I'll Take the Crypto Industry Seriously When Its Biggest Advocates Stop Saying "What Did You Expect?"

that's not the flex you think it is

funnily enough the forced meme pictured here was the subject of an unauthorized shitcoin itself

If I were smarter and less lazy I’d come up with a graph with a title like “The deBoer Media Reactivity Cycle” or something more clever. I would use this visual to demonstrate a basic point: topics go in and out of fashion in media, as you’d expect, but there’s also a recursive quality where a topic going out of fashion (in terms of amount of interest) or out of favor (in terms of how positive the coverage is) prompts a countercyclical response from a subset of the media. The journalism and commentary industry is highly influenced by perceived matters of supply and demand; that is to say, many people in media have a natural self-interest in filling what they perceive to be a hole in coverage. And so one moment or movement inevitably becomes the basis of a future backlash and a backlash to the backlash.

Crypto, right now, is a perfect example. We had the ever-building buzz of crypto for many years, which led to a crescendo when the industry gained a little respectability but especially when it became associated with a strange niche of an ethical movement. Journalists work in story, and the association between cryptocurrency and effective altruism, however tenuous it may have actually been, was the perfect fodder for a new wave of coverage. Sam Bankman-Fried was what ever journalist is looking for, a quirky central figure to act as an avatar for a movement and an industry. (I would argue that they had been looking for such a figure since the beginnings of Bitcoin, as Satoshi Nakamoto’s anonymity prevented that world from having a central charismatic figure to profile.) When Bankman-Fried’s downfall arrived, so much the better. The story simply took on a new dramatic turn, perfect for generating content, and the fact that he had recently been celebrated by the media (after a fashion) only improved the position of those in the media who would now represent him as a cautionary tale. Certainly there are many individual people in the broad media world who are antagonistic to crypto itself and/or to the types of people associated with crypto. But the media writ large will always be governed far more by the rules of attentional cyclicality and perceived opportunity than by that kind of personal animus. It’s a business. And crypto’s bunker mentality has really hinder the ability of people within it to understand and use the media.

Right now if you asked the average crypto enthusiast about media perceptions of the industry they’d probably insist that the media hates crypto and is out to get them. But if you look around a bit with open eyes you’ll find that we’re in a new wave of credulity and openness towards cryptocurrency even in - maybe especially in - the stodgiest old media. That’s how this all works; everything people write is a reaction to things other people write. Yes, for me too. So if I were a crypto partisan I would spend less time grumbling that the media is out to get them and more time asking about crypto’s own internal culture.

Here’s what I want to say today: the crypto industry should not be taken seriously so long as the culture of “What do you expect?” is normalized. Recently, the surprisingly durable meme-celebrity Hailey Welch, aka “Hawk Tuah,” launched a shitcoin, which is to say, her hangers-on were told they could make a lot of money doing so and allowed her name to be attached to it. The coin promptly flatlined, resulting in a scandal that’s now attracted the attention of YouTube investigative journalist CoffeeZilla. The ethics of Welch’s participation are not interesting to me; certainly I expect that she’s being led around by entire squads of opportunistic people looking to monetize her 14th minute, but whether that’s an excuse or not I can’t say. What is interesting to me, and I think represents a major problem for the crypto industry, is the response to all of this from the crypto community: a ton of people making fun of the very idea that people who got swindled have any claim to be upset. If you search around on Twitter or Reddit, you’ll find thousands of people making the same point about the Hawk Tuah coin - of course this is a scam; of course they all lost their money; what did you expect? What did you expect, that’s the communal reaction to a product that was definitely a terrible investment and very likely an active fraud. To which I would say, you people are the ones who want crypto to be seen as respectable, and yet you yourselves acknowledge that fraud is endemic to the industry.

Sure, yes, I would definitely have predicted that a meme coin based on an internet celebrity who’s trying to wring as much money as she can out of her dying moment would fail. Of course it was a shitty investment. But the broad acceptance of the fact that the crypto space is still absolutely stuffed with casual corruption and shady business sure doesn’t convince me that crypto should be replacing traditional banking anytime soon! This is not how mature, healthy industries function. It’s hard to buy a bad new car, these days, as the car business has taken major leaps in the past decade or two in terms of quality and capability. But Mitsubishi cars are consistently the worst-reviewed new cars you can buy, at least to my casual understanding. And if someone buys a new Mitsubishi and comes away unsatisfied with the purchase, you could fairly say that they should have read more reviews and been a more discerning consumer. But if you bought a new Mitsubishi and it literally didn’t run, if you opened up the hood and found that instead of an engine there was a carboard box filled with bricks, if it turned out that the center screen was a fake tablet from a Fisher Price set, if they said it had leather seats and they were stitched together from old burlap sacks, that wouldn’t mean you were in “be a smarter consumer” territory. It would mean that you had been the victim of a deliberate and serious act of fraud, and it would be a big scandal in the car world. The car media wouldn’t say “Hey, caveat emptor.” Car guys wouldn’t say “What did you expect?” And that’s the difference between an actual functioning, adult industry and a space that absolutely refuses to move on from being a site of gimmicks, exploitation of the ignorant, and out-and-out corruption. If you want to be taken seriously as an industry, clean your own house.

I’m not a crypto guy and never will be. But if you happen to be a crypto person, and you’re really evangelical about the possibilities of the industry, you should absolutely hate that so many crypto people are so blasé about fraud! You should be demanding that the industry police itself, so that the government doesn’t decide to take a far more aggressive regulatory stance. If you keep laughing and lolling and yucking it up every time some poor suckers lose their life savings on FartCoin Deluxe, you’re simply handing more power to people like me, people who think regulation is good and necessary and that the way to prevent this sort of thing is through heavy-handed government action. The only reason I can see for a dedicated crypto enthusiast to keep acting like a culture of cons and abuse is to be expected, and very funny, is if that crypto enthusiast sees themselves as one day being the one to pull the rug themselves.