A lot of fiat simps over the last 48 hours shilling away, blaming Musk, etc, don't get this one thing...

Reddit is a pro-crypto and super crypto tolerant place overall, between r/bitcoin, this sub, and the fact that reddit's whole coin system runs on ETH -- over last day or so have seen a lot of unintellectually presented stuff hit the reddit homepage just bashing us and BTC. This post is meant for such haters, who are no doubt browsing this sub, it's not meant for people who've been in for years as it will be a repeat of values you already understand well.

Red Herring 1: "Why would they go into this scam that ONE MAN can change the value of by so much?"

Well, caught a fresh red herring right there, didn't ya. I don't see evidence that Elon Musk is singlehandedly keeping the crypto markets alive. Mainstream narrative being propped up by fools. I don't check Elon Musk's twitter feed before I buy or sell ETH or BTC, and I honestly don't know a single adult who does. Quite the opposite. It was in the trillions of dollars market cap when he began flirting with us all, and just as we didn't really need people Brock Pierce, Roger Ver, etc to be advocates of "the technology" in the past... because the blockchain's economic benefits are eventually self-evident to its users. (Some would argue Bitcoin would have been actually better off without such controversial advocates centralizing the locus of influence.)

So, to answer red herring 1: the vast, vast majority of us aren't here because of Elon Musk, nor because of Suze Orman, Robert Kiyosaki, William Shatner or any of the other fine folks who have caught the bug. Instead, these celebrities are laymen late adopters to our technology, and they're getting some things very wrong in how they present our technology to the wider public, in my view at least.

Red Herring 2: "The government should prevent this from happening!"

Prevent what, exactly, from happening? Crypto markets have gone from $0 to more than $2 trillion of market value, because of the use cases. These are voluntary, consensual markets. The people who have made the lion's share from crypto's rise aren't Elon Musk types, but all of us. Millions of people were lifted up by ETH and BTC, many don't discuss this for tax reasons, privacy, etc.

Due to this disclosure bias, on social media and places like reddit we typically only hear from people who did unusually poorly - the person who sold their house for a useless NFT, etc.

Red Herring 3: "I just don't want you using money that isn't a rectangle of paper with a dead slaveholder's face on it, majority controlled by a handful of families!!!!!! You're shaking my loosely held assumptions about the world to the core and I don't like it!"

It's hard for me to downshift the gears of my mind to such a place where I can discern what exactly is driving all these knuckle dragging anti-crypto posts over the last couple days, and it's not exactly jealousy - it's literally some kind of lack of understanding of what crypto is, and a lack of insight into what is driving the vast majority of us here. It ain't greed.

When people ask me why am I in crypto, and in ETH specifically, I turn it around and ask them why are they in fiat? It's owned by a handful of families, there's no fiat that has ever survived the test of time, and it's foundationally unfair to trade one's skills for money which has been pre-mined by humans back in the 1910s or whatever, and then pretty much bagheld generationally. Even worse, there's no proof-of-stake or proof-of-work component to these historically bagheld USDs or EURs, so we're all scrambling for money that was invented effortlessly by others, yet that we need to sacrifice labor, time, or originality in exchange for. That's the essence of servitude.

So, when someone is hyperventilating about Elon Musk manipulating the market, or is worried that crypto ransoms will shatter the West because that's what they hear on Fiat Media all day long, get them to realize their money is missing a feature that millions of us take for granted: proof-of-work, proof-of-stake.

Contrary to Fiat Media and what some celebrities say, there's no free lunch in crypto. Proof of one's ownership, or past work in maintaining the chain, is what makes us the new money. We're all risking our legacy money - fiat USDs or EURs etc. - or our mining rigs to nurture the chains we want to maintain and build our projects on. The "boom" some are seeing is simply the Reward part of the Risk/Reward equation.

Nothing was taken from another, and the rise in crypto isn't even a victimless crime. It's not a crime at all.

As I wrote recently on my personal blog, Elon Musk's about face on crypto is a true betrayal, but we can use it to educate and on-board the next 100 million crypto users, instead of allowing it to be the latest Weaponized Narrative against the blockchain.