Rest of the paper reads more like it was written by an early GPT than Neal Stephenson. "Blockchains for the metaverse" does feel like something from a two page digression in the middle of a Stephenson novel, but that would at least cover what they were trying to do, why it turned out to be a terrible idea and how the villain ended up fleecing the idealistic hackers...

I have a similar reaction to these non-interesting, noncontributing, unthinking, nonsubstantive knee-jerk expressions of hatred of all things crypto on HN. It's tiresome, and your comment could been more useful as a flag.

This is a general point and not a gripe at the anti-crypto crowd: comments that boil down to "I don't like this topic" are not useful and probably don't belong here.