Dear John,

Thank you for taking the time to read my work and thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion.

To be sure, I am not entirely comfortable with the characterization of claims of “fake news” to ensure the manipulation of cryptocurrency prices.

Whilst there is no doubt that price manipulation does and continues to exist in cryptocurrency markets, I believe that this criticism of “fake news” paints with too broad a brush.

Just as there are bad actors in the financial markets, there are also bad actors in cryptocurrencies.

For every one cryptocurrency protocol or blockchain project that was a scam there would be a commensurate number that were not.

With regards for needing to prove to the rest of the world that cryptocurrencies have value and a use case, this is something that will play out of its own natural course.

Whether or not that is likely to ever occur depends very much on the people who continue to dedicate their lives to this space. I know many of them personally and I can assure you that contrary to popular belief, many are good people who believe in both cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology.

To divorce to the two is an artificial separation because decentralization is key to the value proposition of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are the incentivization tool that keeps the system running.

As you would have no doubt noted from my writing that I have regularly made a distinction between both cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. I do not use the two terms interchangeably because they essentially mean different things.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter and for contributing to the discussion.

Any errors and/or omissions remain strictly mine.

Yours,

Patrick