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Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

Vitalik's the only person in the entire crypto space that gives me pause about my belief crypto is 90% a mixture of useless and fraudulent. He's clearly much more intelligent than me and much more thoughtful, and has come to the opposite conclusions about the topic.

I really don't know how to square that with basically everyone else in the space being clearly morons or hucksters.

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Smart as he is, Vitalik also has a massive financial interest in the conclusions he's reached being the correct one, which can lead to all sorts of biases.

I'm pretty bearish on crypto long term, but Vitalik is one of the few crypto people who has actually thought critically about crypto. Most people who try to defend crypto struggle to answer the fourth or fifth why when pressured (if you use the five why philosophy for example).

The problem (like many others) is that Vitalik doesn't necessarily think practically about the situation. For example, how do you explain to my grandma that the fork of BTC is the newly reached consensus or the original one? Vitalik would have an answer for this, but it's not a practical one.

Maybe how you square it is "if a really smart person disagrees with me, might I possibly be wrong?"

Lucrative opportunities attract frauds. The dot com boom attracted frauds, was the internet a big scam? Literally every technological development in history that was potentially very lucrative attracted swathes of con men. For every stock worth purchasing there are a dozen garbage ones. For every innovative product you can buy online there are dozens of cheap worthless pieces of junk. The fact that idiots and scumbags are attracted to crypto only means there's money to be made, it says nothing about the actual utility of the technology.

Same thoughts but also Sam Bankman-Fried, although his is better understood as likely “billion $ grifting is worth it if it’s used to benefit humankind more than it harms”

I believe there are a few intelligent people who have seen the opportunity to make money off the morons :) you know, someone has to sell the pickaxes :)

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