The backlash to cryptocurrency investment is growing

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Maybe it was when the author of the influential book “Black Swan” said bitcoin was worth “exactly zero.”

Perhaps it was the assessment from a billionaire hedge-fund manager that cryptocurrencies are a “limited supply of nothing.”

Or it could just be one of those cultural shifts that happens when one too many celebrities tries to convince us of something.

Whatever the turning point, a growing group is sounding dire warnings about the dangers of cryptocurrency investment. Call them the crypto-catastrophists — bloggers and billionaires, mathematicians and economists, computer-scientists and 2008-crisis prophets and, even, a 2000’s-era Hollywood personality — who have all come together to unleash a warning to government and citizens about cryptocurrency investment. And their voices have, slowly, begun to rise above crypto’s evangelist din.

“For a long time it felt like just a few of us shouting from the rooftops,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer-security expert from the University of California at Berkeley, who has long mounted both a financial and ethical case again crypto investment. “But I think there are more of us now, and hopefully that will help us be heard.”

On Wednesday, Weaver was one of 26 influential technology personalities to direct those cries to Congress.

In a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Nancy…

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