Leeching off the system is not a skill

Cryptocurrency threads on a founders’ forum go badly with such reliability that it’s worth asking what the mismatch actually is.

You’re on a site largely built for people who want to build things. That’s how it started and you can still see the shape of it in the Show HN posts and anything startup-flavoured, even though there’s far more going on now than there used to be. Code topics, machine learning, electric vehicles, environmental things, a bit of futurism. The core is still founders and that alone doesn’t rule out a good conversation about crypto because there are genuine opportunities in it and real pain points somebody could go and solve.

The trouble is that three things about the subject rub directly against what that audience respects.

The first is that a large number of the people making a living from crypto are purely speculating. They aren’t building anything at all. They’re trying to buy low and sell high which is a legitimate way to make money and is not a thing founders tend to admire. What gets respect from the people you’re talking to is going out, starting something, and building a thing that solves a real problem, even a problem the person admiring it doesn’t personally have. Leeching off the system isn’t a skill and an audience selected for wanting to build will read it that way whether or not that’s fair.

The second is that a lot of crypto isn’t solving a problem. It’s trying to be digital gold without the parts of gold that make gold useful so what’s left is a store of value and nothing else. There genuinely are good uses for the technology, and even for things like NFTs, and almost none of the speculation is about those. It’s the buying and selling and a forum full of people who make things is not a trading forum and has never wanted to be one.

The third is harder to argue away and it’s the one that ends most of the threads. However you cut it, the returns everybody is there to discuss depend on somebody else arriving later and paying more.

Put those together and you get a subject where the participants and the audience are optimising for different things, and both sides read the other as missing the point. The crypto side sees a group of people being sniffy about a technology they haven’t studied. The forum side sees speculation dressed up as engineering. Both are partly right. Neither will convince the other. The disagreement was never about the technology.

Which is why the threads don’t get better with more information. You can post the most careful technical explanation of a protocol anybody has written and the top comment will still be about the price because the price is what most of the visible activity in the space is about and everyone knows it.

The conversation that would work is the one nobody starts. Somebody building an actual product on this, solving an actual problem for actual customers, writing about what was hard. That gets a completely different reception and it gets it because it’s the thing the audience turns up for.

You can watch the same mismatch play out in other subjects when the audience shifts underneath a topic. Anything where most of the visible participants are extracting value rather than adding it gets the same treatment, and the people doing genuinely interesting work in that space end up paying for the behaviour of everybody around them, which is unfair and completely predictable.

If you’re building something real in a field like that, the useful move is to lead with the problem you solved and let the technology come second.