old but ✨✨✨ gold ✨✨✨
I miss the times when blockchain tech was still somewhat considered innocent by journalists and where they genuinely tried to work out the benefits of the technology for their audience. Balaji would respond to this saying that the fall of journalism changed this dynamic, but I‘d argue that we as a space also have gotten worse, to the point where a majority of outsiders only encounters our products as spammy forms of casinos. At the time of filming that video, these things existed too, but they did way smaller numbers.
I was very surprised by the quality of journalism here - haven't seen such an optimistic, curious approach to crypto from mainstream media in a long time. Agree with @timdaub here - also, many crypto people got very annoying in the meantime ("Have fun staying poor" etc.).
Yeah but also in the 2020-2021 bull run, many crypto people had a mask of moment where they went anon and committed all sorts of crimes and did immoral stuff. And the crypto influencers started to embrace the Bitcoin maxi view of fucking up the US federal reserve, and people from Coinbase started complaining about the SEC. It was really different back then. Crypto really was still innocent. It also didn‘t have the potential it has today, but people were generally friendly towards it. At best they were ignorant of the tech.
So don‘t get fooled. This is not „the quality of journalism,“ this is based on how crypto was back then and how we behave today. If we would behave differently today, such videos could exist again. This is precisely one issue with the Balaji view on the world: he credits the fall of journalism for the bad depiction of technology. But for sure tech also has to more self-regulate to get rid of the bad apples.