I thought this was an interesting claim to use as a disqualifier. If you see the promise of blockchain, why wouldn't you invest in them?
That doesn’t need to be a conscious attempt to defraud, either: humans are notoriously bad at seeing things accurately when not doing so is highly profitable. A lot of people really believed their house doubled in value over a couple years in the 2000s, or that selling things online was a high margin business before that.
> If you see the promise of blockchain, why wouldn't you invest in them?
There’s a delicate difference between investing vs. investing and telling strangers how they could invest into the same thing.
The former indicates you believe something has merit. The latter indicates you want something to appreciate in price.
Perhaps those aren’t mutually exclusive, you might also believe it has merit, but others will take your words with a grain of salt because you maybe, just maybe, are trying to speculate in it short-term. (Otherwise wouldn’t you try to keep it quiet and invest more and more into it while the majority is unaware?)
There’s the third case, though, and it’s the worst: you invest, frequently praise the thing you’ve invested into, and consistently forget to mention the fact that you’ve invested into that thing.
This would read as: you believed into something enough to invest, you’re eager for it to go up, and you also don’t want your audience to discount your acclaim on the basis that you’re an investor. In other words, lack of investment disclosure (where it’s due) advertises a degree of insecurity about true merits of the thing someone’s endorsing, so those two cancel out, which leaves the speculation motive. The whole field seems to send this sort of a mixed signal, and it leaves an unpleasant residue. The hype is, perhaps paradoxically, discrediting the technology.