One does have to wonder if the level of vitriol around crypto would be quite so high if it was merely popular and had not made some people a lot of money.
Does one? Because that's a line straight out of the MLM playbook.
One might also "wonder" why the only people with positive things to say about cryptocurrency are those with a vested interest in its success. That's not true of any other technology.
I guess my speculation stems from a lack of substance to poke holes in?
Even going line by line beginning with the first real paragraph we find they launch into a classic straw man of rejecting the "industry claims that crypto-assets an innovative technology that is unreservedly good". Nobody with a whiff of tech acumen in crypto thinks or says this. Additionally, anyone not thoroughly anarcho-Libertarian also gets the need for guardrails to squash scams.
A scattershot of the other tangible claims in the paper feel pretty similar.
"Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions." <- true, but the also can be said for the evolution of AI models and we see where we're finally at with those today.
"Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design." <- quasi true depending on the chain, but also we can approximate reversibility with clever escrow-like transactions (I'm actually building this full disclosure)
"Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither." <- unequivocally stating blockchain tech can't mitigate fraud in ANY way is silly and reductionist. Deciding human-in-the-loop reversibility is the pinnacle of fraud mitigation is also pretty wild considered how much effort and resources developers just on HN put into removing humans from their process execution loops.
"Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses." <- partially true in the present tense (similar to how everything has to be adopted before it reaches mass adoption), but glaringly narrow minded if considering potential uses. Anywhere there is asymmetric trust and power between transacting parties one can imagine the possibility of an application! Not to say its necessarily the best use case, but the lack of effort of consideration seems intentional.
There's more, but I hope this provides some context to my initial post
"na na sore loser" is quite the angle for someone bemoaning a lack of "thoughtful criticism."
Do try and grow up.