The reality is that it is all a scam and there is absolutely no justifying it.
You have people losing their life savings over this fad. People gambling in this distributed casino; addicted to looking at the price all day. The VCs dumping their tokens onto the unsuspecting general public for them to restart the scam cycle over again.
The only 'usecase' for all of this is for speculative purposes only. Which is what the majority of the people involved in this crypto hype are doing.
I believe that the recent Terra crash is the beginning of a complete wakeup call for the end for these crypto tokens.
This needs to all stop.
As co-creator of a cryptocurrency that aims for simplicity and elegance, that doesn't financially benefit me in any way, and that happens to strongly discourage speculation, I take issue with this characterization.
Amazing the kind of scams that are being orchestrated in that world.
Presumably this was the first time the reporter had escaped the WaPo offices since 1980; if anything this is probably more an early-middle-age uniform than anything else, at this point...
That said, there will be lots of people who are only emboldened by her take-downs. Not much that can be done about that. It's transparently a scam, it's hard to feel too bad about people who get caught up in greed. On the other hand my retired father had told me some people he know were "investing" in crypto and wondered if he should be too. Preying on retired people is really not cool.
One nit-pick I can't help, the article says crypto has been "hailed by libertarians". Yes, there are technically unsophisticated, naive libertarians that have been taken in by the scam and see how the supposed benefits of crypto align with their values. Same as people with many other viewpoints. Just because some people in a group have been tricked doesn't mean anything else, just that they got tricked (or greedy). I'm a libertarian and I know crypto is a scam. I'm not the only one.
It proports to be a way of having money outside of central control, and kind of digital gold, and that's more likely to be attractive to unsophisticated libertarians than to, say, technically unsophisticated social democrats, who would generally consider central control of money to be desirable.
(There are definitely attempts to market crypto to other ideologies, for instance the "Let's Go Brandon" scam aimed at the US far-right, and the "Bitcoin actually helps the environment, we promise" thing aimed at the center-left, but they're, well, such obvious nonsense that only _very_ unsophisticated people are falling for them. The hook for libertarians is better.)
