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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

What is up with the comments in this thread? Feels like tons of them are bot written. Weird attacks on Bill Gates and Microsoft all over the place.

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Maybe that's because no one should blindly trust a billionaire's opinion on a form of economics. Same goes for Elon Musk, who's on the opposite end of Bill Gates on BTC. It shouldn't be surprising that Bill Gates, Peter Schiff, and so forth might find BTC to be a threat to at least some of their wealth. (as an example, if cryptocurrency somehow evened the playing field for people to build up their wealth, that's not good for the <1% who won't stop collecting more money than they'll ever need)

Meanwhile, we've got many people(and many of whom I think are extremely hypocritical) piling on the BTC hate mob and using Bill Gates to feed into their viewpoint. Gates is a smart man, but I don't think it's reasonable to believe that his opinion on BTC is worth much more than someone whose net worth is a minuscule fraction of his.

You haven't noticed that bill has become something of a movie villain over the last year in some circles?

He's been infamous since the slashdot/digg days because Microsoft's business practices and anti-trust suit. The latest conspiracy theories about him from the past year are...."weird" to say the least but are completely separate from why he was already disliked by the linux crowd.

The type of person hackernews respects the most - a billionaire - told them that their favourite toy is bad.

Bitcoin is anything but HN's favorite toy.

Majority opinions seem to lean towards Bitcoin being a net detriment to society but HN will attract a really loud minority of Bitcoin diehards, for tech or profit.

Or so I thought, the amount of people taking offense at Bill Gates saying the uncontroversial is impressive.

Arguing from the conclusion, are we?

I mean I'm going by precedent, there's popular HN threads every so often decrying the externalities or lack of utility of Bitcoin, the comments supporting the articles rise to the top but there's a handful of people saying that Bitcoin is still worth it somehow.

Now there's a lot of people attacking Bill Gates for lending his image to the arguments. It could be that there's a majority of Bitcoin believers here but they don't usually care for arguments and just do "he he miner goes brrr" until a celebrity billionaire appears.

Maybe there's some overlap between HN anti-crypto crowd and those who remember Bill Gates track record at MSFT (ex: IE antitrust, anti-Linux).

Why is it weird to be critical of MS or Gates? They've definitely earned the suspicion with their own actions.

Gates has nothing to do with Bitcoin, his opinion here is worthless.

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