There's also probably quite a few influential people who have a vested interest in digital currency increasing in value.

This is a big reason. A substantial amount of people with vested interest that would benefit greatly if the price of crypto increases are in tech and post on HN.

So you get a lot of crypto and bitcoin related posts upvoted very quickly here. It's just that HN has disproportional amount of people invested in crypto so they act in their interest.

Most bitcoin early adopters were hackers after all.

Myself, for example!

Seriously, TFA was posted in the Style section. It's not exactly the most rigorous part of the Times.

It also has a clickbait title added; which gives it an advantage wrt attention.