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Comment by jb12 | Hacker News Reader

Matt Levine consistently puts out such good content. His newsletter is absolutely worth subscribing to.

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff

Never subscribe to his newsletter, it's impossible to unsubscribe when you want to. Literally have to filter it in my mail to go to the trash as for the Bloomberg website won't let me unsubscribe.

Never paywalled!

The email subscription is free

He wrote a whole issue of Bloomberg Businessweek boosting crypto recently that was not up to his usual standard and was worse than the usual Businessweek standards of layout and typography.

It seemed something a year out of sync, aimed to get ‘greater fools’ to take a second look at crypto, completely divorced from the headlines a week ago and a week hence.

???

The Bloomberg crypto issue was great! What were your specific problems with it?

I read it cover to cover and didn't get a single sense of it "boosting" crypto. If anything, it was really in depth and skeptical.

It's not news. Anybody who doesn't know how Bitcoin works in 2022 is never going to understand how Bitcoin works and they need clear messaging such as "No" or "Nothing more to see here, move on folks." My guess is that the real audience is blockchain enthusiasts who crave validation and will squee on it so much that they'll buy 50 reprints.

Why doesn't Bloomberg take an issue and reprint the first few chapters of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and add a paragraph about each of the 20 times that people said "it's different this time" and it wasn't? That wouldn't be news but it would be timeless wisdom that would serve readers well.

Ummmm. I think for the typical readership of Bloomberg - guys in their 50s looking for cool places to park some extra cash - a five page explainer on how smart contracts work with some editorializing about how they will probably never work as promised is kind of the perfect inoculation against hype.

If people are curious about crypto, and their only sources of information are polemic, that seems much, much worse for everyone.

I just finished reading this article and I absolutely loved it. The layout with meme pictures was an excellent use of that format, especially in context of all this crypto non-ponzi-sense. Another friend of mine who doesn't know Matt was very complimentary of it (in fact he gave me the paper article). My wife is reading it now and enjoying it too!

There is no accounting for taste.

Memes are where neurotypicals and autists can both pretend that they are communicating when actually they aren't.

If you felt that way about that issue, never ever look up the other single-topic issue they put out a decade or so ago about code and programming. The design of that one would probably make your head explode.

I read that article and I wouldn't characterize it as "boosting" crypto at all.

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