I feel that HN as a whole, plays the role of cynic very often when it comes to tech discussions around new tech, especially since the community has a lot of fol

I feel that HN as a whole, plays the role of cynic very often when it comes to tech discussions around new tech, especially since the community has a lot of folks who've seen the hype cycle way too many times (heck, I'm 30, and it's not odd to find folks on HN who've been coding since before I was even born!). However, I find this take refreshing compared to the perma-optimist VC/media hypetrain where everything is going "to the moon" until it isn't and then VCs and media walk away like nothing ever happened! Of course this does come back to bite sometimes eg. the infamous Dropbox launch post but by and large, the mainstream startup media + HN helps form very balanced opinions on topics. Crypto is one of those topics where the hypetrain was primarily driven by "number go up" mentality and as the hype on one side grew, HN and other tech-first communities doubled down in the other direction to maintain a semblance of balance. As the number has started going down, the laser eyes have disappeared, the calls for $100K BTC have died down, HN folks are also much less flame-baity in the discussions on the topic. The bone of contention remains that outside of tech utopias where "code is law", in real world, everyone has to deal with third parties, governments, corruption, the fed, market dynamics and what not. And the moment it hits the real world, crypto (rather the form it's taken today) broadly fails the smell test outside of speculation. Sure, there are likely applications possible and perhaps future iterations of existing ideas will prove more (for lack of a better word) useful, but it's like saying that just because a casino builds a good random number generator, it can now be called a R&D lab.