Despite having a lot of scammers and bad actors, crypto does have an underlying ethos that attracts a lot of people. And that ethos is one of removing intermediaries, robust cryptographic security, open and unrestricted participation for all, and letting people have as much financial freedom as possible.
A lot of us still fight to push those values forward.
Polymarket is not decentralized or rule-driven, and it does not represent crypto values. The crypto community has a long way to go in actually making a prediction market that is rule-driven and not subject to the whims of corrupt staff.
I mean, the main ethos of crypto is 'antisocial' (code is law, no intermediary, circumventing laws), which first drew people like younger me and other people 'on the spectrum' with socializing issues, as well as a lot of scammers and grifters.
Code being law is the ultimate social justice. This is not antisocial; it is maximally social at a deeper level. In much of the world, code not being law is what opens the door to the most corruption, also in this example. Had the prediction market actually have been engineered to be driven by code, the bet would have resolved on its own. It should teach us to strive toward an actual decentralized rule-based market.
I use to love "code is law" when i was an engineering student. Then i worked in the real world, and discovered how dumb i was. Code is code, it's flawed, it's bugged, it's old and very hard to update to account for new reality, it cannot account for all edgecase in projects with much easier rules than "law", and ultimately, an unaccountable engineer with no real stakes in the result (except maybe employment, which until 2024 was _not_ a real stake) has the last word.
The shoddy "engineering" that you're used to in the business world is not actually proper engineering; it never was.
Consider cryptocurrencies and smart contracts -- they work perfectly fine with millions of transactions daily, all executed by perfectly correct code -- that's real engineering. Mature programming languages also are good examples of real engineering.
Of course everything needs updates to account for edge cases, but tackling these correctly only makes the engineering more sound, not less sound.
In the real world, the selective application of law commonly is more likely to take away rights than to grant rights.
As for those on 'the spectrum', as per today's news, it may be interesting to know that a cause of it could be copper deficiency during early brain development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377066
A lot of us still fight to push those values forward.