Crypto is a PVP zone.

Everyone is aware that investing in crypto is risky. Especially recently established meme coins with no functional innovation whose principal distinction is celebrity endorsement.

I find it puzzling that intellectually serious people on a startup-adjacent website are morally outraged by the existence of winners and losers in a blatantly capitalistic, market-driven ecosystem.

The River [1] consists of people who are attracted to risk and opportunity. They thrive in high-risk high-reward environments.

The Village consists of people who are attracted to safety and stability. They thrive in low-risk environments, which are also usually low-reward by nature.

It's a matter of individual taste. A functioning society benefits from both. And it's a not matter of rationality or EV. Riverians can irrationally choose to make -EV high-risk bets; Villagers can irrationally take costly precautions against remote risks.

Humans are contradictory; the same person who pays for insurance might also buy a lottery ticket. The same gamer who bemoans loot boxes ruining video games might also own a large collection of Magic: The Gathering cards.

The only explanation I can come up with is that Riverian playgrounds are morally offensive to some Village types.

Many people are outraged by crypto because it's not "safe". They're the people who decided the slides and the merry-go-rounds and the pirate ships and the jungle gyms needed to be downsized and padded and supervised and taken out, until all the fun is gone.

I'm continually surprised that a substantial portion of HN, normally a startup-adjacent tech-adjacent River-adjacent community, hates so hard on crypto.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/welcome-to-the-river