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Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

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timdaub

- Read 3 pages and Balaji was mentioned 6 times

- Top 10 crypto people to watch is mostly VCs, ok

- Links to some big claims are direct links to tweets

- "It’s inaccurate to call Tether a fraud."

- TIL: Balaji backed Worldcoin (Worldcoin is the retina-scaning dystopia Sam Altman crypto startup)

- They call OHM an unpegged stablecoin, but it's actually a ponzi: "However, judging by the number of forks it has spawned, OlympusDAO may be the year’s most important new project, and non-pegged stablecoins may be the best bet this industry has when it comes to de-pegging from the US dollar." Wow, let's see how that statement will age...

- Have I mentioned that Balaji is cool?

Actually, it's pretty entertaining to read.

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For reference, Balaji is the guy who promised a massive project to put bitcoin miners in all of your household appliances so they could get bitcoins to make microtransactions with. This was somehow pitched as both desirable and possible, two things which is most certainly wasn't.

Having raised large amounts of money for this, he then proceeded to deliver absolutely nothing except an outdated mining chip duct-taped to a Raspberry Pi, and then pivoted to... paying people to answer surveys?

Everyone in the cryptocurrency sphere thinks he is a genius and visionary.

Can confirm. But hey Peter Thiel then recommended him to Trump for like some government positions.

Everybody's origin story in crypto is criminality

My origin story was being a nerdy kid interested in how I could turn compute power into magic internet money. Hardly criminal, wouldn't you say?

I was generally refering to the people running the projects and selling tokens

Were you paying for the energy you used?

oh yeah, amazing how quickly everyone forgot about 21.com and the vaporware kleptocurrency-mining toasters Balaji Bullshitivasan somehow (claimed to) raise $100MM+ to develop and market. Even roped in Qualcomm, though what their role was, nobody seemed to know or care.

Where did all that vaporized money go and why aren't there a dozen lawsuits on his back from angry, defrauded investors?

I already feel sorry for the future historians who are going to have to parse thousands of broken Twitter threads when they study this stuff.

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