"crypto smell" & the virtues of seriousness
crypto smell in the lobby
The building is painted matte black, and the Market street sidewalk outside is reeks of urine. I peer through some dirty glass to see a young man in a Hawaiian shirt sitting behind a tiny little desk, scrolling his phone. There’s a poster showing the same building I’m standing in front of covered in futuristic green gardens, blooming from rooftops and balconies. Beside me, a man is doubled over, silent, while scrunched up aluminum foil crinkles in his palm.
I’m here to see Emmett Shear talk about AI. Hawaiian shirt man lets me in, gives me a yellow name tag, and tells me to head up the stairs.
I pop my head into a big room full of chairs, and the smell of Crypto hits my nose, right away. There’s nothing about crypto in the space, but its evident from the instant I arrive that this project, whatever it is, is a Crypto Project.
I start hunting down some coffee, and a man in sunglasses and cat ears chats me up about the morning rave he just got out of. I am not against morning raves- I think that is a cool way to start a conference, and I feel a tinge of FOMO that I missed this. I find some coffee and start to chat with a person who is one of the organizers of the space I am in- which I come to understand is in fact not a floor of a building, but a whole damn building. 16 floors.
There’s something for everyone- a cathedral of techno-optimism, with floors for robots and bioengineering, floors for talking, cooking, AI, floors for serious pursuits and morning raves. My FOMO intensifies- how did I not know about this?
Coffee in my veins, I start poking around. The Crypto Smell is everywhere- bright eyed catperson ravers, cardboard boxes stacked in the corners, covered in drywall dust, flyers with Emmett Shear’s face smiling back at me. The vibe is an underfunded student union after a wild party weekend, and its hard to tell if the space is under construction or quietly rotting.
The crowd starts to pick up- a french man in a fire-engine-red jacket starts to talk with me about Crypto. The smell is so thick in my nose I can hardly think. Beautiful women in short skirts constantly interrupt our conversation, asking about guest speakers, microphones, and lunch catering options.
I know nobody here. I go to 3 AI events a week, and I know the people who go to AI events- they’re not Sam Altman, but they’re curious, serious, and mostly pretty quiet. They must be all recovering from the Morning Rave, maybe hanging out on the Human Flourishing floor of this building, drinking matcha with their shoes off.
I crack open the event app and look to see the morning agenda. Emmett Shear is not, in fact, speaking. The first speaker also cancelled. A man with cat ears on starts speaking over a slide deck about the tower- he doesn’t say much about AI, but he does have a slide explaining that one time he threw a party in LA that Grimes attended. He’s unbelievably proud of this fact.
crypto smell in the office
I remember reading Fred Wilson’s posts in 2013 and 2014 on crypto and falling in love with how beautiful and clean the ideas were. I hold bitcoin, I like bitcoin, I have friends who have dedicated their professional lives to building bitcoin. My feelings over 12 years have moved from euphoria to exhaustion, and I don’t think I am alone.
The believers are always going to be OK, but the peripheral people need a new narrative, beyond whatever crypto is providing in 2025. AI provides one. Bioscience provides another. Longevity research, psychedelic therapeutics, space mining, you name it: if the field carries a whiff of frontier and a tolerance for loose accounting, the crypto diaspora is already circling.
The migration would be fine if it stopped at capital. Science has always relied on dubious money; railroads were financed by robber barons long before they carried wheat. The trouble arrives with the culture that tags along.
Crypto culture is maximalist, reality‑optional, and permanently adolescent. It runs on memes, conspiracies, and the dopamine loop of 24‑hour price feeds. Inside that loop, rigour is for suckers and accountability is for victims. When you import that attitude into disciplines that manipulate genomes or deploy autonomous systems, you are no longer gambling on JPEGs. You are gambling on the substrate of life.
I am not romantic about science. Biosciences have their own carnival barkers. AI has plenty of vapourware. But both domains still depend on falsifiable claims. A lab that cannot replicate results dies. A model that fails in production is pulled. Crypto, by design, lacks that filter. No matter how many projects collapse, the ledger marches on; the next whitepaper is always just one hype cycle away. The discipline of admitting error never takes root.
crypto smell in the arXiv
Banning crypto capital from frontier science is neither practical nor desirable. Some of the best hardware companies in AI were seeded with early Bitcoin winnings. GPUs bought to mine can be used to fine-tune models; 21st century swords to ploughshares (or if you live in East Bay, ploughshares to swords).
The thing I care about is guarding the culture of AI. I want young people full of ambition and energy to build in this space- I want an AI community that is open to Morning Raves and to coffees laced with 10mg of creatine and discord anons making cool points about papers on RL while they trade Fartcoin.
But I want it to stay serious. I want to extend my life, I want to help birth superintelligence, I want to live in a society that values serious scientific advancement. I want to keep these things clean of the crypto smell, by caring about vocabulary, caring about reading the damn paper, caring about keeping whatever culture that is currently working, working. Because it is ours, and it is working.
crypto smell washes off
I’m making my escape down the stairs, and the Hawaiian shirt man tells me that I should stay for the party, later on. My yellow badge doesn’t permit me party access according to the rules, but he seems keen to make an exception.
A young woman asks me about the event. I tell her how I felt about it, and she listens, carefully and attentively. She takes notes, she listens, frowning. She cares about this space being great. She’s serious. She works somewhere in this building, perhaps sandwiched between the yoga studio and the robot fighting cage, where the windows are open and there’s fresh air coming in. Its nice to think there’s a Serious Floor here, somewhere. Personally, I’m hoping its the one where they’re doing the experimental biotech work- but some part of me knows that its smells like crypto there, too. They’re having a biotech summit soon; this is the flyer.
Smell that? Thats crypto in your Mitochondria.