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Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny, I’ve been in crypto for a few years now and not once have I seen these grifters you talk about.

Also, you should maybe stop associating right wing crypto YouTubers with crypto developers. I would say most I know are left of central.

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Never? The highest profile things in crypto are the scams, so you gotta be pretty laser-focused on your niche to not see them.

The highest profile things in crypto are Bitcoin ETFs which are institutionally run, so I guess you’re not wrong there

FTX seems pretty high profile to me.

I’m just a dev, and don’t hang around parties in the Bahamas. Like I said, I’ve never met a single person who’s a grifter.

Calling out FTX is like doing background checks on the company you work for’s VCs, their LPs and then their associates. Nothing to do with crypto on the ground

if you can't see the grifters, you're the mark

You’re a Java developer and you’re calling me the mark?

You have seen no grifters in crypto and you're calling me a java developer?

Let's assume a normal distribution of humanity exists in crypto, ie, broadly, over all of humanity, there are good people and bad people, so we would expect there to be good and bad people in crypto, as, while there are some self-selecting aspects to cryptocurrency enthusiasts or developers, there isn't a way to select for "only good people". This is true for every group of people. This is true of the police, true of the clergy, true of school teachers, true of software developers, politicians, etc.

So if you've never once seen them, either you're wilfully blinding yourself, or you haven't looked very hard. Now, whether or not grifters are overrepresented in the cryptocurrency community, the cryptocurrency developer community, or the right wing crypto YouTubers community, is an entirely separate question, which I made no claims about. Though I imagine North Korean crypto devs fall into a certain category.

But to claim they don't exist, because you've never seen one is questionable. I mean, that works for some things (eg unicorns and dragons), but I've also never seen eg the Vegas Sphere in person, but I'm fairly convinced it's a real thing that exists.

Nah, I don't claim they don't exist but I also claim that I've never met any - 99% of people I know in crypto are devs who chose to be there because of the ideals and challenges. From what I've seen in media, it's not the devs who are the scammers but the people up top - founders and sales people, which again I don't know many of that kind.

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