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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially, you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not going to lose your fortune.

Those invested financially have very good reasons to believe in solutions that will retain their investment, and dismiss solutions that put them at risk.

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Well the problem is THAT DISCUSSION OF SOLUTIONS to bitcoin issues are being censored, with key people being banned from the usual discussion forums

A decentralized currency where the development, mining and discussion is controlled by less than a dozen people which is a joke

It's sort of absurd that there's only two places to talk about bitcoin. There's no reason that a small cabal of people should have so much control over the flow of information about any serious asset.

Literally the only sensible discussion of Bitcoin on Reddit is /r/buttcoin.

>A decentralized currency where the development, mining and discussion is controlled by less than a dozen people which is a joke

Again: why does anyone think you can get a decentralized structure out of a property-norm design (commodity money, held privately as capital) designed to create centralization and hierarchy?

It is irrational to complain about censorship in a private location.

Depends on why you're complaining about censorship. If you're talking about some God-given right to free expression, sure, complaining about censorship is ridiculous. But if you're talking about what's best for a community, complaining about censorship is a good way to motivate change. People start asking, "Why, exactly, are we censoring these viewpoints? Is it for a good reason, e.g. preventing trolls from taking over discourse, or is it for a stupid or even malicious reason?" Stuff like that is what gets rid of toxic leadership. On the Internet, it usually manifests itself in all of the high-quality folks going elsewhere.

Basically, relatively few people have a problem with the idea of censorship; a certain amount of moderation is necessary on an Internet forum to prevent shitposting. What people are decrying is misguided, stupid, and / or malicious censorship - either due to juvenile power games on the part of the moderators, or due to an external agenda that said moderators are pushing.

No it's not.

Contribute to the discussion please as to why private property rights should not apply?

Nobody's saying it should be illegal for them to censor. They're saying that they shouldn't censor.

Why are "rights" and "complaining" related? It is generally the case that my rights include both things I should do and things I should not do, and it is generally the case that a healthy, free society encourages people to figure out what they should do via discussion ("complaining"), instead of via suppression of rights.

For instance, an employer has the right to fire under-performing employees, and the right to make the decision about that on their own (as long as their decision does not conflict with other fundamental rights, such as equal protection, that society has recognized). They are explicitly permitted to make bad decisions. A society that only gave you the right to make good decisions would not be a free one; a society that prohibited discussion about whether it was a good decision would also not be a free one.

I don't think anyone claimed they shouldn't.

> The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not.

This is a tautology. What you say is true of all investments (which bitcoin does not claim to be, but obviously is in practice), because that's what an investment is: an asset whose value is expected to change over time.

To the extent that bitcoin sees this effect "worse" has nothing to do with its status as an investment and far more to do with its total lack of regulation. An investment run by community consensus works well when there is consensus, and falls apart when there is none.

And companies releasing earning statements can lower the value of company stock.

Which is why the US Government forces public companies to release earning statements. Because discussion is more important than burying your head in the sand and pretending that everything is a-okay.

Until the BTC community can see beyond extremely short-term profit-driven thinking, I think it is fair to call the community as a whole a failure. US Public Companies, and the commercial banking system even, have evolved beyond that.

That's a really great point.

I suppose what I meant was mainly regarding the current issues going on in the bitcoin community- as you say, with any investment discussion of problems can lower the value. And it just so happens that we are in a situation today where the people most heavily invested in it financially have the power to censor any discussion of problems with bitcoins.

That's the same as ordinary currencies. If enough people believe (for example) that the Venezulan Bolivar is unsound, or the government of that country is unsound, then the price of the Bolivar will fall. Even if that government isn't necessarily doing something bad like recklessly printing currency.

The difference is that a government currency still has some value to dampen that fluctuation because it's backed by a sovereign state. The government of Venezuela can horribly mismanage it but people will still need to use the Bolivar to pay taxes, the government can require shops to accept Bolivars and ban foreign currency, etc.

That can cause huge problems but short of the government collapsing it does serve to limit the volatility of a currency. In contrast, Bitcoin has absolutely no value beyond the social consensus. It's very easy to imagine scenarios where the value of any stored Bitcoin you have craters overnight: major miners run out of VC cash & shut down, you're on the wrong side of a fork, a major competitor launches, etc. In every case, the floor price is zero and there's no recourse if you fail to convince someone else to accept it at the price you think is fair.

Isn't this also how the stock market works?

Issues internal to a company are usually kept very confidential until they're able to be addressed in a managed press release/conference, and this is so respected that the state's monopoly on violence will come after you if you breach that confidentiality and trade on the result.

For a currency, the US Federal Reserve works the same way; there's only limited speculation (based on public data) until they make an announcement about monetary policy, and the discussions leading up to that announcement are also kept very secret to avoid disruption to the market.

This is an important point, but it's worth noting that the relationship between social beliefs and personal benefit exists in countless other domains: company stock price, religious groups, political movements, adoption of a particular FOSS library/stack/protocol, etc. There are few people who have no stake in social ecosystems that are fragile to shifts in perception, and therefore to subject to perverse incentives in managing that perception.

In this context btc is down about 10% overnight, probably due to a reaction to Hearn's blog post. It was stable yesterday at 430 on bitfinex and its down to 390 today, and its a fairly notable spike considering recent trends.

Well there is also Cryptsy fiasco today

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/411bqw/cryptsy_clo...

Bitcoin is a never ending drama rollercoaster but I still use it and I hope eventually some sort of solution is reached

Wait, did they keep the fact that they had over 13,000 BTC stolen for over a year and a half?

Yup. They were insolvent for a year and a half, and paid out people with pending withdrawals when new people deposited new coins. How people thought it was a good idea to keep using them, I have no idea. There had been warnings about their solvency literally for the past year, starting with permanently "pending" BTC withdrawals, and slowly spreading to not allowing withdrawal of the altcoins on the site.

Just being pedantic here :)

Banks are fractional reserve because at any given time they don't have enough cash to pay demand deposits but that's because they've lent that money out. So while banks don't have cash they do have _assets_ that could be sold or borrowed against to fulfill deposits.

If I have an uninsured, full reserve bank and somebody steals half the deposits I don't become fractional reserve, I become _insolvent_. Just like a fractional reserve bank whose assets drop significantly in value is insolvent.

Thanks for the pedantry, I just updated my comment to indicate that they were insolvent. I definitely used the wrong word there.

> How people thought it was a good idea to keep using them, I have no idea.

Well, if they had no idea that they were missing all those bitcoins, then the reason is plain ignorance on the depositors' part, and criminality on Cryptsy's part.

The community consensus have long been that Cryptsy are at best incompetent, at worst crooks. They might very well have milked it for all they could get away with.

I think part and parcel of this issue is just how much capital investment the nascent bitcoin saw before its technical limitations and capabilities were known. Capital investment brings conservatism where new technologies thrive on the freedom to evolve. These opposing forces are apparently a key existential threat to bitcoin now.

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