I can tell you why I downvoted it.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t actually work
False, it works just fine. It’s a token that can’t be duplicated and people can send to each other without any centralized authority.
and only is there for scams and fraud.
There are indeed a lot of those, but scams and fraud were very clearly not the intention of its creators. Realistically they were cryptography nerds who wanted to make something cool, or libertarians with overly-idealistic visions of the future.
Not surprising that FTX collapsed.
Clear hindsight bias. This person should have made some money betting against FTX before it collapsed and then I’d take them more seriously.
Basically, the comment is just your standard “cryptocurrency bad” take, without any attempt at justifying their claims or even saying much of anything other than expressing in an inflammatory way that they don’t like cryptocurrency.
The fact that this comment is at −160 karma is frankly shocking to me. Trust is important in any community, and the fact that people appear to be completely dismissing the fact that Owen and anon had established an atypical norm of honesty and forthcomingness about their thoughts and emotions and are choosing to frame this norm being followed as somehow inappropriate makes me expect that any agreements I might make with another EA will likely be broken as soon as it’s socially advantageous to do so. I enjoy and appreciate the EA community because, at least up until recently, people here seemed committed to caring about what’s true and what will maximally benefit the world, not jumping on the social shaming bandwagon. I sincerely hope I’m misunderstanding what’s going on here, because if EA really is giving up their epistemic integrity as it looks to me like is happening here, that indicates a much darker future than I expected.
(It’s theoretically possible that all the downvotes are people disagreeing with the last paragraph only, and I think disagreement with that one is indeed much more justified. But the first four paragraphs are clearly the main point of this comment, and if someone agrees with those and disagrees with the last one, I don’t think they should be downvoting the comment overall.)