The New York Times Has a Crypto Blindspot
Crypto is terribly explained and the New York Times isn’t helping.
Unlike many people in tech, I have an endless amount of respect for the New York Times as an institution. I’ve been a subscriber since 2012, and it’s quite literally the first app I load every morning over my morning coffee to make sense of our increasingly fraught world. Which is why when I opened the paper last Sunday and saw ‘Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto’ — an article which incidentally quotes me on several topics — I was a bit shocked and disappointed at the missed opportunity of this article. The aspirations of this piece are absolutely noble in its stated intent yet falls vastly short in the execution of actually demystifying anything.
Crypto boosters will likely quibble with my explanations, while dug-in opponents may find them too generous. That’s OK. My goal is not to convince you that crypto is good or bad, that it should be outlawed or celebrated, or that investing in it will make you rich or bankrupt you. It is simply to demystify things a bit.
To most of the public, crypto is still an enigma. It’s a collection of ideas shrouded in techno-obscurantism, dense jargon and absurdist memes that make even the most stalwart of reporter cringe at the amount of effort it takes to unpack all this intellectually…
