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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

one of the better quotes from the thread:

Just think for a minute how amazing Bitcoin is, that it can not only survive but continue to grow despite the huge number of dipshits and saboteurs so intimately associated with it.

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Isn't this a cognitive bias? How has bitcoin grown?

In 2015, Wordpress dropped support for it because there were too few transactions to warrant it.

That thread is from 2013.

Retail transactions are through the roof by almost all indicators

You mean Overstock?

Years ago I remember a thread where people were bashing the Bitcoin ecosystem for being full of bubbles, scammers, ponzi schemes, criminals, and con artists. Some smart-arse replied "so you're saying Bitcoin is a real currency?"

That really stuck with me. :) Because of course none of those things happen with ordinary currencies.

Yeah, that's an... interesting way to look at it. And I guess it's right - the proof that something is significant (for better or worse) is that it attracts scoundrels. Scammers and frauds and power-hungry thugs don't have time to seek random trinkets; they group around things that can help them earn a lot of money and control.

I think this can be said about human societies in general. :-)

I think the difference for me is that most societies are built around substantial commons. Shared places, shared resources, shared interests. The Bitcoin community (if that's even the right term) seems to be built mostly of people who are somewhere between skeptical of and averse to that. And their commons is much narrower than, say, a town or a city.

It may still be workable, but I think Bitcoin has challenges other communities mostly don't.

Bitcoin community wants to promote the technology so that it - and the community - is respected by good men, even though all the most obvious applications of it range from "quite evil" to "ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in Dante's Inferno". In a way, they have it even harder than proponents of nuclear energy - the latter can literally power the world in a clean way, but it took just two bombs early on and a few relatively minor failures (compared to other industrial accidents) to pretty much shelve the technology for good.

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