It's the ecosystem domination by crypto bros, they ruined it for everyone.

A lot of hammer looking for nails and the micro-financialization of everything. "Crypto" has been captured by Wallstreet and the oligarchs, Trump is using it for corruption. How much money did they print while crowing about what you find in the Bitcoin genesis block?

"allowing more people to participate in the financial markets" (*hit like this is a lie, it's really about being able to middleman and take a cut of every transaction, or leave them as the bag holders)

HN will find interest in various blockchain technologies extracted from the crypto. Things like using ZKP to have online safety while preserving privacy, that is an interesting intersection of HN fav topics.

Case in point, I find that Google is pushing on ZKP interesting and exciting: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

We're talking about similar in ATProto ecosystem

Things like trust and exposure to the legal system are actually good.

When the thought leaders on your subject include both the Trumpogarchy and Logan Paul, your subject tends to draw negative sentiment.

HN values things you can build with and ship. The negative sentiment isn't really about the underlying tech, it's about the ratio of speculation to actual utility.

Most crypto conversations still center around price, tokens, and "number go up." That doesn't land with a crowd that cares about solving real problems with software.

The tech underneath is interesting, though. ZKPs for privacy, programmable settlement, onchain identity. But those conversations get drowned out by the noise of yet another token launch or influencer pump.

The sentiment would shift if more projects shipped useful products first and tokenized later (or never). The crypto projects HN does respect (Signal adding MobileCoin, the ZKP work Google is doing) lead with the problem they solve, not the financial instrument they created.

Because most people dont know any history of Finance. We already tried this once upon a time. In fact its a natural evoltiinary stage before central banks emerge. Ask your favoriye GPT why they emerged or the sequence of failures that led to their emergence. It was called the Free Banking system back then. And it failed because distributed systems are not magic just because the skill to build then exists.