HBO´s John Oliver talks Cryptocurrency on Last Week Tonight

John Oliver delivered a witty and informative piece about cryptocurrencies while reminding people of the potential pitfalls of investing in a new and unregulated market.

On this week´s episode of HBO´s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delivered a compelling monologue about some basic aspects of cryptocurrencies, while trying to remind people of the dangers associated with investing in a market that only a few truly understand.

Oliver began by referring to cryptocurrencies as: “Everything you don’t understand about money combined with everything you don’t understand about computers”, which may be surprisingly close to the truth: the concepts of cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology are proving to be quite exotic and sometimes difficult to grasp for the majority of people.

Given Last Week Tonight´s huge popularity, the piece seems to have reached a lot of viewers outside the cryptocurrency community and people could not wait to rehash it on social media. The biggest thread on reddit.com about Oliver´s piece was on /r/Television.  The post managed to get almost 13,000 upvotes in less than 24h. 

Even the cryptosphere seems to have liked it: on this thread, /u/RobinHoodin said: 

Other threads about the same video on the big Crypto-related subreddits like /r/Bitcoin and /r/Cryptocurrency seem to have approved of Oliver’s take

 /r/ethtrader ‘s top comment:

Top comment on /r/Bitcoin

& Top top comment on /r/cryptocurrency:

All in all, the sketch contained some weird analogies as well as some other very on-point definitions of what decentralization and Blockchains are. Truth is that while some news outlets seem to have focused on the bad, if you see through John´s usual harsh comedy style, he actually ended up giving some very solid advice.