Like seemingly everything these days, crypto has a grifter problem. It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mo

Like seemingly everything these days, crypto has a grifter problem. It's becoming a predictable story - something with potential arises, with a community of mostly true believers. The true believers make money, but they're not optimizing for profit, they're optimizing for making the ecosystem better. The grifters, optimizing only for profit, not only start to take the lion's share of the profit, but also attract more grifters. The grifters eventually outnumber the true believers, because: 1. true believers are hard to make; grifters already exist 2. grifting as a skill can be applied anywhere; true believers need relevant skills 3. lower profits and higher burnout leads to attrition among the true believers; some of them even convert to grifters So the grifters completely dominate the market. They then siphon the market dry, offering essentially nothing in return, and then move onto the next grift, flush with the proceeds from the last one.