Item — HN Reader

This article is attempting to put an extremely positive spin ("new law makes Germany 'crypto[currency] heaven'", "leads to institutional investors", "major breakthrough", "massive for adoption") on a government crackdown. To be expected given that decrypt.co is funded by ConsenSys, which was in turn founded by someone who had (in Feb 2018) an estimated "net worth in cryptocurrency to be between one and five billion [US] dollars"[0], so they have a vested interest in promoting cryptocurrencies. But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lubin_(entrepreneur)

3 comments

Bloomberg is founded by a billionaire with a vested interest in... whatever he has an interest in? Washington Post by Bezos as well. Should we ban all of this so-called “independent” media from HN?

If the Washington Post featured nothing other than articles about Amazon, and those articles only ever painted Amazon in an unreasonably positive light, then I would question the value of having those featured repeatedly on HN too.

Guess it depends what you want out of HN. Those publications all have issues with objectivity. For me it's enough to know the source, and see comments spelling out the source when it's non-obvious.

Well, Bloomberg probably has some actual cash. The crypto guy has a bunch of tokens he needs to turn into usable money. So he has a interest in keeping the price up while he slowly exits without crashing the price.

Bloomberg also has a lot of pricing and other financial market data that he needs to turn into usable money. Most (but not all) of Bloomberg’s editorial content furthers that interest in one way or another.

Honest question - does it bother you every day that any cryptocurrency is valued above $0? Does this violate you intellectually?

This doesnt sound like a "honest question" to me.

This seems like a good place to quote the latest HN guideline: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's implied by the other guidelines already, and is certainly the spirit of the site, but some redundancy seems needed for clarity.

>why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN

Hacking, startups, and cryptocurrencies are all a rebellion against the stifling rigidity of the established order. Some more constructive than others.

Oh, c'mon. Startups and crypto are mostly attempts at getting rich.

Surely most startups are attempts at getting rich.

Indeed I don’t see how this exempts the custodians from any of the AML and KYC rules that represents the only real value proposition of crypto: crime.

> But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?

Enough people within the HN community also suddenly found themselves with a large amount of wealth in these digital beanie babies of late, and so have similar vested interests.