Suddenly crypto, once a shorthand for cryptography and now also for cryptocurrencies, was, for the first time since Occupy Wall Street and the financial blockade of WikiLeaks, occupying center stage in a political and economic crisis. However, while these developments are headline grabbing and not unambiguously politically progressive, it is also important not to overlook the myriad ways in which cryptocurrency is also being used by others experiencing state repression. For example, in Palestine and elsewhere in countries with economic sanctions or by sex workers who are constantly in a fight against financial service providers due to the legal gray area in which they work. For many who don't have the privilege of proper financial services, turning to cryptocurrency has been one of their lifelines. Why then has blockchain been greeted with such hostility and skepticism by much of the left? One of the earliest critiques of Bitcoin, the first and most famous of the cryptocurrencies, was David Columbia's The Politics of Bitcoin, software as right wing extremism. His argument was largely that Bitcoin's right libertarian origins meant it was predisposed to having utility and application only for a right wing agenda, if any at all. This has continued with left wing publications like Jacobin, which in 2022 published several articles related to crypto, with nearly all of them concluding that cryptocurrency is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, and something that the left should stay away from. A look through many of the claims made and the sources cited in these articles show that few of the writers properly understood many of the basic technical principles and workings of the technology, making their claims weak for people who are actually working on the infrastructure they are critiquing. It seems that their audience is not those who are closest to being able to answer their critiques. That is people working in the industry, but instead others who are jockeying for position within what might be termed the critique economy, a largely discursive and academic mini industry that seems to have consumed too much of the left's energy of late as its actual institutional power has declined. Blockchain is not a simple technology. So while technical inaccuracies can be forgiven, what is disturbing about the many articles written by incorrect but otherwise intelligent journalists and academics is how their claims inadvertently serve the crypto industry. By taking the sociopolitical descriptions of what cryptocurrencies or blockchains are at face value, these critics are inadvertently doing the job of the crypto marketers and hype men they so despise.