The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp; it used some of that cash flow to buy the illusion of respectability, which brought in even more investors. And for a while, even as the risks multiplied, it became, in effect, too big to regulate… [This may be] a moment in which effective regulation has become politically possible… before crypto stops being a mere casino and becomes a threat to financial stability [All bolding mine — JMN].
(Paul Krugman, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” NYTimes, 7-11-22)
I would suggest investors are “lured” and not “lured in,” but that’s a matter of style. The ‘in’ does add realized force to the bait-taking. Krugman’s good at dropping nuggets of the patois du jour in his columns. Hello, derp: “speech or action that’s foolish or stupid.” There’s ever a fresh word for stale states. Poaching the gaming term ‘casino’ for application to finance registers a tick on the rhetoric scale.
Crypto currency seems more of an attitude than a substance, something like an arcane, dark matter floating in the blockchain nebula. Language-wise, the term ‘crypto’ is magnetized for me because of its connection to ‘cryptic.’ The discovery of ‘cryptic coloration’ in high school biology, and of ‘lapidary’ somewhere else (Baudelaire?), gave me two favored words at an early stage in the quest for crypto literacy.
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Texas Made Him. The New Yorker Claimed Him
That’s how Nick Paumgarten starts his tribute to John Bennet, a New Yorker editor, recently deceased, who was venerated by his writers.
John Bennet came from a “hardscrabble childhood” in East Texas. He got his start at The New Yorker in 1975, as a collator, someone who copies out each reader’s edits onto a master proof.
His obit isn’t the best way to meet a paladin of style, but better so than never. I will remember John Bennet immediately for “what became known as the Impossible Sentence, which he composed, with Nancy Franklin, in the eighties, made up of words (or usages) that were effectively banned from the magazine”:
Brevity is the soul of it.
(c) 2022 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved