The cryptocurrency space has been almost entirely overtaken by people whose sole interest is to get rich from coins increasing in value. These people don’t actually care about the technical aspects or real-world use outside of how it creates buzz that makes the price go up.
The field is basically fuel for the worst elements of the wider financial world - pure speculation, hype, volatility and discourse appealing to greed and FOMO, with the actual fundamentals negligible outside of a few niche uses.
Meanwhile HN is filled mostly with engineers and tech-minded people (“geeks” if you will - I include myself in that group), and it is no surprise that there would be distaste for a formerly technologically promising field that has turned into a playground for trend-following marketers.
I don't find it surprising that this space is being crowded with opportunists, marketers, scammers or people motivated by greed because that's the most obvious thing that would happen when you mix vast amounts of money with new technology that offers such possibilities. Their existence doesn't invalidate any actual premises.
Ignore those people then. There are communities dedicated to their projects and care about the underlying tech and long-term vision. Every industry, especially those involving money, will have unsavory elements. It's human nature.
I would say that depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you're trying to get an overview of the space then probably one of the best ways of going about it to locate key figures that are involved in different projects (e.g. Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson) and listen to some podcasts with them or read stuff that they wrote. If you're trying to get a fairly good understanding of some specific technology or aspect of it then you must do your own research and that should be enough to be able to identify and ignore "those people" + as a bonus you might gain insights about the shortcomings or trade-offs of that thing.
But then if you're looking for investment opportunities then you should definitely have a very good understanding of what you're getting into, any why - especially if you're being purely speculative and not doing stuff like arbitrage or some form of DeFi farming, etc.
The field is basically fuel for the worst elements of the wider financial world - pure speculation, hype, volatility and discourse appealing to greed and FOMO, with the actual fundamentals negligible outside of a few niche uses.
Meanwhile HN is filled mostly with engineers and tech-minded people (“geeks” if you will - I include myself in that group), and it is no surprise that there would be distaste for a formerly technologically promising field that has turned into a playground for trend-following marketers.