I can tell you why I downvoted it.

Cryptocurrency doesn't actually work

False, it works just fine. It's a token that can't be duplicated and people can send to each other without any centralized authority.

and only is there for scams and fraud.

There are indeed a lot of those, but scams and fraud were very clearly not the intention of its creators. Realistically they were cryptography nerds who wanted to make something cool, or libertarians with overly-idealistic visions of the future.

Not surprising that FTX collapsed.

Clear hindsight bias. This person should have made some money betting against FTX before it collapsed and then I'd take them more seriously.

Basically, the comment is just your standard "cryptocurrency bad" take, without any attempt at justifying their claims or even saying much of anything other than expressing in an inflammatory way that they don't like cryptocurrency.

Very reasonable! I understand you feel like you have to walk a fine line in order to not trigger social disapproval of your words; I think that's bad, and to be clear, I did not mean to make it seem like I disapproved of your comment. I wish EA could be a place where everyone felt comfortable speaking naturally without having to add a bunch of disclaimers.

I just wanted to mention that this comment tripped my "bravery debate" detector. I still upvoted it because honestly the bravery debate framing seems correct here, and I said something similar in my own comments earlier. But then again, everyone who engages in bravery debates thinks their framing is accurate. So let's be careful not to give posts additional weight just because they're speaking against majority EA opinion.

A summary of sorts is being compiled here:

And on a personal note, I aspire to create a lot of value for the world, and direct it towards doing lots of good. Call me overconfident, but I expect to be a billionaire someday. The way EA treats SBF here sets a precedent: if the EA community is happy to accept money when the going is good, but then is ready to cut ties once the money dries up… you can guess how excited I would be to contribute in the first place.

This is a weird paragraph. If your goal were doing the most good, why would it matter how you expect EA to treat you in the case of failure? It kinda sounds like your goal is social status among the EA community.

This isn't to say that you don't have a good point. If people are donating to EA because they want social status, that's still money going towards good causes, and perhaps we should reward them for that in order to encourage more people to do so. But I'd have a hard time calling that "altruistic behavior" on their part.

Yeah, reading further, I definitely don't agree with a lot of these claims. But the fact that I feel like I have to post this clarification in order to avoid getting downvoted myself is something I think needs to be talked about. The original post is now down to -15, and I haven't even finished reading it.

Thank you for posting this. I haven't yet read through the whole thing yet, and I don't necessarily agree with it, but I think it's important that people feel comfortable expressing their opinions here. The fact that within minutes of posting this has gotten -8 votes is something I find concerning, as I doubt those people have even had time to read and process what you said before voting and I suspect they're voting based on anger and groupthink. I hope the community will be able to have a productive conversation in these comments.

I'll just note that I have a prediction market on this here, which is currently at a 7% chance of some prominent event causing mainstream AI capabilities researchers to start taking the risk more seriously by 2028.