Naomi posted this originally on the Telegram. I thought it was a pretty good sentiment of what I also feel about the hyping up of crypto currencies. This paragraph stood out to me: > You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call 'politics'. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable. As someone who has dedicated their entire career to crypto and distributed systems, it's really scary when grifters are taking over. I have nurtured a good reputation as a software engineer because this makes me money continuously. If someone drags the reputation of the entire industry into the mud, that's bad for me too. Suddenly when I say that I co-invented NFTs it sounds like I'm a scammer, not that I was dedicated! Additionally, it is also true that practitioners don't gain that much from hype. Those who set themselves up intentionally to profit from hype are those who end up profiting. And often these aren't practitioners.