fiprofessor

Except that what's being implied about the New York Times and New York Post articles in that quote is misleading. Yes, the headlines mention the flashy gains, but both of the referenced articles repeatedly mention the losses and scammy aspects of some coins.

For example, here's a pull quote from the NYT piece:

> But as some people mint millions from little-known cryptocurrencies, others have seen impressive gains disappear overnight. For every Solana or Luna, there’s an out-of-the-way token that shoots up in value, only for its price to collapse. Some of these projects are scams, or what industry experts call “rug pulls,” in which someone aggressively markets a coin, then immediately liquidates the holdings, leaving investors with major losses.

The whole second half of the article is about such scams and how many gains are ephemeral "paper gains".

Meanwhile, the New York Post piece quotes an expert who says "The volatility attracts people who like gambling, excitement and so forth ... They’re not so interested in underlying economics, but [rather] the chance of a very rapid, high gain, or a very rapid, sharp loss." It also profiles a TikTok influencer who uses astrology to predict coin prices -- with the clear implication that this is ridiculous.

So while the overall message of the essay is on point (there was tremendous misleading and dangerous advertisement), a lot of "traditional journalism" was in fact extremely skeptical and quick to point this out.

> One reason is that only the transcripts of conversations from Farm Hall survive, not the original recordings. (Those recordings were never kept: Tape-recording technology was in its infancy in 1945, and the conversations were recorded on shellac disks that were resurfaced and reused after their contents were transcribed.)

Interestingly, during the war, it was the Germans who had made rapid advances in tape recording technology. It was in that same year that Jack Mullin acquired the German recorders from Bad Nauheim and would later demonstrate their technical superiority to amazed audiences in America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetophon#History . Astounding to think that if that technology had been disseminated a bit earlier and faster, we might still have access to these recordings.