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Comment by epistemer | Hacker News Reader

He makes some good arguments and is certainly better read in economics than the youtube conspiracy theory video level/back cover summary of the Creature from Jekyll Island economics most crypto enthusiast stochastic parrot back as truth.

The 24/7 crypto is a scam community is extremely odd though. I can't stand the sport of NASCAR but I can't imagine enveloping my entire thought and identity around how much I think NASCAR is a bullshit sport and trying to convince people to stop watching NASCAR.

Finding an anti-passion to that degree seems extraordinarily unhealthy mentally.

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Well NASCAR is just a sport.

Crypto might well be the biggest vehicle for financial fraud the world has ever seen.

Whatever you think of Crypto more broadly, millions of innocent people are being prayed on, who have lost collectively, literally billions of dollars, some more vulnerable to the impact of that than others.

To a lot of (good) people, it’s unacceptable to allow that to go unchallenged.

So yeah I think I can see how it’s a bit different.

> Crypto might well be the biggest vehicle for financial fraud the world has ever seen.

How do you measure this? If by “total value defrauded” then fiat has to be #1.

sigh

What point are you trying to drive here?

It’s an extension of the culture war. Tons of right wing culture warriors got really rich off crypto without doing anything to deserve that wealth, so left wing culture warriors are naturally opposed to it. You check out /r/Buttcoin, they also hate GameStop (valid) and Elon Musk (much less so, he’s doing great work outside of Twitter despite his immaturity) for those same fundamental reasons. It’s more of the same social media derangement cycle that sucks in so many people on both sides, even if they fundamentally have a point about a lot of crypto being based on nothing

what you wrote in parentheses is enough to not like elon.

didn't he falsely accuse someone for being a pedo because they said his submarine would not have saved the people trapped in the Thailand cave?

Elon Musk, personally, is an asshole. He is also majorly addicted to Twitter, which toxifies him, and his acquisition of Twitter is the equivalent of a severe alcoholic buying Anheuser-Busch.

Nevertheless, Teslas are great cars and SpaceX is doing phenomenal work in space travel. Hating Musk with a passion is extremely weird, and tons of online people really do

I think it would be more accurate to say his companies are doing great work.

He's an idea guy, but mostly he's just an investor. A toxic, thin-skinned, sometimes fraudulent investor, but it's hard to argue with the work being done by companies like SpaceX and Tesla (not just what's being promised, but what has actually been done). IMO it's important to understand both sides of that coin.

> I think it would be more accurate to say his companies are doing great work.

SpaceX? Undoubtedly

Tesla? Very very arguably. Even though it did kickstart the modern EV era, it is now propelled by lies, deflection and bullshit

All others are scams or provably bad.

Nah. Tesla is doing good work. They're far from perfect, but it's an interesting product, and they were first to market in many ways. I can't see it lasting that much longer in it's current form, but that doesn't undermine the work they've already done.

It's also important to note that Musk isn't the founder of that one. He just has a contract that gives him the title "founder".

And there's definitely a trend where his earlier companies were less likely to be scams. Zip2 and Paypal were both successful AFAIK. Boring Company is a bust unless it's radically reorganized (without underground vacuum tunnels), OpenAI is probably BS too. It's a little hard to say right now.

> so left wing culture warriors

I generally like this site because it has more mature adults.

Perhaps you'd be happier on Reddit?

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