[throwawaybobby]

The author exemplifies people in the digital field who are making it their life mission to criticize blockchain/crypto all day.

I invested a significant amount in bitcoin very early and am now retired thanks to that decision. My hunch was that it was the combination of interesting innovative tech and a vector for greed that would be unstoppable. I never talked about this publicly, very few people know. Crypto is not my identity. I honestly don’t care about whether it gets banned, disappears, or ends up replacing parts of our digital experience. I recognized from the beginning that it would be unstoppable, whether it was to be a net negative or positive contributor to humanity being completely irrelevant. You can’t stop an idea.

But since I’ve been watching this space from day 1, literally installing the bitcoin client the day Satoshi posted it here, I’ve noticed that people who criticize blockchain tech tend to be folks who could have made the same bet I did and didn’t. At the time I invested I worked in a tech company and some people were already going on and on all day about how bitcoin is a scam, etc.

These folks were aware of the tech very early, considered it a scam. And now they’re making this crypto bashing their identity. I think a lot of that drive comes from the frustration that despite the space having so many negative aspects, they missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They personally know people like me. And now the only way to make peace with that decision is to publicly bash it constantly, to revolt against it. This becomes who they are, as much as crypto bros make it their identity too.

I don’t see people from the general public criticizing blockchain/crypto with as much passion as them. It’s only people from the tech field who go on personal vendettas against that space. People who had the tools and the information to transform their lives and even leave that space since… and didn’t.

As much as people who promote blockchain constantly probably have a vested interest in it due to the money they’ve put in it, making their opinion less interesting, the same is true for people who bash blockchain constantly because their vested interest is to make peace with the fact that they didn’t put money in it when it was really early.