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Comment by cecilpl2 | Hacker News Reader

> As far as GDP, Ethereum spawned an entire new industry with tons of companies paying actual salaries to people (in fiat, if I might add), all of whom bought lattes and cars and houses, and some, I'm sure, also bought Peloton bikes.

This is like the Broken Window Fallacy.

All that money that was spent building Ethereum could have been spent on activities that were far more useful to society.

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> All that money that was spent building Ethereum could have been spent on activities that were far more useful to society.

Like all the billions that went into building...Facebook?

Again, I don't understand how you can get into the morality of it all when literally tens of billions of venture funding goes into everything from juicers (remember Juicero) to companies that literally help instigate ethnic cleansings [0]

0: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Facebook is hugely valuable. Making it easy to share photos, organise get-togethers, or message your friends, is directly making people's lives better. (And complaining that messaging systems allow people to send negative messages is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; do you blame the telegraph or the telephone for "literally helping instigate ethnic cleansings", which in a literal sense they undoubtably did?) Even Juicero, which is very much the exception rather than the rule, was a real product that helped make people happier and healthier (just, not by $400 worth - which is why it rapidly collapsed in the market, as it should).

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