My comment had nothing to do about the money that Theranos raised, but about how the hype feels.

Theranos was sooooo hyped on HN early on, and now we know how it turned out. This feels like practically a carbon copy of that hype.

The hype is more warranted here because I think material and physics scientists are excited and publicly and clearly skeptical.

There is a wider knowledge that this may be nothing or somewhere in between. The rollercoaster following the developments is why the wider public is enjoying following it as science entertainment.

On Twitter it seems like crypto bros are trying to scam with a LK-99 coin.

AI/ML crowd is pondering what happens to computing power in 5-10-15 years if LK-99 is proven applicable to advance current technologies.

There is a large mix of aspirational futurism and a lot of tempered real science going on here.

All in real time, on active, Twitter, WeChat/Billibili(?) etc

a decent crypto strat is to buy a coin named after a major news event asap, then sell within a day

It's a decent strat right up until the greater fool learns their lesson and leaves. Then you become the greatest fool.

The only way to reliably succeed at this is to take steps to ensure the existence of a greater fool. We call that "fraud."

Theranos had very little external hype. No one talked about Theranos until it blew up, outside of pretty niche fields. The founder tried to build some hype but it was still a pretty typical "tech startup founder hyping themselves up" type of situation

All hype cycles look like this. If Theranos was the last one you witnessed, I envy your ability to unplug.