Molly White tracks down crypto scams. It’s just great | WITH CABLE

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As cryptocurrencies rise and it falls, there is a number that keeps going up. Anytime someone loses money due to a crypto scam or hack, Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 is going great, spin higher and higher. It recently ticked over $12 billion.

White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with the mainstream coverage of cryptocurrency, which she says paid too much attention to rags-to-riches stories and not enough to its darker side. Her goal was to paint a fuller picture, chronicling the thefts and failures, debunking the marketing spiel and highlighting the risks in the process.

A software engineer by trade, coded in white Web3 is going great in the span of a few weeks. It was just a side project, designed to “entertain me and me alone,” says White; she never imagined that she would gain traction. But within a few short months, the blog had become a viral hit, earning White a reputation as an authoritative crypto expert.

When he first learned about cryptography at a college lecture in the early 2010s, White admired the pro-privacy, anti-censorship principles on which it was founded. She said she was excited about her potential to protect mavericks and whistleblowers from financial surveillance and to help women confined to abusive relationships by financial dependency.

However, by the time cryptocurrency reappeared on White’s radar a decade later, those ideas had been wiped out entirely, replaced by an emphasis on maximizing personal gain. Online, the space rocket emoji was being used as an instrument of hype, with “non-coiners” being told to “have fun being poor” as record numbers of people were drawn to cryptocurrency. As a result, examples of technology being used for good are “dwarfed” by the number of people who have lost money, White says. “It’s moving the web and society in a really negative direction.”

when white started Web3 is going great, crypto was on a roll and people were making a lot of money, which meant he found himself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t about to let it rain,” he says. Threats, slander, and personal insults began arriving in his inbox.

As a longtime editor of Wikipedia, White had suffered abuse before, including doxing threats and violence towards family members for entries she had written on the American far-right. Nonetheless, she still “really sucks,” she says. “That is why this type of behavior occurs: to discourage people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”

But in 2022, White and his fellow critics had their moment. A calamitous year for cryptocurrencies was marked by a series of crashes, each dealing a cumulative blow to confidence in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin sparked a chain reaction that wiped out hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, crypto lender Celsius, and others. November saw the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offences, including fraud and money laundering.