There is no shit coin and no rug pull. You can’t own any coin. But this perfectly illustrates why HN, full of smart people, is also full of people who actively fight against solutions to centralization.

These problems existed before crypto. You are defending a dystopian nightmare system that is progressively getting worse. If people like me don’t build a decentralized alternative you’ll just keep bitching about problems while having literally zero solutions (except “just give the government MORE power and they’ll save us this time through regulations”.) Newsflash, the governments are the biggest consumers of this centralized tech (like Palantir) and pushers of this dystopian future where they can do anything secretly while you can’t do anything without them knowing.

“Hacker ethos” is now filled with a lot of shills for corporate greed. You’re the ones pumping your latest centralized data silo where VC-funded companies convince everyone to give them your data or just grab it into your AI models, which take published work of millions of people, with Nigerians paid to label your data for pennies, and then sell it back to the stock market for billions of dollars in yet another bubble. “Web2” platforms have been shilling and rugpulling the public for decades. It’s called “capturing the market” and “extracting profits for shareholders from the ecosystem”. Go read Peter Thiel’s “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”. You have no moral authority to chastise authors of decentralized protocols and distributed systems. They’re cleaning up YOUR mess.