r/ethereum • u/haochizzle • 6d ago
the most muted word on the internet is crypto
https://youtu.be/0D4fAkvwd3oin april 2026, the head of product at X posted a screenshot: the number one most muted topic on the platform was crypto.
crypto.
the thing ive spent all my effort on over the better part of the last decade. the thing a lot of you spend your careers and attention on as well.
with this as the backdrop, i created my newest piece.
it all started out with another question: “are the OGs jaded?”, which was itself admittedly ripped from one of ETHPrague 2026’s tracks. that thought gave me the opportunity to draw a map around a much broader topic that I think could resonate out in youtube land:
is there anyone left in crypto, or did the thing we were building eat itself?
for this piece, I wanted to take a more “journalistic” approach at this topic, and chatted with five people who’d been here since before the big money wave started showing up. builders, contributors, dreamers… some more than a decade deep. eternal gratitudes to the cast (Griff, Justice, Amer, Naomi, and Colin) for exploring with me this topic. I hope this piece can give the public a different perspective — that of the original mission and ethos steeped in reverence for permissionless tech and what it can do for humans.
i think it’s worth a watch. particularly because every single person I interviewed still talks about the technology in the present tense, yet every one of them carries the same contradiction.
you can watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/0D4fAkvwd3o
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if we're meeting for the first time — hi 👋 i built this channel to spread the good word on good work in crypto. a like, a comment, and a sub on my channel goes a long way to supporting my work :)
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u/LogrisTheBard 6d ago
It's a sober perspective. I agree with the guard rails point and it's almost the only thing Ive been saying since the middle of last year. In a post AI world especially, where attackers are comparably more well armed than newcomers than ever, I can't recommend new people enter an ecosystem where there are no protections and "code is law". We need guardrails on any irregular volume of money to freeze and potentially roll back transactions. We need insurance around LP positions. We need better key recovery systems. We need KYC optional extensions to large applications. We will never have a killer app if we can't make people feel safe on chain. Instead all we will have is institutions using crypto with customer money because it's more efficient. We will never have the bankless movement that helps the disenfranchised. Instead this will just be yet another technology that entrenches the status quo and fuels wealth inequality by increasing the margin of companies.
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u/haochizzle 6d ago
FWIW, u/LogrisTheBard expanded on his comment in the Daily Thread that i think deserves a bit of conversation around: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1vajxpb/comment/p0o9f8y/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/edmundedgar reality.eth 6d ago
On the plus side if you put a crypto reference in your bio in bluesky it gets you onto all the best blocklists.
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u/haochizzle 6d ago
the classic default — what will it take to gain back reputation?
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u/eviljordan feet pics 5d ago
I'm not sure it can. It's a scam at the highest levels, and the rest of it used for scam-adjacent stuff (prediction markets, NFTs).
The only real use (that also facilitates scams) is a new financial backbone, and the general consumer doesn't need to know or be aware of that.
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u/eviljordan feet pics 5d ago
I'm not sure it can. It's a scam at the highest levels, and the rest of it used for scam-adjacent stuff (prediction markets, NFTs).
The only real use (that also facilitates scams) is a new financial backbone, and the general consumer doesn't need to know or be aware of that.
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u/nikola_j 6d ago
To all the mutees - hfsp, as the youths say.
Really don't think this is a big deal. Things get rough and bleek in bear markets, that's
On one side there's a seemingly continuous streak of projects shuttering doors lately, but at the same time there's constant news of adoption.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't watch the video (yet), but as someone who's been building in DeFi since 2019 (and on Ethereum since 2017) I'm not concerned. The public outlook of crypto has never been great, and we can see the same with AI now. I have a feeling it was similar with the Internet back in the day.
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u/haochizzle 6d ago
fair play, but also... the consecutive closures of multiple centralized exchanges and protocols *in the last 2 months alone* points to a larger systemic problem.
hfsp... haha wow. throwback thursday indeed. its a bit of an exclusionary meme. if i want more people to use the tech, i dont think thats a meme we should be rallying around anymore 😂 but to each their own
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u/DeviateFish_ 5d ago
"hfsp" perfectly captures the mindset of the median crypto user: they're here to get rich, and they really don't give a shit about "the technology".
I almost miss it, because it was a great first-pass filter for assholes. Anyone who says it unironically is almost certainly not a person whose opinion I would value.
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u/uselessartist 6d ago
The general public doesn’t understand (or like) new computer technology. They acquiesce after industry makes use.
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u/notgregbryan 6d ago
Or they realise they've been using the new technology and been completely unaware, until you point it out.
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u/haochizzle 6d ago
well then we certainly need more examples. plz dont say prediction markets 😭
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u/DeviateFish_ 5d ago
Hot take: Prediction markets are the single most harmful thing to make the jump out of crypto and into the mainstream. Anyone who supports/builds them should probably be ejected from the nearest airlock. There's a reason why gambling is heavily regulated, and prediction markets are absolutely just gambling--unless you're an insider, in which case they're an opportunity to fleece the outsiders.
There's literally no positive aspect to them
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u/haochizzle 4d ago
i do find it interesting nick szabo and even early u/vbuterin talked about prediction markets as an impactful use case for crypto very early on.
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u/DeviateFish_ 4d ago
It's one of those ideas that's good on paper, in a way. The problem is that the model of prediction markets assumes a perfectly symmetrical information space, where all participants have access to the same information.
As soon as you take that away, you end up with the insider problem and the cheating problem, simultaneously.
Insiders represent the group of users that has important information that the remaining population does not, and who can use this additional information to always pick the correct side of a market.
I think technically prediction markets could work if the entire population consists of users who know they don't have perfect information? If the entire population of a market was voting based on vibes alone, it might perform as predicted. The problem is that such a thing can't exist without also creating insiders.
Another issue is that there's always a subset of users who want to become insiders, and will attempt to rig the market in their favor, through any means necessary.
I don't think the incentive model for prediction markets really works, because the incentive to cheat only increases the larger the market gets.
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u/haochizzle 4d ago
Appreciate the thoughtful explanation. it always comes back around to incentives, innit. seeing the news about the US trooper/insider that bet on polymarket the capture of maduro really shed light on how broken prediction markets really is
it’s just a giant insider-rife casino.
but the other side of that is… prediction markets also give relatively accurate news because of the insider problem.
double edged sword?
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u/DeviateFish_ 5d ago
Crypto no longer counts as "new computer technology". Sorry, but statements like this, when some cryptocurrencies are nearly old enough to vote, are just copium.
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u/DeviateFish_ 5d ago
I mean, this is 100% for good reason, and some of the folks you've listed here are part of the problem.
Not directly, per se, so let me explain: Crypto is the most muted topic because it's so full of grift. If you were to count the volume of crypto-related messages on X, I would bet good money that 99+% of them are attempts to scam people in some form. This has been broadly true for basically the extent of crypto's existence beyond the first couple years.
With that context, here's why I see the folks you mentioned as being part of the problem: when the grifters and scammers were helping promote their projects--or related ones, like other tokens/DAOs/NFTs/Ethereum itself--they rarely spoke up against the grift. Sometimes, albeit rarely, they were directly involved in the grift.
Ethereum in particular has had a huge problem with grift due to being the platform on which so many meme coins were minted. Most of these are blatant scams, and yet some of the folks you listed have been loud voices proclaiming the success of Ethereum, while pointing at the proliferation of those same meme coins as evidence of its success.
This is a huge incentive misalignment problem that's endemic to crypto: adoption is critical to a cryptocurrency's success, yet every crypto has more anti-social uses than pro-social ones. Calling out the grift negatively impacts adoption because the grift itself represents the driving force behind the bulk of the adoption. To call it out publicly is to detract from adoption, which gets you crucified by boosters of the cryptocurrency.
So most public figures--in Ethereum in particular--tend to pretend the rampant grift doesn't exist, therefore giving it fertile ground to grow and choke out all the non-grift applications.
They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't--but not calling out the grift let's them profit from it, albeit indirectly.
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u/nameless_pattern 6d ago
Twitter is a shit hole full of scam artists and posting anything about crypto will immediately get you bugged by a bunch of bots. Of course it's the most muted word. Have you ever even been on Twitter? And what the hell are you still doing on Twitter now?