The past three months have been good to everyone in the crypto world as the price of Bitcoin has shot past $40,000—it is currently hovering near $44,000—for a year-to-date gain of around 170%, and as the industry shows it is about more than crime and scandal. Well, good to everyone except the no-coiners.
The term is industry lingo for one of the tribes that inhabits the crypto world alongside the likes of Bitcoin maxis and the XRP Army (crypto people have their own vocabulary for nearly everything). As the name suggests, no-coiners are those who don’t hold any cryptocurrencies and loudly advise others to do the same. Their position is based in the belief that crypto is fundamentally stupid or criminal or both.
Since the collapse of the Web3 bubble in early 2022, the no-coiners have had plenty of evidence to validate their position—from the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud empire to the collapse of many blockchain projects built entirely around greed and hype. Hating on crypto has even become a cottage industry of sorts, allowing authors to build a brand based on their contempt for it.
These include computer scientist Molly White, who has become a sought-after figure in the tech world thanks to her snarky Web3 is Going Just Great blog, and programmer Stephen Diehl whose essays offer withering takedowns of the ideology driving crypto. There are also authors like Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux, whose funny-but-lazy book Number Go Up was perfectly timed with the trough of the recent bust.
Until recently, the no-coiners have been taking ceaseless victory laps on Twitter, holding up every price drop and scandal as more evidence of their position. The problem now, of course, is that Number Is Going Up, and that the crypto industry has proved to be resilient despite relentless hostility from the U.S. government and much of the media. And while the recent surge in prices has been driven in part by the usual cast of hucksters and speculators, it has also been powered by the likes of BlackRock embracing crypto and the ongoing adoption of blockchain technology by banks and others.
These developments, though, are unlikely to sway the no-coiners who have built their public personas around hating crypto. Those I named above are very smart people who offer valuable critiques, but at this point they also come across as obsessive—in Diehl’s case, he has published literally dozens of essays railing about crypto. And some others are just not very pleasant in the first place. In the past year, I’ve had to use the block button on Twitter to help tune out no-coiner fanatics who have the time to harangue me for writing about crypto in a way that doesn’t constantly denounce it.
Ironically, the worst of the no-coiners resemble the same sort of weirdo crypto cultists whom they criticize. It also seems like a dreary way to spend one’s days, just hating on something—it’s hard to imagine that no-coiners would be much fun at your dinner party. But like the many other tribes who make up the colorful crypto world, they do their part to keep things interesting.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
