It's even more insidious than that. An astonishingly high fraction of people in both the news media (and particularly in the financial news media) as well as in

It's even more insidious than that. An astonishingly high fraction of people in both the news media (and particularly in the financial news media) as well as in variously leveraged positions of power in government and quasi-governmental bodies, were primed to talk up Bitcoin wherever possible due to having taken some position in it (or in one of its boutique gateway drugs alts) "just to see how it works." This position being facilitated either by direct action or, more frequently, by enthusiastic prompting from a "blockchain consultant" acquaintance who offered to walk them through setting up a wallet (or even a miner / mining contract) and show them how to use it. You know, "just to see how it works." Now that their curiosity has been elevated to, as Bitcoiners love to quip, actual "skin in the game" (both in terms of time/material investment and reputational commitment), they are biased to repeat the pro-bitcoin messaging points they've been spoonfed by what they believe to be a helpful, fashionably libertarian insider geek contact, but is in effect merely this generation's reboot of the garden variety penny stock shill.