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Comment by AgentME | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the hate is a reaction to the baseless hype from people just trying to get rich from cryptocurrency. There are tons of altcoins and ICOs being made and advertised constantly that are nothing but hot air. There are people making a lot of money (or thinking they can) from buying into altcoins (hyped up by nonsense marketing pages), which they then try to shill to others. People are often being incentivized by rising prices to act this way!

Outsiders start to learn that "blockchain" = "get-rich-quick nonsense", and miss the interesting technical discussions (which often come from the Bitcoin and Ethereum spaces).

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Yes, this is definitely a big part of it. HN used to be super into cryptos, when it was more about the technology (pre-2017, or even pre-2013). That being said, the pendulum has pretty clearly swung too far the other way here.

The pretty obvious reality is that smart contracts and cryptocurrencies are truly interesting and novel technology. Does that mean they're good investments? No. Are they going to take over the world? Maybe, maybe not. But they're definitely 'cool', in the technological/hacker sense. They're cool in the way the internet was cool - they enable a fundamentally novel form of human interaction. It remains to be seen if that form of interaction will be economically meaningful. But the novelty and possibility of it is definitely interesting, and anyone who says otherwise either doesn't get it, or has been jaded by the scams. An understandable response to all the greed and general chicanery of course, but the reality is still that this stuff is actually pretty cool tech, even if you never use it to buy a latte.

>>I think a lot of the hate is a reaction to the baseless hype from people just trying to get rich from cryptocurrency.

This is it exactly. People are naturally suspicious of anything that is widely promoted for the profit of the promoters.

I don’t think you’re wrong or anything, but I do find it frustrating that HackerNews seems to be full of people dismissive of the technology and from what I’ve gathered relatively devoid of the baseless shilling. Other communities, not so much.

Well, baseless naysayers are just as bad as baseless hypers.

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