Emin Gun Sirer:  If you’re a reporter covering crypto, here are some suggestions. Fact checking is a critical requirement for every media outlet. Failure to check an obviously fake claim makes you wonder what else they do not check.

There are some coins that are dead. Finito. They are no more. We all know which ones they are. We do not mention them by name because no one wants to be negative in public. And the nature of these chains is that they never actually go to 0, even when they are dead.

But the coins are practically dead. Ask any OG, for these coins are particularly the target of pumps and dumps.

Almost all benchmarks, and especially TPS numbers, are wrong. Do not report them. If you must, report “time to finality” instead of “tps” (also known as throughput), because the latter is trivial to fake.

Most partnerships bring no value, though some bring immense value. Vanuatu issuing something on some coin no one ever heard of, or some car company putting their VIN numbers on a chain, are not going to create value. Questions you *must* ask include:  How will this create value for token holders? Is this just an announcement, a proof of concept, or something in production? Is it done by a product team or the “innovation office”? How many people worked on it? Just an intern, or a full team?

There’s so much more to say on this topic, but I’m running out of time, so I’ll have to pick up this thread some other day. But please, when in doubt, please ask someone, ideally an OG, off the record, and do some amount of fact checking.

Meanwhile one of the community members asked:  Emin, could you please respond to what will happen to Avax when Avax 2 comes out? Will it become obsolete?

Emin replied stating, what’s Avax 2? Avax v2 is a protocol optimization that should not even be visible. It’s not like ETH2 which has to compete with and kill ETH1 to succeed. It’s more like a software update that makes things more efficient.

Community response:  People need to know that avalanche is not fighting against anything, just minding its own business, thanks for the explanations prof.

The number of journalists I respect is in single digits. This whole market is built on hype, lies, manipulation and only limited facts.