It certainly didn’t help that the crypto community was choke-full of conspiracy theorists, libertarians that never read anything else after falling in love with Ayn Rand as teenagers, and get-rich-quick schemers.

The idea was fascinating, and Bitcoin has held up marvelously considering it was essentially a prototype with high barriers to change after becoming popular. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting if the rightful owner ever wants to come forward to claim it.

But, at least for me, it was the culture, especially around Ethereum, that ultimately stopped me from wanting to have anything to do with it. Which is ironic, because a large part of that culture was the denial that anything like “culture” exists, that “trust” and “institution” are terms with meaning, etc.