(1) People may get hurt. I was in an Uber two weeks ago where my driver talked about taking out a second line on his home to buy Bitcoin. By today's mark, he's lost money. That people who clearly have no idea what they're doing are being preyed on is disturbing to many, myself included.
(2) ICOs are a cesspool of frauds. They allow promoters to make money without putting anything up. That's different from early Bitcoin adopters, who actually put time or money or computing power at risk.
(3) Bitcoin is an article of faith. Discussions around its value often devolve into "does god exist" arguments.
As a skeptic, people thinking this is a good currency are hilarious. Day trading and making money off them is simple sport.
Are there scalability problems? Yes they are, it's very evident in the transaction fees. But are technical solutions being developed to mitigate this? Yes they are - that's the real work that actually goes on in the background, by the people who actually work, instead of spending their time on internet posting about the price. It's not an easy task, but it is being done.
When people bring up the transaction fees, sometimes it sounds like they think that real Bitcoin developer's don't know that this is a problem. They do, and they work on it! It's just that regular person doesn't want to hear developers, he wants to hear someone that tells them they can make 3x their money over a weekend.
Bcash has increased the blocksize (and forked), which is a perfectly valid solution for such a task, in terms of how a cryptocurrency should be governed: no wars, no lawsuits, if some users don't think a certain decision is valid, they are free to fork off their own chain. No one stopped them, no one tried to shut them down. But the market will ultimately show what is a good solution and what is a bad solution. And you can already see what the market decided in terms of the decision of increasing the block size - by comparing Bitcoin market cap to Bcash market cap.
There's no valuable discussion to be had anymore regarding BTC because every discussion turns into price point speculation, FUD, or "I told you so" remarks.
Bring some real discussion and critical thought the table, and not just repost the same WSJ articles that sensationalize the tiniest price movements.
There are tangential discussions around market structure, regulations (their existence, interpretation and necessity) and other matters I've found genuinely interesting.
Bitcoin appears to have attempted a clean reboot of modern finance. It's interesting seeing where common solutions are found. It's fascinating considering where divergent conclusions could be reached, and whether that could help us in the mainline economy.
Price discussions are inane for this asset, but it doesn't mean that's the only thing we can talk about.
The things that you mentioned are what I am most interested around Bitcoin, and what should be talked about - but that is only happening in very small amounts and (in my experience) by people who don't have any horses in the race.
As a side note - I would add that Bitcoin in theory attempted to reboot modern finance. The idea, passion, maybe even necessity is there - but I don't think the tech is there yet. Clearly people are more interested in generating value based on our current monetary system vs. pushing for widespread Bitcoin adoption.
Cryptocurrencies have been rising in value at an astronomical pace the last few months, and Bitcoin may currently be the biggest asset bubble in human history [1]. It would seem it is only quite logical that the general HN comment would be quite skeptical at the very least.
[1]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/its-official-bitcoi...
Note that I reply here on the general HN sentiment, not regarding cryptocurrencies specifically. Although I would say that on the topic at hand : beware making general judgments based on one bad day.
There's no problem with putting a little into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but at the moment, it is a very speculative investment. If you diversify, and don't do something silly like massively borrow, then that's fine. In fact, this sort of investor probably doesn't care too much that Bitcoin crashed in value. It may go up by silly amounts, or it may go down by silly amounts. That's life with any speculative investment. I personally can't see Bitcoin justifying its valuation unless it fixes its transaction issues, but there is plenty of room for disagreement there.
Now, the fact that a fair bit of current marketing / promotions of crypto has the whiff of pyramid schemes and other dodgy "make money fast" type things is of concern to me. Mainly because these sorts of things usually never end well. I think it would be very foolish to put a significant percentage of your assets into crypto right now, and it would be extremely dicey to invest in crypto on the margin. In fact, it would probably be better if one was seriously interested in crypto to wait until a major crash clears these sort of "you're gonna get rich instantly with CRYPTO!" players out of the market.
Are there really large amounts being traded? I guess you could just look at the block chain ledger and see. But I'm just wondering how much of this is due to people cashing in/out vs market manipulation.