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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

1. Because it's a ponzi scheme and they get to get in on the ground floor. See: https://mobile.twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/1473302581...

2. Because they're rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government

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Honestly, I though NFTs were just a tax loophole to begin with.

Perfectly summarized.

The only thing more annoying than libertarian crypto bros is progressives who don’t like crypto because people have made money off it or they see it as inherently right wing technology (the Soviet Union said that about computers originally, you can see how that worked out for them)

Maybe so, but they’re not in this thread.

Criticising the whole shebang as a bunch of charletans pitching snake oil to the gullible isn’t “progressive”, it’s common sense.

Everyone loves to say their politics are just common sense but characterizing all of crypto as “rich libertarians who see crypto as a way to protect their assets from the government” is an inherently political narrative and it simply isn’t true.

There’s also a big difference between valuable emerging technologies that have a lot of speculative investments & charlatans selling snake oil vs “the whole shebang”.

The post I was replying to was asking why some VCs are pumping so much money into crypto. I'm not characterizing all crypto supporters as libertarians, just the VCs who pretend that they're investing in it because they want decentralization and open democratized platforms that are owned by the users.

Ahh yeah I misread that a bit. Still I don’t necessarily think that’s accurate even regarding the VCs. Their investments and goals sort of run counter to the libertarian types in the crypto community who tend to be focused more on monetary policy or privacy concerns. If anything what the VCs are doing imo is subverting cryptos ability to meet any of the goals of libertarians by focusing most of the development effort in crypto on centralized platforms that look a lot more like traditional tech companies.

This rather parochially presupposes the whole world operates on the same basis as the two-bit low-grade binary oppositional shit-flinging that passes for political discourse in the USA, or even cares much about it.

Fortunately, that isn’t how this works. Since I don’t live in the US or read its tattered, overwrought media except by accident, I can comfortably say “what political narrative are you on about mate”, and make my analysis free of whatever baggage that entails.

Which leads me back to saying, no thanks. What’s being peddled here creates no fundamental value, so the only beneficiaries are middlemen, their equivalents, and their proxies.

Repeating a narrative that was crafted with a particular political intent is furthering that intent regardless of how you’re thinking about it internally. And unfortunately us Americans are really good at exporting our shittiest ideas everywhere else (especially Western Europe) so it still has meaning regardless of where you live

Except I'm not "repeating a narrative", I'm drawing my own conclusions.

The assertion that anyone who disagrees with (whatever) must have been brainwashed by something they read is pathological for debate.

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