How shady exchange and ICO practices, conflicts of interest in journalism, and other serious issues in cryptocurrencies are largely ignored by the media
[Note: I neither own nor have any trading position on any cryptocurrency. I was not compensated by any party to write this.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 piece from Great Wall of Numbers argued that exchanges, ICO promoters, and journalists with undisclosed crypto holdings were operating in a scrutiny vacuum — and that the press covering the asset class was too invested to police it. Months later, Nieman Lab reached the same conclusion from inside the newsroom, arguing that bitcoin's rise and the difficulty of tracing ownership make disclosures from journalists and quoted experts essential (disclosure demands for crypto journalists).
What makes the piece worth revisiting is how the record since has played out: the New York Times later called for regulatory action precisely because crypto gained an 'illusion of respectability' through high-status associations (crypto's borrowed respectability), and the Wall Street Journal found that 16 of 19 publicly traded miners disclosed internal control weaknesses — the kind of diligence gap the original piece said the media was ignoring.
First-order effects
- Readers relying on mainstream crypto coverage get price enthusiasm without conflict-of-interest disclosure, leaving exchange and ICO practices effectively unexamined at the moment retail money is flowing in.
- Exchanges and ICO issuers face no reputational cost from press scrutiny, so the incentive to clean up practices sits entirely with regulators rather than markets.
Second-order effects
- The industry's response to the credibility deficit is not reform but respectability-building: Fidelity and other big financial players lobby the SEC for Bitcoin-linked ETFs while VC firms like a16z publish state-of-crypto reports that critics read as propaganda for their own positions.
- Independent critics such as Molly White fill the watchdog role the institutional press declined, shifting accountability journalism to individual writers outside newsroom structures.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the legitimacy gap between what crypto marketing claims and what audited practice shows becomes the central battleground — with regulators, not journalists, forced to do the disclosure enforcement the media skipped.
- Sustained internal-control failures among public miners suggest the industry's path to mainstream finance runs through the same audit-and-disclosure regime its early advocates dismissed, making transparency infrastructure a competitive requirement rather than an optional virtue.
The trend: Cryptocurrency's push into mainstream finance is colliding with a disclosure culture it never built, forcing regulators and independent critics to supply the scrutiny the trade press did not.