Meanwhile they get the marketing value. They spend over $100MM annually on advertising (by way of a quick googling, I have no special insight) so it seems reasonable that they like being talked about, especially by people who might otherwise be avoiding them.
edit: I don't watch TV and use adblocker (both of which I recommend).
Jimmy Fallon became a meme for his awkward endorsement of his Bored Ape: https://twitter.com/FallonTonight/status/1485843736345161737
Except these grifters, scam artists, and rug pullers are fleecing more than just a few nerds and it isn't limited to just the online world.
Web3 is the unusual case where it has significant effects offline that affects people other than nerds, namely in the form of energy consumption and global warning.
It's using energy fast enough that it's holding us back from green energy deployments. There are studies picking this apart that you can Google if you're interested. The gist of it is that every unit of green energy added to the grid is gobbled up by miners forcing legitimate users of energy to rely on coal. PoW coins have expanded our use of coal over the last 10 years rather than reduced it.
Update:
"But proof of stake..." is green-washing. Claiming that something will be green in the future does not make it green today. Nor does it wash away the fact that this claim has been made for the last 6 years and has been delay yet again. It's release will likely continue to be "some time in the near future," indefinitely.
I mean, absolutely. But let's not pretend that the whole blockchain bubble is a "nerd" (in the tech sense) thing. It hasn't been since like 2014. It also isn't an "interest of some", the cryptocurrency people very much want to force this dystopia and snakeoil technology onto everyone. All so a few people can make a lot of money.
If you goal is to prevent your average joe, grandma & pafrom getting rugged from script kiddie, then it must be destroyed.
Or you create financial tsunami dwarf today's collapse and probably create WW3.
I'm very sorry to report that these regulations are going to come and wipe the meme coins but leaving the compliant cryptocurrencies and web3 projects to survive.
So, when I see articles like this calling for it all to be totally destroyed even since it 13 years of its existence, I can only say that the author, crypto-skeptics and the crypto maximalists are going to be disappointed for the next 13 years.
They're gremlins. At a Waffle House. At 2:30 am. It may not make any sense, but the situation doesn't look good.
https://www.cbr.com/why-gremlins-after-midnight-eating-rule-...