Crypto-skeptical Molly White may be the new JK Galbraith … just a lot tougher | John Naughton

IIn 1955, economist John Kenneth Galbraith published a slim volume entitled The Great Crash 1929, a story about the Wall Street crash. In it he chronicled, with his usual caustic wit, the violent speculation that led to the catastrophe and its striking resemblance to all speculative bubbles in one key respect: the inviting speculators’ belief that they can get rich without doing any work. The book went through many editions and reprints, for many of them Galbraith wrote new preface. When his Harvard colleagues asked him why he continued to do this, his answer was that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 would be the best protection against it happening again.

By believing this, Galbraith was uncharacteristically naive, something even a superficial inspection of recent history will confirm. Consider, for example, the first Internet boom of 1995-2000, in which dotcom startups that had websites but had neither revenue nor customers for a short time achieved value ratings that exceeded General Motors. Or think of Ireland’s “Celtic tiger” moments between the mid-1990s and 2008, with the associated real estate boom promoted by a government that served as the political wing of the construction industry. And just to keep the history of human greed and folly up to date, think of the craziness of cryptocurrencies, “Web3” and the blockchain we are involved in.

In the midst of such speculative madness, it takes courage to point out that bubbles are always bursting. People can get really nasty when someone suggests that the nonsense they have invested their hopes and savings in is, well, nonsense. For example, when economist Prof Morgan Kelly in 2006 predicted that Irish real estate prices would crash by 50%, he was intimidated by the then Taoiseach. “To sit on the sidelines,” said Bertie Ahern, “to crib and moan is a lost opportunity. I do not know how people who engage in it do not commit suicide, because honestly the only thing that motivates me is to be able to actively change something. » (Ahern later apologized for the suicide note.)

All of this is a reason to celebrate Molly White, a remarkable young woman who is the most sensible critic of the crypto-madness. Today she is a software developer and a dedicated editor of Wikipedia, which she has been involved in since she was 13, and on which she now has more than 100,000 edits. In her spare time, she has become the sharpest critic of online cryptoboosterism. Her website, with its heavily ironic title “Web3 Is Going Just Great”, has become the site of examples of cryptocurrencies – investment fraud, incompetently run projects that collapse under mismanagement, hacks that drain supporters’ money and so on.

At first, she told an interviewer, she was quite detached from the madness. If nerds wanted to fool around with crypto, then that was their business. What frightened her was when she discovered that ordinary citizens began to invest in cryptocurrencies. “It was going to be this thing,” she said, “where the average person was encouraged to put money into it and then was completely fooled. And so I decided to start highlighting just project after project after project. as I saw, it was either just a terrible idea to begin with, or something where they put it up, they convinced a bunch of people to pour their money into it. And then they took it all off. “

In a way, her website is a directory of what she calls “rug pulls”. “Someone is making a new project, it could be a new cryptocurrency token, it could be an NFT project, and they get a bunch of people to put their money in. And then they suddenly lose all the funds that are in what is called liquidity pool. And that means that the coin or NFTs suddenly have zero value when buyers expected them to be something they could trade with. ” In other words, they are what in an earlier age would have been called pump-and-dump scams.

But in addition to exposures like these, White’s website has many other useful things: a glossary useful for newcomers to this mysterious field; a carefully curated set of resources that she calls her “blockchain collection”; a terrific talk she gave to Stanford students on the subject of “blockchain abuse”; and a fantastic collective critique that she curated from Kevin Roose’s article, The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto, in New York Times.

Predictably, this carefully assembled virtual cabinet with useful information has not made White known for the more fanatical wing of the cryptocurrency. Ever since she published a picture of herself online in 2011, she has been a target for harassment and threats of violence by internet trolls, especially after her Wikipedia coverage of burning topics such as “incels”. If the price of freedom in the real world is vigilance, the price of truth-telling on the internet is harassment and worse. Something John Kenneth Galbraith never had to worry about.

What I have read

Breaking up is hard to do
The dangers of shattering the past. A perceptive essay in Noema the magazine by Nathan Gardels reflects on how aggressive disturbance inevitably reaps a whirlwind.

Reproductive failure
And what about the frozen embryos created by IVF? An interesting editorial in the current issue of New England Journal of Medicine brings up a thought that may not have bothered the Supreme Court justices.

listen to
Drive out a new machine. An unusual version of the 3 Quarks Daily website by David Kordahl about the LaMDA chatbot controversy.