Ethereum, the second largest crypto, is getting rid of mining in the beginning of next year. The second-largest cryptocurrency is getting rid of mining and its energy consumption! It's a big deal. But nobody knows this is going to happen because the media doesn't cover it. And not for lack of interest: the millions of ether investors want to be informed about the underlying asset of their investment. As well, environmentalists should know that cryptocurrency's excessive carbon footprint is a solved problem awaiting implementation.
Instead, media coverage of cryptocurrency exclusively covers price explosions/crashes, looming regulations, darknet markets, and various scams. If coverage of the early www had focused on the darkweb and hacking and the dot-com bubble, we may have seen a public debate about whether the internet was a good thing or just a fake place full of scams, with no real value to anyone except criminals. This is what we're seeing today with blockchain, despite it's very real applications, products, and long-term value.
The latest mainstream crypto coverage, and the only in recent memory, was about squidcoin, a brand new crypto with no reputation. According to Gizmodo, the pre-rug-pull coin was widely covered by the media:
But the biggest red flag was that no one who purchased the coin was able to sell. That didn’t stop mainstream news outlets like the BBC, Yahoo News, Business Insider, Fortune, and CNBC from running headlines about how the new Squid Game cryptocurrency had soared by 83,000% over just a few days.
The articles all follow a similar trend: a headline hyping the coin's massive gains, then some origin story for the coin, and finally at the bottom, if you've read that far, the article mentions that it's probably a scam. Why did so many outlets single out squidcoin from the rest of the scams in their junk folders instead of doing real coverage of a real coin like ethereum? How was squidcoin any more newsworthy than an email from a nigerian prince? The media legitimized and even advertisied squidcoin by presenting it as a real, newsworthy story about massive gains in the crypto market, and people bought it as a result and lost money.
No apology was ever issued, of course. After the coin busted, BBC had a nice laugh with an "expert" about how this is no surprise because all crypto is generally fake scam money anyway.
BBC World Service Podcast, 2021-11-02
This BBC podcast included another expert who actually admitted that lots of these scam coins pay off journalists for coverage (at 1:55).
BBC Tech Tent Podcast 2021-11-05
So I guess that explains a lot.
^ 2021/11