[paulsutter]

>Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about

I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency, it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield")

Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups.

Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible

[rrradical]

This is the author's point:

Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde models", but not crypto itself.

It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had absolutely nothing to do with it.

[paulsutter]

FTX were definitely the most polished fraudsters and hucksters in the crypto community. That's saying a lot, given that the finest fraudsters and hucksters in the world competed to out-swindle, out-cheat, and out-hoodwink each other daily in the crypto community

But that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is math, code, and gigawatts