Dan Olson
Dan Olson, the producer of YouTube channel Folding Ideas, was not on crypto’s radar until January of this year. Since then, his single two-hour video published in January upended the conversation on NFTs and Web3. His video has been viewed over 8 million times and soured the conversation around crypto as it looked to create new highs into 2022.
Olson’s basic argument is that despite the claim that crypto would fix financial institutions, fix the centralization of the internet, and give people a way to invest and store their money outside of big banks, the crypto industry has become a hotbed of bad faith actors working on a new set of grifts like we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, this time on the blockchain. The scam is hidden by a combination of financial and technological jargon to confuse laypeople into buying into the game, all in an effort to make sure “line goes up.”
Leading figures in the crypto industry did have to respond to Olson, with the most common refrain being that while there are obvious problems it shouldn’t reflect on the whole scene. Some mentioned that Olson was wrong on a few technical points, but overall the best good faith arguments said that many in the crypto community understand the issues at play, but that shouldn’t reflect on the whole system that’s trying to reinvent the financial wheel. Olson responded that accepting internal critique without acknowledging systematic issues makes any attempt at change “toothless.”
