Crypto's broken moral compass

I’ll begin by saying - obviously, there’s good in crypto. Indeed, I have written over 150 blog posts over the last 3 years about them (and plenty more with previous pseudonyms), and making the best of crypto and related tech. But none of that matters right now - things have swung too far away to the bad side.

Over the years, crypto has declined into ever more predatory and evil territory. In 2010, there was just bitcoin. Obviously, very speculative, and many of its early proponents were blatantly shilling their bags with populist falsehoods. In 2013, we had the altcoin mania, most of it were pointless “Bitcoin killers”, but whatever. In 2017, we had the ICO mania. I thought that was the pinnacle of market madness, and the most irrational market in centuries, or at least a century. I was very wrong - that was merely a lack of imagination on my part. Things would get much, much worse.

The DeFi ponzis, the memecoins, the ugly JPEGs of 2021. It’s the same story every time - there’s some grandiose narrative for what’s nothing more than pure casino. Can’t get much worse, right?

Sadly, nope, things have hit an all-new bottom with 2024: racist, sexist, and other shitheaded memecoins which are merely a vehicle to transfer wealth from the many to the most obnoxious people on the planet.

So why has there been such a sharp decline? I think it’s pretty simple - the crypto community lacks any moral compass.

The same defensiveness and cope keeps repeating:

• “Everything’s a ponzi”

  • This is obviously false. There are many productive assets worldwide, organisations that have invented products that have led to significant increases in productivity and quality of life, governments that have executed effective policies that have led to billions of people lifted out of poverty. MSFT stock and your bigoted memecoin are not the same.

• “Scammers are everywhere”

  • Yes, crypto does not have a monopoly on scammers, grifters and opportunists. There are industries that are almost entirely free of scammers, and there are those that where scams run rampant. Crypto is absolutely on the extreme end of the latter spectrum.

• “There’ll always be demand for casinos”

  • Yes, but crypto is a really terrible casino. Watch this excellent talk by Jon Wu:

  https://youtu.be/o17GnPJXxgU?t=244

And the latest cope:

• “Racists are everywhere”

  • I’m not even going to dignify this with a response

In all these cases, the clear problem is being blind to the magnitude of the problem. Like I said, it doesn’t even matter if there’s bad elsewhere - you have to acknowledge the problems in your community first and do something about it. That has simply not happened.

Some people think all of this is perfectly fine, “people can do as they please” - couldn’t disagree more, but I’ll save it. Others clearly know all of this is very, very bad, but give it a wide berth, “I’ll just focus on the good and ignore the very very bad”. Then there are those that know these are pure evil, but are too afraid to speak up because they don’t want to be silenced by the degenerate mob, or they don’t want to FUD their bags.

In December 2022, I posted a tweet about wanting to see a cultural shift . Things have only gotten worse since then. Even the people who were willing to speak up back then have said nothing about this latest wave of insanity. At this point, this evil in crypto is banal and normalized. This has become the identity of crypto - sure, some useful stuff, but mostly just infested with scams and absolute degeneracy.

Those who read my blog will know I have given up a long time ago, this community simply is not for me, but I wanted to be as gradual about it as possible. I quit crypto twitter in June 2023 (aside from a couple of one-offs). In January 2024, I decided to give it one last shot given an alternative, more sensible audience growing on Farcaster . But things quickly went south, and I went on an indefinite hiatus from writing . Huge thank you to everyone who has read my blog posts and derived some enjoyment or information out of them. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. I’ll try and make the occasional cast on Farcaster, and I’ll absolutely fulfill my delegate and investor obligations, and privately help anyone who wants to fight against degeneracy and build useful products. But this is the end of the road for this “polynya” blog.

- 30 -

PS: I’ll be happy to consider writing again if the aforementioned aggressive cultural shift (where crypto’s most popular influencers loudly deride everything that isn’t sustainably useful) were to happen, but it’ll be under a different pseudonym. If it ever happens, it’s not going to happen before the “polynya” pseudonym is forgotten anyway.