Molly White has become the biggest critic in the crypto world
White dismantled the project in a sporadic series of tweets on Twitter, which went viral, unleashing a flurry of criticism and ridicule and spawning fake videos boasting millions of views. Now, the Cryptoland website appears to be inactive, and its supporters have abandoned it. Requests for comment to its founders were not answered.
A 28-year-old software engineer who writes articles on Wikipedia for fun, White is an eccentric figure who makes the crypto industry languish. On its website, “Web3 is Going Just Great,” white papers state after case of crypto breaches: investments turning scams, poorly managed projects collapsing due to mismanagement, hacks draining supporters’ money.
With so much of the financial and tech elite rallied around cryptocurrency, White has led a small but faltering group of skeptics pushing in the opposite direction, and their warnings seem to be proven correct by the collapse in cryptocurrency prices in recent weeks.
“Most of my disdain is for the big players who market this to a regular audience as if it were an investment, usually promising to be a ticket out of a really tough financial place for people who don’t have many options,” White said. “He’s very predatory.”
For White and her fellow critics, the founders of the crypto company and the venture capitalists who support them are leading a massive and unregulated attempt to rid ordinary people of their money by exaggerating the potential of crypto technology. Years spent researching online esoteric internet cultures made White a rare figure who could maneuver the technically complex and emotional world of cryptography, translating it into easily digestible prose.
White works from her home in Massachusetts, where she shares two cats and a 70-pound puppy. She wears a youthful Converse jeans, jackets and sneakers and communicates with fellow crypto-skeptics through Zoom and Twitter direct messages. She has turned down several offers to speak at face-to-face conferences, citing time commitment.
As more people began to question the crypto obsession, White’s fame grew: Journalists approached her to verify the stories, she has lectured to students at Stanford University and advised Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (DRI) on potential crypto legislation.
“In the cryptocurrency world, many things are not what they seem.” Ben McKenzie, a former TV actor and star of “The O.C.,” who started writing about cryptocurrency during the pandemic and has become one of the industry’s most well-known critics said. “Molly shines a light through the darkness and presents it for the world to see.”
White’s goals say her critical brand is very sarcastic, picking out dramatic examples of failing to mischaracterize an entire industry, which is often filled with good people and good ideas. She, in turn, was afflicted with an uncomfortable form of justification.
“I wasn’t the only crypto skeptic who predicted some of these projects would collapse, but watching them doesn’t make it fun,” she said.
The world of cryptocurrency and its boosters is on the way to fraud. Major investors, such as venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which hit big years ago with early investments in Facebook, Skype and Airbnb, have invested billions of dollars in the space. The debate over who serves crypto and who will win in the end is far from over. White’s voice is rising, but the money and power in cryptocurrency is on the rise, too.
Molly White grew up online. As a teenager, she began writing and editing Wikipedia pages, first for bands she liked, and then for documenting unknown female scientists. During Trump’s presidency, her interests shifted to right-wing internet movements and domestic extremism: she edited articles on brutal online attacks on gamers and journalists, which became known as the “GamerGate” and “boogaloo” militia movement. In the past 15 years, White has made more than 100,000 edits and served on the organization’s arbitration panel, the supreme court that arbitrates disputes over the site.
So when the term Web3, a university platform for organizations and companies built on crypto technology, started popping up on social media in 2021, White started writing an article on Wikipedia.
The task proved to be more difficult than she had imagined. “I kept seeing the word everywhere but no one was saying what it meant,” White said, referring to Web3. Billionaire venture capital firms have been pumping money into crypto companies, blockchain startups have been buying Super Bowl ads and high-profile tech companies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey have been exaggerating many cryptocurrencies.
But White’s research kept returning her to one conclusion: Web3 was riddled with a series of scams, failures, and scams aimed at separating ordinary people from their money.
The experience inspired her to double down on her blog posts and on social media, which she spends several hours a day on, even when she was working as a full-time software engineer. (White resigned in mid-May, but plans to return to full-time employment soon.)
She publishes on the site constantly, often writes several short messages per day. It’s written in a rigid and straightforward manner, with a few noteworthy flourishes: the hashtags categorizing each post include “#badidea”, “#hmm” and “#yikes”. The site’s title shows an image of the Earth exploding in flames with a crying “boring monkey” – a very popular cartoon for crypto-lovers – looking at it. The lower right corner collects the money lost in the scams and hacks I’ve documented. By mid-May, it was close to $10 billion.
White said she was skeptical about the industry for years, but she didn’t pay much attention because most of those who lose money to hacks and scams were tech-savvy and wealthy. This has changed.
“People are putting in money they can’t afford to lose,” White said. “They thought this might be their ticket out of poverty or they could eventually stop working that minimum wage job and then all their savings would be wasted.”
This reality only deepened as the total value of cryptocurrencies tracked by crypto data firm CoinGecko fell to around $1.3 trillion, from its November high of nearly $3 trillion. Crypto forums on Reddit are filled with stories of people who lost their savings after investing in top-tier cryptocurrencies and projects.
Many of the posts on White’s website focus on projects aimed at middle-class investors looking for a way to trade their way to a new level of financial freedom. In longer posts, she has untangled the diabolical complex structures that underpin most crypto companies and initiatives, such as Axie Infinity, a company that has allowed people, many of them in the Philippines, to earn money by playing a crypto-based video game.
News articles were written glorifying the company as a way for people to leave their jobs and earn money. Then the company was hacked, and thousands of people cumulatively lost about $620 million. White wrote at the time: “We’re seeing more and more incidents like this one, where someone doesn’t lose some extra cash they decided to risk, they lose money they need to live.”
Other crypto skeptics have produced deep and insightful critiques of the field. Moxie Marlinspike, founder of messaging app Signal, wrote a 4,000-word article in January outlining his concerns about Web3. A 2-hour, 18-minute video from YouTuber Dan Olson about issues with crypto-based art has gone viral and has racked up more than 7 million views.
“The Wikipedia Revolution,” said Andrew Leigh, director of Wikipedia and author of “The Wikipedia Revolution.”
He has known White since she was a contributor to Wikipedia in her teens. “That’s the cool thing about her, she’s like, ‘I’m not going to hit you over the head with it. Just read this conveyor belt sarcasm and draw your own conclusions. “I think that was the strength of her blog,” Leh said.
From margin to front page
Until the pandemic, cryptocurrency was a relatively marginal technology, with bitcoin gaining popularity in the early 2000s as a way to purchase illegal drugs on online black markets, such as the Silk Road. The primary innovation of cryptocurrency, the blockchain, a record of transactions that can be operated without a central authority, such as a bank or government, has been hailed by libertarians and opposition groups in authoritarian countries and open internet advocates as a potential way to remove oppressive intermediaries from human relations.
Not a margin anymore. Cryptocurrency prices skyrocketed during the shutdowns, turning early investors into millionaires overnight and sparking a flurry of interest from people who were worried about losing out on an exciting new wealth-creating tool. Stock trading tool Robinhood and crypto companies like Coinbase alike have designed apps that have made buying and selling cryptocurrency as easy as swiping on Tinder. Crypto companies have launched massive marketing campaigns, spending millions on Super Bowl ads and paying for celebrity endorsements from Matt Damon, Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a special type of encryption technology that denotes ownership of a digital image, video, or song, have expanded the industry’s appeal by bringing in artists, marketers, and musicians. A digital artist named Beeple has sold one for $69 million.
Nearly 90 percent of Americans have heard of a cryptocurrency and 16 percent said they have invested or used one, according to a November 2021 Pew Research study.
White and her skeptical colleagues say the story has been mishandled by traditional media, treating bitcoin as an exciting innovation while downplaying the idea that it could be a giant pyramid scheme. Crypto-focused publications tend to have industry links, while financial news organizations treat it as an asset class. “The crypto industry has benefited from the isolation of the press,” McKenzie said. “You have to step back a lot more broadly and get out of the industry to get some perspective on what could happen within it.”
Today, the battle lines over cryptocurrency are clear. Proponents see it as a world-changing technology that could have as much of an impact on society as the printing press or transatlantic travel. Critics say these utopian dreams obscure an even darker reality.
Despite her growing following, White remains far from the wealthy and powerful investors and entrepreneurs who have been involved in cryptocurrency. You often hear from angry people accusing her of spreading ‘fud’ or fear, uncertainty and doubt. She was named after her and was told to “enjoy staying poor”.
White takes it all in stride. “Nobody likes reading bad things about themselves,” she said, “but I think I’ve been on the internet long enough to see that’s exactly what people do, bad people online.”
And while she doesn’t get hurt when she goes after the venture capitalists and powerhouses pushing crypto investments, she said it doesn’t help to bully ordinary people who are excited about the possibilities of technology or who have lost money in it.
“Some people get very happy seeing ordinary people who bought crypto lose money,” she said. “I can understand the motive given the crypto-shilling and toxicity from a lot of people in space, but I think a lot of people were also convinced to buy based on false promises.”
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