I don't believe in self appointed prophets fight for something or against something. I disbelief them the more they don't have any proven expertise in the domain.
The media goes the other way around as they love hype.
HN is proof itself that Software Engineering isn’t a prerequisite for expertise in the space. It’s like a construction worker talking about architecture.
The expertise relevant in blockchain are economics/game-theory and cryptography - software engineering is to cryptocurrency what typing is to writing.
It's funny though, that people who are learned at economics tend to write it off as zero-sum nonsense as well. At which point they are told they don't understand the technology.
It's kind of like that trick where you tell X that their task will be the next priority after you're done with Y, and you tell Y that their task will the the next priority after you're done with X, when in fact you're making no progress on either and quite likely don't even intend to. It kind of works too, sometimes ... until X and Y talk to each other and they both realize you're full of crap. Gatekeeping doesn't work so well when people can see it's all gates and nothing in the middle, but some people are so addicted to it that they try anyway.
The media goes the other way around as they love hype.