I find it so funny how much HN hates Bitcoin. To me, it screams of a bunch of salty techies who are kicking themselves for not getting in from the start. Egos that can't wrap their heads around the idea that maybe they missed a tech trend.
What BTC has BECOME however, is no longer about solving technical issues. Its now a money-making device... a financial instrument. With most people pointing out how much money they're making instead of how many issues they've solved.
Ah well. At least I learned GPU compute from this experiment. I thank the BTC community for this. (at least, those who were actual nerds and liked solving problems). The OpenCL code written by the BTC / Eth / Monero / etc. etc. communities was clean, usable, and easily experimented upon.
I got what I wanted out of the cryptocoin community. So its been worthwhile. It also taught me the importance of community values: seeing the nerd paradise corrupt itself into financial interests taught me a lot about human nature, and the evolution of communities.
Its not so much that "the nerds" got corrupted. The community got corrupted as money became more and more the focus. It makes me wonder how VCs keep a "technology culture" at the forefront of the actual financial markets (like YCombinator).
With Bitcoin the improvements come from increasing the security of the code base even more, to be able to store many trillions of dollars worth of value safely. Examples are unit tests that find bugs in the compiler or the CPU. It may be not fun, but one of the most critical infrastructures we have for the 21st century.
Even worse. It has been taken over by MLM moguls/scammers who migrated from classic MLM products/scams.
They now often pollute Real Estate, Stock Exchange, etc. forums trying to convert others (which is a red flag).
Which is sad because, like TOR, it was created as the right answer to a real problem but is being perverted/spoiled.
Sad...
Even if I had gotten in early, I'm sure I would have cashed out early.