Throughout the past few weeks, I've come across a lot of troubling material that conveys turmoil and inner conflict. As I reflected on the FTX scandal four weeks ago, I wrote that “what currently shakes the crypto industry is unprecedented in scale, reach and gravity”. Today, I’m feeling this even more strongly.

It’s not just about FTX, a giant fraud and millions of betrayed clients, stakeholders and a pinch of “bad luck” anymore.

It’s about large-scale deceptive practices and bad actors that have infested the whole space in the last years. It's a struggle to find answers to how it got this far. It’s a search for the original principles on which this space was built.

Let’s look a bit closer at what’s happening:

Bitcoiners fight the “crypto” people. They see recent events as a a living proof that centralization is dangerous. No one is happier about Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall than the bitcoin people. They see Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized, independent crypto-asset, living up to vision it was originally conceived by Satoshi Nakatomo. They want everything else to be a security and be regulated. They want to clear the space of all the “shitcoins”.

The crypto people fight Bitcoiners. They say it should be banned because of its energy usage.1