HCBJ3K THE DARK KNIGHT, Heath Ledger as The Joker, 2008. ©Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
“I don’t owe them anything,” he said.
To hear prominent venture capitalist and essayist Nic Carter, tell it, there is a plague afoot in the land of cryptocurrency, its frontier overrun with an “orthodoxy” of undesirables “lashing out” – unrealistic, irrational – in their monogamous love of Bitcoin
BTC
To give a brief recap of the offending drama, Carter, before last week enjoyed a vaunted status in the Bitcoin world, beloved for thoughtful provocations against the standard-bearers of high finance, his creative defense of the protocol’s mining mechanics, and his masterful use of social media, where he regularly earned plaudits from anons and supermodels alike.
But all it took to upend the apparently delicate balance was a relatively small investment, in this case, news that his venture firm, Castle Island Ventures, had participated in funding an authentication startup, one making use of the crypto/web3 wallet infrastructure.
As Carter rightly pointed out in his response to the uproar, this shouldn’t exactly have been news – his work in the industry has, since 2018, been more expansive than his support for Bitcoin, including the fund, a respected crypto analytics firm (Coin Metrics) and a popular crypto podcast (On the Brink). That’s not to…
