Crypto critics: Why do they bother? Can FUD be useful?

“Anyone who says that David Gerard personally stopped their crypto getting into Wikipedia is a fuckwit,” says editor, Wikimedia spokesman and professional crypto hater David Gerard in his typically no-nonsense fashion.

“There are a lot of fuckwits.”

When Gerard is not passionately arguing against cryptocurrencies in Wikipedia editor discussions, the author of the 2017 self-published hit Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain can be found prosecuting the case against Bitcoin, blockchain and crypto on the BBC or in the Financial Times.

Even among the most notable crypto critics, Gerard stands out. He‘s hated Bitcoin and blockchain for more than a decade since BTC was first discussed as an alternative funding source for Wikileaks after mainstream payment processors cut it off.

For Gerard, like a number of other critics, the problem with Bitcoin isn’t just that it’s a hyped-up Ponzi scheme or a glorified database with no genuine use case — he sees it as philosophically and politically wrong.

“I saw that Bitcoin was created by internet libertarians and figured that would predict everything about it,” he tells Magazine. “I was correct. People who think they don‘t need to know what they‘re talking about and can reinvent it all from first principles are certain to fuck up in predictable ways, and they have.”

For Gerard — who leans left and describes himself as “liberal” — Bitcoin appears to be a right-wing Libertarian project and that’s reason enough to oppose it.

“Libertarianism as a political ideology is fundamentally childish and dumb as hell. Growing up in Australia, I didn‘t even believe this shit was real — I thought Libertarianism was some sort of savage Swiftian satire, not a thing people would actually believe. Then I got on the internet, and oh well.”

Crypto dystopians

Gerard isn’t the only professional Bitcoin hater out there, with the sector attracting more well-known skeptics and vehement opponents than most. That may be partly because the crypto community seems to hang on their every salvo and negative tweet in a sort of sadomasochistic relationship.

The crypto haters are loud and proud, from gold bug Peter Schiff tweeting in delight at every price drop in his attempts to flog gold to economist Nouriel Roubini shouting bad-tempered invective about criminal Ponzi-like bubbles. They’re not all a bunch of Luddites either: Some have impressive credentials like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman or Nassim Taleb who wrote the celebrated book The Black Swan but went on to interject the word ‘Bitdiot’ into every other tweet.

And, there are plenty of grassroots opponents, too, like the zeitgeist style criticisms from NFT haters in the art community who see it as environment-destroying cancer or those in the gaming community who picture it as a shameless cash grab from game developers trying to squeeze another dollar out of users.

The question is: Why do crypto critics bother? What is it about the sector that both fascinates and repels them? Why don’t they just say, “meh, it’s not for me,” and get on with their lives?

this guy works on the most useless tech on the planet… private blockchains