CCP’s CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson was a lot more down-to-Earth when Jeremy spoke to him last October. In particular, he offered the following, spirited defence of the game’s blockchain functionality, which can sort of be boiled down to “trust me, bro”, but is at least upfront about the many bad uses to which blockchain and cryptography technologies have been put.

“People do stupid things with everything. Like in the 1700s in Holland, people made [speculative] bubbles with tulips. Are tulips bad? The tulips are not to blame. People are to blame. People do stupid shit with new things all the time. It’s just what we do. Look at any industry; there are people doing bad things, people doing nefarious things, people doing stupid things, and people doing very cool and wholesome things. I just don’t care how bad people have used [blockchain] in the past. If people hate me for something they’re assuming I’m going to do that I’m not doing. Not my problem; it’s their problem.”

I love when crypto dipshits can describe how irrational it is but are so blinded by greed that they’re oblivious to that. Yes, the blockchain is analogous to the tulip mania. What happened to the people who built their business off tulip speculation? At least the farmers had a pretty flower to sell for a few pennies after the bubble burst and all the fetish value was lost. Anything crypto is completely alienating to normal people because it’s a clear scam being artificially soypoint-1 hyped by the most obnoxious weirdos on the internet. I won’t want to play a blockchain game because it’s a game despite the blockchain features, and I won’t want to engage with the blockchain features because you’re selling me overpriced tulips through an overly-convoluted system. If all crypto and NFT shit is stripped out and it’s selling the blockchain to non-crypto people as a public ledger, that has no use to me in a survival game and I’d just play EVE if I wanted to look at numbers.