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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

"Community" ? You mean a horde of tech speculators who would gladly get an opportunity benefit from having some insight about bitcoin just to benefit from it.

I don't understand how there could really be a community that revolves around a crypto currency. It's just some people with a libertarian agenda, who don't like banks or government, and want to make money.

I would gladly hear about the community of programmers who actually write code and try to design new decentralized technology. The "bitcoin community" is not that. I don't think you can find many expert on how bitcoin works.

I would rather call those people finance tech entrepreneurs.

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The existence of "finance tech entrepreneurs", as you politely call them, and the fact that they are indeed very noisy, does not mean there isn't a community of programmers who actually write code and try to design new decentralized technology.

> It's just some people with a libertarian agenda, who don't like banks or government

Sounds like a community to me.

It depends. It takes more to form a community than a common descriptor. For example, consider "atheist". There isn't really an "atheist community", in that there's very little in common between atheist Buddhists, atheist Jews, former Catholics, apostate Muslims, atheist skeptics, atheist Unitarians, etc, etc.

There are many communities that are accidentally or intentionally atheistic, of course. But that doesn't mean there's a community of atheists.

Given both the Bitcoin and libertarian tendencies against centrality, I'd be really surprised to discover that there was really a single Bitcoin or libertarian community. I'd expect a number of relatively distinct communities that interact around common resources or interests.

As an example, consider the Great Lakes. There isn't really a Great Lakes community; people in Toronto and Chicago don't have much sense of shared identity. But the shared resource demands joint action, so you see things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes%E2%80%93Saint_Lawr...

> I would gladly hear about the community of programmers who actually write code and try to design new decentralized technology. The "bitcoin community" is not that.

You obviously have not met any of the bitcoin core developers. There are many talented people pouring their time and energy into bitcoin, not because they have a libertarian agenda or want to get rich quick, but because they believe in building a new decentralized technology.

>I don't understand how there could really be a community that revolves around a crypto currency.

"I admit to not understanding this thing, yet feel okay spouting off some smug opinions about it."

Ok.

Right. There's an obvious community around bitcoin. If this guy doesn't understand why that community exists, then why would his opinion be relevant...

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