My media policy is generally “yes.” Here are some appearances I hadn’t posted about yet.
Saturday Night Dive
This week’s comedy gold spawned a few podcasts.
Jackson Palmer, the regretful co-founder of Dogecoin, is back with a new podcast called Griftonomics. It goes further afield than crypto — but crypto is absolutely in there. [YouTube; Anchor.fm; Twitter]
Jackson spoke to Crikey about why he’s doing this. [Crikey]
Jackson pinged me at about ten minutes’ notice last night to do a Twitter Space on Bitcoin’s Saturday night dive. Other speakers included Amy Castor, Matt Binder and Ben Doernberg, also ex-Dogecoin. It’s two hours and it was reputedly pretty good! [Twitter]
Going LIVE in 10 min: https://t.co/XuqRzxR70k
— GRIFTONOMICS (@griftonomics) June 18, 2022
Amy Castor and I went on Matt Binder’s Scam Economy podcast. This is where I first said “it’s like a huge Rube Goldberg machine slapstick custard pie clown car where each custard pie triggers three more custard pies.” 69 minutes. [YouTube]
What’s Wrong with Crypto? Author David Gerard on TruthDAO’s Crypto DeFined with Kathy Chu — this is a DAO-based very pro-crypto small outlet. I got to rant my usual thoughts about what just happened to solidly crypto media. It came out well. [TruthDAO; YouTube]
CBC, CoinDesk TV
Back on 17 May, I did CBC Radio 1’s The Current with Matt Galloway: “El Salvador bet big on Bitcoin, but was reported to have suffered heavy losses when cryptocurrency markets recently slumped. We talk to Isabella Cota and David Gerard.” [CBC]
I signed the Concerned.Tech letter from actually-technical computer people to the US Senate. We asked the Senate not to accept the word “blockchain” as an excuse, and to regulate all these real-money financial instruments as if they were real-world financial instruments.
I didn’t work on the wording itself, but Stephen Diehl invited me to sign and I was delighted to join such illustrious company as the other initial signers — including tech luminaries such as Tim Bray, Grady Booch, Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Schneier and Jamie Zawinski. [Concerned.Tech]
I spoke to CoinDesk TV about what we were thinking with this letter — if you want real money, you work by the rules of real money, and that’s not at all a controversial position to advocate. [CoinDesk, from 30:36]
60 Minutes Australia
I thought my 60 Minutes Australia appearance had been dropped but no, it showed up the following Sunday 5 June! [YouTube]
(If you’re in Australia and it’s geo-blocked, I think you need to view it via their 9Now portal)
60 Minutes also published article versions of the piece. “’You can’t get rich for free’: Expert predicts crypto crash is only going to get worse” — looks like I was right, though it wasn’t that hard a prediction. [9Now; 9Now]
News.com.au also wrote up the show. I’m “renowned” now, see? [News.com.au]
I was delighted with my 60 Minutes segment. They used far more from me than I expected. Usually you film a long thing and they pull a few quotes; I got a solid few minutes of the best bits.
The interviewer, Tom Steinfort, started the segment with a confession: that he himself got burnt in May’s Terra/Luna-induced crash. Friends told him crypto was good to get into. I expect the friends got burnt too.
Tom didn’t mention that to me in the interview. He did ask “what do you think of the people who got burnt?” I said that some of them are annoying, like the guys who were saying “have fun staying poor” a month earlier, but then I talked about the suicide hotline going up on /r/terraluna and how ordinary investors got absolutely wrecked. So I guess I passed that test.
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To tell the truth, I had to skip ahead several times watching the 60 Minutes piece.
I have a low tolerance for listening to crap like TeslaBoy talking about how he “lost” everything in the crash… one, he clearly didn’t lose enough that he had to sell off his ugly-ass murderbot internet car, and two, the real money he used to buy the imaginary moonbeam money still exists somewhere. He spent it. He gave it to somebody else in exchange for a bunch of nothing.
That’s terribly unsympathetic to those who’ve lost so much that they had to move back into one of their parents’ flats.
A whole lot of real programmers have been trying to warn about this crap for 12 years. Nobody has listened to us until now, when the warning is pointless because the crap has already been flushed.
In earlier decades radio and TV tried to dramatize rackets and swindles, so people could recognize and avoid the crap. These warnings disappeared in the 80s when everything turned into rackets.
Great to see the exposure for your hard work David but can’t help but agree with other commenters that it’s so depressing that “skeptics” are only getting airtime now that number go down when anyone with half a brain could clearly see you were right all along.
The fact that actual governments and politicians and people who are supposed to have some degree of influence over how the world is run didn’t care to do due diligence or were willing to sacrifice their credibility to enjoy some ponzinomics is grim