The VC Crypto Swindle

https://medium.com/@Stephen.Diehl/the-vc-crypto-swindle-271e6ea9400c

by luisha • 4 years ago

31 9 4 years ago

dcolkitt• 4 years ago

You can think what you want about Stephen Diehl. But it should be pointed out that for all his criticisms of crypto, he is the co-founder and CTO of a blockchain company that explicitly competes with and has a vested interest in the failure of open source crypto projects like Ethereum.

All of which is fine. You're perfectly allowed to criticize your competitors. But what's extremely sketchy about Mr. Diehl, is that he virtually never discloses this conflict of interest in any of his crypto commentary. In fact he's gone to increasingly greater lengths to cover up his involvement with the blockchain industry as it gets pointed out.

yomkippur2• 4 years ago

still doesn't discount anything he's said about the space and looks like Adjoin hasn't been active for quite some time. So its likely that he dabbled in the space and stopped once he realized crypto was just a one stop ponzi on top of ponzi.

http://adjoint.io/ does not appear to be active since 2019

naniwaduni• 4 years ago

I would prefer to hear "I've been in this space, and it was a fucking mess and I got out" from him, then.

XhGkXBvR• 4 years ago

See my sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304395

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

Based on this comment alone (we are not provided with the name of Diehl's company), it sounds like Diehl has opted to support a blockchain-based business that complies with the law instead of one that flouts it. That is smart decision-making.

IMO, this comment suffers from a misunderstanding of the term "conflict of interest". To me, the conflict would be that Diehl is presenting himself as a source of objective reporting on the negatives surrounding "blockchain" but in fact he himself is invested in it. As readers we might question whether he is downplaying the negatives. Yet when one Googles his name, we find the opposite.

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

Here’s the website for his company: https://web.archive.org/web/20180213200210/https://www.adjoi...

And much of their work is forked from public blockchain projects, just check out adjoint’s github.

What is the conflict of interest? It’s that he explicitly says that he only wants “permissionless/public blockchains” to be regulated, meaning ones like Ethereum that anyone can build on and use. But his company works on “permissioned/private blockchains”, which seem to me like a direct competitor with the public ones.

Maybe I don’t have the whole story, that was just the impression I got after doing a bit of digging.

hnthrow1010• 4 years ago

company that explicitly competes with

According to some crypto promoters I've seen on Twitter, blockchain is apparently the solution to everything and will revolutionize every industry. By their definition, you'd be hard up to find a company that isn't competing with them.

In actuality, the word "blockchain" usually refers to a specific type of distributed database based around a consensus layer on top of a merkle tree. Its usage competes (poorly) with other commercial distributed databases, not with Ethereum. And these "commercial blockchains" still failed to find a single effective use. All of them I've seen are just worse versions of other databases, and are either forks of some open source code, or are directly inspired by Bitcoin or Ethereum or another similar project.

has a vested interest in the failure of open source crypto projects like Ethereum.

I also have a vested interest in the failure of projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it's not because I'm invested in a competitor. It's because I don't like fraud and ponzi-style scams. And all crypto tokens are a variant of the same scam, because they inherently don't have any real value. All of them depend on the miners/validators pumping up the value so they can sell the block rewards and realize their profits. These tokens are all completely useless and valueless without a steady influx of new "investors" artificially inflating the price. Inherently they're just not like a stock, but the false idea of "crypto investing" is suggesting that they are.

You don't have to be invested in another product, to dislike scams and want them to go away.

You're perfectly allowed to criticize your competitors

This author is far from being the only one to criticize blockchains. Lots of others shared the same conclusions: https://concerned.tech/

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

I feel like I've heard the same thing in quite a lot of places now, talking in general terms but never having the balls to name names. Off the top of my head I've heard references to it from the guys at All-In, I've definitely heard the people at Odd-lots make reference to it as well, and I'm sure I've heard it elsewhere.

Obviously people are very wary about making public accusations about other investors/VCs, especially ones that have the resources to sue them, but I've got to think: They're all saying Chris Dixon at a16z is running this scam right? I feel like that's got to be what they're hinting at unless there's some other big VCs in the crypto space? No one wants to say the name, for obvious reasons, but there's really not many people they can be talking about.

I wonder if anyone has seen a more direct description of what's going on over there.

The VC Crypto Swindle

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