Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by version_five 1477 days ago
For a lot of us, most of "web3" is too ridiculous to engage with. It's good to see someone actually taking the time to engage with it.

That said, there will be lots of people who are only emboldened by her take-downs. Not much that can be done about that. It's transparently a scam, it's hard to feel too bad about people who get caught up in greed. On the other hand my retired father had told me some people he know were "investing" in crypto and wondered if he should be too. Preying on retired people is really not cool.

One nit-pick I can't help, the article says crypto has been "hailed by libertarians". Yes, there are technically unsophisticated, naive libertarians that have been taken in by the scam and see how the supposed benefits of crypto align with their values. Same as people with many other viewpoints. Just because some people in a group have been tricked doesn't mean anything else, just that they got tricked (or greedy). I'm a libertarian and I know crypto is a scam. I'm not the only one.

1 comments

I think it would definitely be fair to say that (right-) libertarians have been better marks for crypto than people of other ideologies, though, if only because it's, at least superficially, so aesthetically compatible with libertarianism.

It proports to be a way of having money outside of central control, and kind of digital gold, and that's more likely to be attractive to unsophisticated libertarians than to, say, technically unsophisticated social democrats, who would generally consider central control of money to be desirable.

(There are definitely attempts to market crypto to other ideologies, for instance the "Let's Go Brandon" scam aimed at the US far-right, and the "Bitcoin actually helps the environment, we promise" thing aimed at the center-left, but they're, well, such obvious nonsense that only _very_ unsophisticated people are falling for them. The hook for libertarians is better.)

Yes I agree with you. It definitely ties nicely with the ideology (if you don't think very hard about it) and so libertarians are good "marks" as you say.