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And unfortunately I think the tech industry unintentionally enabled it in a few ways. The internet/mobile boom was a real leap for humanity. (Not an unmixed on

And unfortunately I think the tech industry unintentionally enabled it in a few ways. The internet/mobile boom was a real leap for humanity. (Not an unmixed one, any more than the printing press was. But a real leap nonetheless.) This left a lot investors looking for the Next Big Thing. I think it made regulators very cautious of possibly harming something that could be The Future. Journalists were accustomed to telling uncritical gee-whiz and great-man stories about tech. And we ended up with a cultural archetype of the genius tech founder in the Steve Jobs/Tony Stark mold. All of these things were vigorously exploited by the cryptocurrency fraudsters and blockchain grifters. That harmed all the people they suckered, of course. But I also think it was terrible for the tech industry. The culture flowed back into tech, and also created an incentive toward hype. All the years and all the money spent on the mining/blockchain/smart contract/ICO/DAO/NFT/DeFi/Web3 series of bullshit "innovations" could have gone to real technology and real companies. All the bright young people distracted by that stuff who instead of learning the fundamentals of real business and real tech who will have to spend years deprogramming themselves. Hopefully next time around we can be more discerning, more usefully critical.

tmpz22 3y ago
But how much does our industry get to claim unintentional? Were we incompetent? Naive? Uninformed? Blinded by good intentions, optimism, greed? If celebrities who endorsed ftx are now in hot water - should tech influencers such as major VC firms also be held liable?
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Very much intentional, especially after the first couple rounds of fraud/theft/bad behavior, it's obvious that the downsides and risks were known, but the promotion of the tech kept being promoted.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Entirely fair questions. I said unintentional because a lot of the same factors were helpful for the tech industry and we as an industry just blithely accepted their continuance. That includes the VC money spigots for sure. But there are plenty of actors, specific VCs included, where I have a hard time believing they didn't know better. In my view it was often their job to know better.
duckhelmet 3y ago
It's understandable why these were modded into invisibility ;) -- @nancyhn: “The banking industry is a fraudster's paradise. The difference is they don't get arrested, they get bailed out with bonuses. It seems there are a lot of short memories here who don't remember 2008.” -- icepat: “If you rolled back every bitcoin transaction ever made you would end up with people in debt because the transaction fees were paid. This makes bitcoin into a scam. The miners in total are guaranteed to win, everyone else in total is guaranteed to lose. Some people haven't realized their loss but it's there. It is an ingenious scam because it's not the scammers who hype it up, no, it's the marks because the only way they can get ahead if they hype it up. The miners get their cut no matter what.” “This is not the same for say, gold, because gold can be made into, say, electronics which now can be sold for more than the sum of the cost of the components. Stocks pay dividends etc.” “Since so fundamentally it's a scam, is it a wonder other scams are built on top?”
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Strongly agree with the point made about the miners being criminally overlooked in all of this. If crypto and Bitcoin are camouflaged pyramid schemes, the people at the top of the pyramid- even above the exchanges and the hucksters and the VCs, are the small handful big miners who have been doing it even before BTC was a few dollars each. There's a huge misdirection in the very thin narrative about minors, which is that "everyone knows" they've always had to sell the entirety of their coin bases to break even. This is completely taking the miners at their word when there is absolutely no reason to believe any of it. The reason the price is stabilized every time it should fall is because the miners, and the OG miners alone, have the ability to collectively throttle back on selling their newly mined coins to the market and can do so almost indefinitely because of the massive profits they realized on early gains held long term. This is the true source of number go up and I'm surprised how little attention it's been given, probably because miners are notoriously publicity shy. You'll notice they're never talked about it any of these articles.
sonicshadow 3y ago
> Hopefully next time around we can be more discerning, more usefully critical. Like after the destruction of democracy by social media? Or the implosion of the dot com bubble? How many more times does the tech industry get to just say "Hopefully next time!"
- wpietri 3y ago
  That is an excellent question. For what it's worth, I think that whatever we choose to do, we're going to get a lot less leeway in the future. I was just at a Trust & Safety conference. European legislators and regulators are very much cracking down on the social media space, and it's clear that years of slippery behavior from places like Meta have burned a lot of goodwill.
RestlessMind 3y ago
> All the years and all the money spent on the mining/blockchain/smart contract/ICO/DAO/NFT/DeFi/Web3 series of bullshit "innovations" could have gone to real technology and real companies. Really? I imagine all the effort simply redirected towards social media (bad), adtech (bad), fintech (mostly based on ZIRP, like BNPL), self-driving cars (pie in the sky) and gig economy. The only truly useful thing SV worked on in the past decade was Cloud.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Yeah, fair point. We could also include all the "blitzscaling" nonsense, which, given its ability to soak up far more capital, is much more attractive to VCs, allowing a pump-and-dump on a titanic scale. But I saw so many entrepreneurs getting pulled into blockchain-ish spaces thinking they could do some good. Even given that most of the money would have gone to something else terrible, there were a lot of people who might have focused on actually useful things.

tmpz22 3y ago

But how much does our industry get to claim unintentional? Were we incompetent? Naive? Uninformed? Blinded by good intentions, optimism, greed? If celebrities who endorsed ftx are now in hot water - should tech influencers such as major VC firms also be held liable?

NegativeLatency 3y ago
Very much intentional, especially after the first couple rounds of fraud/theft/bad behavior, it's obvious that the downsides and risks were known, but the promotion of the tech kept being promoted.
wpietri 3y ago
Entirely fair questions. I said unintentional because a lot of the same factors were helpful for the tech industry and we as an industry just blithely accepted their continuance. That includes the VC money spigots for sure. But there are plenty of actors, specific VCs included, where I have a hard time believing they didn't know better. In my view it was often their job to know better.

duckhelmet 3y ago

It's understandable why these were modded into invisibility ;) -- @nancyhn: “The banking industry is a fraudster's paradise. The difference is they don't get arrested, they get bailed out with bonuses. It seems there are a lot of short memories here who don't remember 2008.” -- icepat: “If you rolled back every bitcoin transaction ever made you would end up with people in debt because the transaction fees were paid. This makes bitcoin into a scam. The miners in total are guaranteed to win, everyone else in total is guaranteed to lose. Some people haven't realized their loss but it's there. It is an ingenious scam because it's not the scammers who hype it up, no, it's the marks because the only way they can get ahead if they hype it up. The miners get their cut no matter what.” “This is not the same for say, gold, because gold can be made into, say, electronics which now can be sold for more than the sum of the cost of the components. Stocks pay dividends etc.” “Since so fundamentally it's a scam, is it a wonder other scams are built on top?”

ChainOfFools 3y ago
Strongly agree with the point made about the miners being criminally overlooked in all of this. If crypto and Bitcoin are camouflaged pyramid schemes, the people at the top of the pyramid- even above the exchanges and the hucksters and the VCs, are the small handful big miners who have been doing it even before BTC was a few dollars each. There's a huge misdirection in the very thin narrative about minors, which is that "everyone knows" they've always had to sell the entirety of their coin bases to break even. This is completely taking the miners at their word when there is absolutely no reason to believe any of it. The reason the price is stabilized every time it should fall is because the miners, and the OG miners alone, have the ability to collectively throttle back on selling their newly mined coins to the market and can do so almost indefinitely because of the massive profits they realized on early gains held long term. This is the true source of number go up and I'm surprised how little attention it's been given, probably because miners are notoriously publicity shy. You'll notice they're never talked about it any of these articles.

sonicshadow 3y ago

> Hopefully next time around we can be more discerning, more usefully critical. Like after the destruction of democracy by social media? Or the implosion of the dot com bubble? How many more times does the tech industry get to just say "Hopefully next time!"

wpietri 3y ago
That is an excellent question. For what it's worth, I think that whatever we choose to do, we're going to get a lot less leeway in the future. I was just at a Trust & Safety conference. European legislators and regulators are very much cracking down on the social media space, and it's clear that years of slippery behavior from places like Meta have burned a lot of goodwill.

RestlessMind 3y ago

> All the years and all the money spent on the mining/blockchain/smart contract/ICO/DAO/NFT/DeFi/Web3 series of bullshit "innovations" could have gone to real technology and real companies. Really? I imagine all the effort simply redirected towards social media (bad), adtech (bad), fintech (mostly based on ZIRP, like BNPL), self-driving cars (pie in the sky) and gig economy. The only truly useful thing SV worked on in the past decade was Cloud.

wpietri 3y ago
Yeah, fair point. We could also include all the "blitzscaling" nonsense, which, given its ability to soak up far more capital, is much more attractive to VCs, allowing a pump-and-dump on a titanic scale. But I saw so many entrepreneurs getting pulled into blockchain-ish spaces thinking they could do some good. Even given that most of the money would have gone to something else terrible, there were a lot of people who might have focused on actually useful things.