A critique of a16z's State of Crypto 2023 report, which seems to be an exercise in propaganda with the sole goal of bolstering the VC firm's bottom line
Venture capital firm and crypto pusher Andreessen Horowitz wants you to keep buying crypto, and is not above publishing blatant falsehoods to convince you to do so. Mastodon: @shauna@social.coop . Tweets: @molly0xfff , @molly0xfff , @molly0xfff , @molly0xfff , @friscojosh , and @cindygallop Mastodon: Shauna GM / @shauna@social.coop : Reading @molly0xfff's latest which casually includes the fact that Andreessen Horowitz has invested over $7.5 *billion *in crypto in the last five years. I knew that a lot of VCs were pouring money into crypto, but *jeez*. … Tweets: Molly White / @molly0xfff : A deep dive on Andreessen Horowitz's latest “State of Crypto” report. In short: they want people to keep buying crypto, and are not above publishing blatant falsehoods to convince them to do so. The report itself is 60 pages long, so this is a long one. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/ ... Molly White / @molly0xfff : The worst slide in the deck is the one that claims Ethereum now uses 94,000x less electricity than YouTube, a comparison they pick to avoid impugning Bitcoin. However, this data is based on some incredibly shabby math and bad sourcing by a low-quality popsci blog. https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : Finally, the “State of Crypto Index” that they've released invites visitors to “adjust” it to “form your own view” (though limited only to a16z's selected data). https://a16zcrypto.com/... Its “threshold” parameter seems solely included to prevent the chart from coming out like so: https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : I start by noting that this “creativity” with the numbers is not new to this year's report. However, because the price downturn was still somewhat recent in last year's, they were able to get away with some subtle manipulations that would be a lot more obvious this year. https://twitter.com/... Josh Hermsmeyer / @friscojosh : This a16z takedown by Molly White is excellent. I can't say VC were ever ethical or even very useful, but they were better than *waves hands* this. It's all just a transparent grift now. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/ ... @cindygallop : .@molly0xFFF doing the Lord's work. 'If there's one thing I want you to take away, it's that VC firms and other heavily invested players in the crypto space should not be trusted to give us the facts on the industry they desperately need to promote.' https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/ ...