The crypto industry is following exactly the same playbook as the tobacco industry when it comes spreading disinformation and spin about bitcoin not being the ecological disaster we all know it is.
In the 1970s the tobacco lobby revealed the mechanism they spin public opinion. You don't try to refute facts directly, you just spread doubt.

> "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public."
Bitcoiners want you to believe the truly nonsensical position that because the carbon footprint of mining is not absolutely precisely knowable, we shouldn't even ask questions about the per-transaction cost.

They don't want you to ask about bitcoin's inconvenient truth.
Emphasizing uncertainty on behalf of big business has become a big business in itself. We see trade journalism like Coinbase (which is owned by a hedge fund) that prints utterly incoherent screeds written by other hedge funds doing nothing but spreading industry propaganda.
The truth of the matter is the simple fact that most of the public is beginning to intuit. Bitcoin does far far more harm than good in this world. It is a filthy risky investment that serves no societal purpose and needs to be banned by governments completely.

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More from @smdiehl

14 May
People often ask me if there's anything related to blockchain that isn't tied to grift. Possibly, but the only way you can tell is by examining the business model. (1/) 🧵
Anything that self-identifies itself as a cryptocurrency is clearly a scam (see my vast number of other threads for the reasons), so let's get that out of the way first. (2/)
I wouldn't go so far as to say that everything that self-identifies as a blockchain project is a scam. For instance Microsoft had a Azure Blockchain Service that recently got shut down. (3/)
zdnet.com/article/micros…
Read 12 tweets
13 May
Let's talk about Elon's "hustle" with Tesla's bitcoin holdings and why it's horrible for markets and the public at large. (1/) 🧵
Disclosure: It won't come as a shock to anyone I'm not a fan of Muskrat cult of personality that emerged around him. However a person is not reducible down to a single facet, we're all the sum of our good and bad choices.

While there is some good, let's talk about the bad. (2/)
The facts:

In January 2021, Tesla the company decided to use company funds to silently purchase bitcoin at $34,200 facilitated by the then private company Coinbase. The company spent $1.5bn to secretly purchase 48,000 coins. (3/)
Read 25 tweets
9 May
Let's talk about the phenomenon of "mathcoins" and how fancy tech and academic obscurantism is used to defraud the public into buying scam crypto investments. (1/) 🧵
Cryptocurrencies are nothing but a form of investment fraud that enriches a small group of people by directing funds from new investors to pay out old investors. They're a variant of the classic Ponzi scheme, but where the cashflows are obscured with internet technology. (2/)
Now Ponzis schemes can indeed make people very rich. Madoff got rich, and made plenty of his early investors rich. But at some point there is an inflection point in which cash outflows exceed inflows and the scheme inevitably collapses. (3/)
Read 29 tweets
7 May
Some pundits compare blockchain to the dot-com bubble or the early internet.

This is complete nonsense. (1/) 🧵
You work in tech long enough, you start to understand the bubbly nature of it all. And that timing trends is just part of the whole structure of how things work, and how even bullshit can actually drive innovation if incentives are aligned. (2/)
And we've seen a TON of them even just in my time:

Agile, big data, blogging, cloud, CMS, data science, DevOps, IoT, intranets, Java, LANs, Linux, online advertising, microservices, PaaS, PDAs, search engines, social media, Web 2.0 ... the list goes on on and on.
(3/)
Read 27 tweets
5 May
This year #ESG investing has a lot of momentum in Europe, and many funds are interested in how crypto factors into their portfolios. (1/) 🧵
For those that don't know, ESG stands for:

* Environmental
* Social
* Corporate Governance

It's an investment philosophy that tries to allocate capital towards companies that are better than their peers with regards to sustainability and societal impact. (2/)
Investing in directly cryptocurrency is one of the most anti-ESG investment you can possibly make.

The environmental exposure of crypto is a nightmare that directly contributes to carbon emissions and climate change at the level of nation states. (3/)

ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bit…
Read 22 tweets
4 May
Let's talk about surrogate money scams and how they are used to cover up the liquidity crisis at heart of the global crypto fraud. (1/) 🧵
Contrary to myth, it's actually entirely legal for private companies to issue private money, but with some caveats.

Whenever you buy a Starbucks gift card or top up the mobile app you're effectively trading your dollars or pounds for Starbucks-bucks. (2/)
Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This is a great line of business for them because these dollars are locked into being spent at their coffee shops and the company gets a giant pile of actual money they can spend anywhere. (3/)
Read 19 tweets

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