The crypto market crashed. They’re still buying bitcoin

moneycontrol.com:

Cory Klippsten started issuing warnings about the cryptocurrency market in March. The digital coin luna, Klippsten tweeted, was a scam, run by an entrepreneur with “major Elizabeth Holmes vibes.” The newfangled crypto bank Celsius Network was a “massive blowup risk,” he said.

When those crypto projects collapsed a few weeks later, causing a crash that has wiped out about $1 trillion in value, Klippsten became a fixture on news shows, where he cast the industry as a morass of hucksters and hypocrites. “Crypto is a scam,” he declared last month.

But Klippsten differs from most crypto haters in one crucial respect: He runs a bitcoin company.

In the crypto world, Klippsten is known as a bitcoin maximalist, or “maxi” — a hard-core evangelist who believes bitcoin will transform the financial system even as fraud pervades the rest of the crypto ecosystem. The maxis are just a subset of the crypto industry, but their ranks include influential figures like Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter and an early bitcoin proponent.

The maxis continued buying bitcoin even after its price plummeted to an 18-month low of roughly $20,000 in June. (Bitcoin is simply “going on sale,” they say.) And, as the market has melted, they have embarked on a public-relations offensive, aiming to persuade investors and lawmakers that bitcoin is different from the thousands of other digital currencies that proliferated in the last few years before tanking this spring.

“The only future for non-bitcoin crypto is to seek to be co-opted by banks and governments and become part of the existing system,” Klippsten, 44, said from his home in Los Angeles, where a decorative bitcoin sculpture sat on a bookshelf behind him. “Bitcoin actually is outside of the system.”

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