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Comment by wildsatchmo | Hacker News Reader

This one makes me a little sad. I was very into bitcoin and blockchain ideas early on and the ICO fever has poisoned the well a bit. The money is attracting the types you're describing but IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy. It seems obvious to me that the intersection of these things informed bitcoin's core design concepts. Some people think the system we have now is deeply flawed and needs a redesign, others don't. Those who don't might find it hard to see the utility in bitcoin.

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> IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy.

No, it was founded by, and primarily attracted, weird conspiracy theory spouting goldbugs whose motivation was that (a) they thought a gold standard was still workable (b) they had a pathological aversion to the concept of credit in a banking system. Literally, conspiracy theory. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-conspiracist-gold-b...

The scammers didn't come along just this year with ICOs. Scammers have been endemic in Bitcoin as soon as they were tradeable for anything else at all. Bitcoin was founded by starry eyed naifs and this always attracts predators. Sometimes, e.g. pirateat40, the naifs are also the predators.

If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin. The hard core gold bugs in the Libertarian forums circa 2008 STILL don't trust bitcoin because they can't hold it in their hand. You think these are the folks that invented it? They're typically not computer savvy in the least and would rather invest in canned food with a 90 year shelf life. In that diverse group there were a small subset of cryptography nerds who had worked on several digital money theories and iterations before actually inventing bitcoin. Those people knew a lot about finance, economics, politics, etc. People like to flatten groups into one personality and call them weird or fringe to auto-win an argument when the reality is a bit more complicated than that. I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too. Doesn't mean they were wrong to be excited, and it doesn't mean the people who actually invented it wore spiked collars and combat boots either.

> If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin.

If you assume your conclusion, then your conclusion follows. I understand the desire, but a wider need doesn't follow, because a pure gold standard hasn't been adequate to the economy we actually have since the late 1600s. One of the big problems bitcoin has always had is that wishing doesn't make it so.

> I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too

Often literally the same characters, the cypherpunks.

I see Bitcoin an amazing store of value as it is. Of course I'm excited for the improvements that are coming to it (ring signatures being used to increase privacy of the system, Schorr signatures to make multiple signatures aggragatable).

Cryptography is going through a new booming period.

Just skip the hype part and look at the math part..if an improvement is not using cryptography (for example the elliptic curve group directly), it most likely is not critical for scalability of the system.

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