Inside the cult of crypto

I had to keep checking the date of this article because it reads like old news or, perhaps, like bizarro-world news. In the midst of El Salvador flipping the switch on bitcoin as legal tender, the article gives us this quote:

>“However, if you look at bitcoin off the screen, what you’ll see is declining merchant uptake, zero evidence of blockchain deployment or efficiency, and mostly just a lot of promotional events offering cures to whatever ails you.”

That quote comes from Chris Derose, and while I did enjoy some of his podcast episodes back in the day, he has not really been active in Bitcoin for seemingly years. He did, about a year and a half ago, claim that Bitcoiners at one time had a tradition of celebrating their leaders[1]. The problem is that most bitcoin people I am familiar with hate celebrating leaders, and also he lists a questionable lineage of "leaders": Martti Malmi, Gavin Andresen, and Jeff Garzik. Martti seems largely out of the picture. Gavin and Garzik were both on the wrong side of the block wars. Dereose's perspective resonates with the din of time capsule from 2017.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw3-mW0QBco&t=2749s

Choice quote: „Crypto is essentially an economic cult that taps into very base human instincts of fear, greed and tribalism, combined with economic illiteracy as a means to recruit more greater fools to pile money into what looks like a weird, novel digital variant of a pyramid scheme“