I had to respond to an opinion piece from major tech magazine that calls crypto a Ponzi. My response inside.

While we are all used to MSM calling crypto a scam, I would expect a technology magazine to have some objectivity when it comes to crypto, at least from technological perspective. So when I read an opinion piece "When madness rules", which basically calls crypto a Ponzi, I felt I had to write a response. I doubt it will be even read, let alone published in the next issue, but anyway. My email response below, with name of magazine and author removed (but you should be able to find it by searching for the article name above).

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Dear [magazine],

Long time reader here. What prompted me to write this letter (or rather email if we are to be accurate) is opinion piece from [xyz] issue "When madness rules" by [author].

With all due respect to [author], who is entitled to his own opinion and whose articles I generally enjoy reading, I must disagree with his expressed views around cryptocurrency space. The article sounds like he lacks understanding around blockchain technology (which is perfectly fine) and therefore it must be bad (which is not fine). With every new technological revolution, there is always resistance to it. During early stages of industrial revolution, people were destroying machines. When electricity started arriving, many people were too scared to use it. Even the internet was called a passing fad by many in mainstream media in early-mid 90's, and look at where we are now.

Now I am not here to tell your readers that they should or shouldn't get into crypto (that is for them to research and decide), but I would like to address a couple of points from the article.

1. Implosion of various crypto currency platforms. There is no denying that in the last couple of months there has been a lot of mass liquidations due to failures of various companies. However, all these companies (with exception of Terraform and their LUNA/UST) were operating like traditional finance companies. They promise you huge returns, you give them your crypto, and everyone is happy, right? Except that this sounds like a common Ponzi scheme, which is in no way shape or form exclusive to crypto space. I would argue that there is a lot more money lost every year in various Ponzi schemes and other scams involving traditional currencies. The way these companies operated goes against the basic concept of decentralisation which is at the core of crypto. Not your keys, not your coins. Also, remember GFC from 2008? That was before crypto existed, with traditional finance companies fully responsible for it.

2. NFTs. I agree with [author] on his view that pictures of monkeys is a pretty poor use case for the technology. But at the same time, you could argue that any technology has many use cases that are just dumb. The fact that TikTok and many other similar services exist where a very large number of people spend their time does not mean that the internet as a whole is useless. Now, if we look past this, we can see some great use cases where NFTs are used to prove authenticity, such as event tickets (no more scalping), originality of high end fashion items (so you don't get scammed by paying big money for fake Prada), or tracking components / ingredients to verify that they are ethically sourced, to name a few.

As [author] himself rightly pointed out, "they had no idea of what they were buying into, or how it worked, or the risks involved". Indeed, putting your money into ElonMarsFlokiInu is not investing, it is gambling with high probability of being rug pulled. Invest in projects with real use cases instead. Blockchain is here to stay, and looking at the rate of growth and adoption over the last 13 years it will only get bigger. It is now where the internet was in the early-mid 90's. Fast forward a couple of decades and you get the picture.

So the key here is education. Instead of scaring people with "big, bad crypto", we should aim to educate and make people more comfortable with blockchain technology. And as a technology oriented magazine, some of that responsibility to objectively educate falls on [magazine] as well.

Looking forward to [magazine] having regular blockchain section in the future.

Best Regards