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Comment by factsarelolz | Hacker News Reader

> They just engaged in run-of-the-mill journalism.

Click bait puff pieces/native ads intended to drive money into FTX. They're an accomplice.

Remember the Fyre festival scam? The PR agencies knew it was a scam and went along with pushing and then said something philosophical about whether they should be responsible or not for "just doing their job". Their entire job is to make gold out of dog poop, so yes, they share some responsibility.

The definition of the word journalism is as follows:

"journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials"

These people do not actually do journalism. They are in effect PR shills. The very first part of the definition is not done. They don't actually collect information, they just publish what they're handed in the most enthusiastic manner.

Professionals like marketing firms and lawyers are virtually never held to account when their clients are eventually caught. So they're just responding to the incentives we've set up for them.

Journalists will sometimes at least suffer a bit of a reputational blow.

Yep, Wirecard is another such example where a huge accounting firm E&Y didn't even have any reputation damage worth mentioning. As you say it's a failure in our incentives.

Is everyone who tweeted nice things about SBF also an accomplice?

If they stood to make money, yes.

So the entire cryptop industry scammed the entire crypto industry then

Sounds about right, sunshine must be bright if you're just now coming out from under that rock. The Crypto Industry is nothing but scams on top of scam on top of scams in order to show legitimacy. Hell try to get an _actual_ trusted audit. I'll hold my breath.

Personally I agree with you on that. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to say that fluff pieces in the media makes the “reporters” accomplices to the scam.

I put reporters in quotes because any halfway decent reporter would have known to dig around a bit but that’s just unfortunately not how the largest newspapers operate, with a few exceptions.

Correct. Those of us that actually remember this 'technology' remember that it existed back in the late 1970s as a permissionless distributed database. It was an unworkable mess then, and look at what we currently have right now.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com

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