The amount of Bitcoin hate on Hacker News is astounding.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments and especially please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents and especially^2 please don't take HN threads on meta generic flamewar tangents. I know it's exciting in one way but it's boring in another way, and that's the way that matters. It only makes discussion worse.
"Volcanoes contribute massively to climate change we need to turn them off to save the planet"
The success of Bitcoin isn't entirely rational. And people generally (probably disproportionately so on HN) try to analyze phenomenon like this analytically.
The thing is though...financial markets are not always rational. This isn't unique to BTC.
Edit: typo
I think bitcoin is genuinely hated, just like a lot of people and technology are hated.
It doesn't necessarily come from an analysis of bitcoin, whether rational or irrational.
And it doesn't necessarily come from people who are upset because they think they are too late to make money from bitcoin.
I stop reading any btc criticism at the endless climate impact/criminal activity discussions.
Of all the things that impact climate change, this is the offender we decide to focus on?
Of all the ways criminal activity is facilitated, this is currency we focus on?
Such a brilliant technology seems lost on HN because people are jealous they missed the boat.
It is a massive enabler of corruption and crime.
This whilst offering almost nothing back in return
In terms of low-hanging fruit of things to hate, yes this should be pretty damn high on the list. This is as a person who originally mined coins in 2011.
> Of all the things that impact climate change, this is the offender we decide to focus on?
Whataboutism...
> Of all the ways criminal activity is facilitated, this is currency we focus on?
Also whataboutism...
> Such a brilliant technology seems lost on HN because people are jealous they missed the boat.
What's so brilliant about it? And you're really projecting here re: the jealousy...
Then only word being 'whataboutism'... which is an infinite loop of an argument. Literally the same as saying "I know you are but what am I".
And clearly I'm on the crypto train. Why would I be projecting jealousy? That I secretly wanted to off the crypto train? lol
I had the chance to participate on a Ponzi scheme once, in 1993. I declined because I could not accept the idea of getting quick money knowing that 7 every 8 people would lose money.
If you see a group of people describing something you yourself participate in as environmentally and economically destructive, you have to choose a framework in which to process that information. Some options are:
1. Sure it has some, ahem, negative externalities and I am somewhat bad for participating. But all of those people are just as compromised as me and they're only mad because they didn't get in first. I am no worse than them. If anything, I'm at least honest about my position.
2. They are right, I am selfishly participating in something that benefits me at the expense of the world.
The problem with 2 is that acknowledging and wanting to be morally correct forces you to change your behavior. So 1 is an easy pick. But that doesn't imply that it's correct.
Yes, but that moral interpretation is based on the framework they use to contextualize the behavior. Is cutting down a tree moral? Well, if it was a fire hazard next to an orphanage, maybe. If it was endangered and you were going to sell it for personal gain, probably not.
This article may seem far-fetched right now, but it's amazing how often novel new large-scale attacks turn out to contain elements that featured in speculative writing that was previously dismissed as being far-fetched.
Now it is all about how Bitcoin is a ponzi, key reason for climate change and solves no issues whatsoever. Maybe all those things are correct (I don't know) but it sure was a good way to make a lot of money -- and most of the people here just missed it.
And this hate is not new. Look at this well commented thread from 2015 when Bitcoin went down to $180 and HN is still filled with comments like that this is not surprising and they don't see it coming back from hereon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884838
We haven't learned anything? Have we?
But because we engineered a way to magnify the wealth of the people who need it least, at a huge environmental cost for no reason.
It's like all of the worst tendencies of our society reduced down and maximized.
Have you considered that there are indeed legitimate reasons not to like bitcoin, like those outlined by the previous commenter?
Or e.g. I think the detachment from the nation state is a dangerous element that will foster a race to the bottom on taxes, environmental standards, etc as capital gets even more mobile and untraceable than before. A small crowd gets the benefits and many many miss out with underfunded schools and healthcare...
I feel like this is an argument against money, not necessarily cryptocurrencies in general and even less against Bitcoin specifically.
Yes, creating opportunities will lead to people who don't really need it taking advantage of those opportunities. But, it also means that people who really need opportunities can take those too, as it's a open network.
So yes, richer gets richer while the poorer is getting poorer. At least cryptocurrencies are leveling the field a bit, so the the poor has a bigger chance out of poverty. As someone who used to be poor, I welcome the new War In the Status Quo.
Hasn't this always been the case, for all of humanity's existence?
"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat from it"
Do lefties have a "not real capitalism" meme like the "not real communism" meme for righties?
I hate bitcoin because you can only participate (and become more wealthy) if you're already fortunate/privileged enough to be wealthy. It's just another thing that helps increase the divide between rich and poor.
Bitcoin is NOT about payments. Just stop saying that. Bitcoin is store of value. When you think about Bitcoin the closest analogy is gold. Sure it is more volatile but it is a 10yr old asset. If you look at the long term trend (past 10 yrs), your value only increased.
It is called bit-coin, not bit-gold. The designers of bitcoin intended it to be used for commerce.
In my opinion Bitcoin is the modern day tulip. It has no real value (note Bitcoin is not blockchain, which is a useful technology), uses tremendous amounts of real world resources and is in a massive bubble and will eventually burst leaving us all worse off.
Sure, some will and have prospered, but there is net loss of value for society.
This is all independent of whether one is peronally invested. I don't happen to own Bitcoin, but I do own shares of some companies that I actually want to see fail. But it is a sort of a hedge.
I can't remember the last time I saw a story about a new payments processor, or an actually useful thing. It's all "price price price" these days.
To me the shark jumping moment was when Coinbase and many other "crypto banks" reworked their UI/UX around presenting your holdings as a "portfolio."
When I log into my bank I don't see my "portfolio of USD." I see my account. I'd see USD in my "portfolio" if I had a Forex account, but then I'd be trading currencies not banking them to use as currencies.
It's a pure admission that for the vast majority of its user base the sole purpose is just to play pump and dump games.
The only group I see routinely using cryptocurrencies as actual currencies are online black market users and sellers, and they do so for an obvious reason that outweighs the downsides. Many of them have moved to Monero and Zcoin too since those actually have decent privacy. (Not foolproof, but decent.)
This is such projection. I have 0 regrets about not buying into Bitcoin (or any other hyped up blockchain tech). It represents the absolute worst of capitalism, selfishness, and anti-intellectualism. I sleep soundly at night having had 0 involvement. Also perfectly happy in my decisions to avoid: buying a lottery ticket ever, joining any MLM in existence, working for a hedge fund, hoarding XBoxes to re-sell them, etc.
> Now it is all about how Bitcoin is a ponzi, key reason for climate change and solves no issues whatsoever. Maybe all those things are correct (I don't know) but it sure was a good way to make a lot of money -- and most of the people here just missed it.
Annnnnd exactly demonstrating what I'm referring to. "These criticisms might be fully correct. I don't know! But it sure was profitable!" What a disgusting way of looking at the world.
> We haven't learned anything? Have we?
Clearly not.
What makes it worse is that these people who just got lucky think they're changing the world and are a part of some kind of movement. Some are evangelical and almost self-righteous about it. Some sound like cult members.
Just admit you won the lotto and stop perpetuating obvious nonsense.
The thing I find most obnoxious is the sector of the Bitcoin cult that talks about how they're going to destroy the useless legacy financial industry... when what they are doing by getting rich off a value-less token is everything they hate about financial capitalism distilled into its purest form.
Bitcoin is a reductio ad absurdum of financial capitalism, not a revolt against it. If it actually "took over" it would invert all financial incentives so that simply holding deflationary tokens became the safest path to profit, disincentivizing investment in any kind of productive work.
Financial capitalism and Wall St. get a lot of hate around here too for the exact same reason.
Edit: everything I hate about Bitcoin I also hate about much of conventional financial capitalism... but I don't hear very many Wall St. tycoons pretending they're changing the world or creating some kind of utopia. Many of them will flat out admit that they're purely mercenary. It's more honest.
If Bitcoin diverts surplus money from real estate for a while, and fellow software developers/cypherpunks sell it one day before the bubble bursts, therefore taking money from boomers and FOMOs, I am happy enough.
Interesting admission.
Wanting to see some group suffer seems to be the motivation for a decent amount of the bitcoin hate on HN.
Guess you simply hate some other groups more than you hate bitcoiners.
Maybe, I missed the latest Medium article on why we are near adoption(!?). The tech is useless and detrimental to our earth. It finances terrorism, human trafficking and other ponzi schemes.
But Elon Musk... just pumping an unregulated market. The fact that he created Dogecoin is a pretty strong giveaway of his stance on the subject of the blockchain
Edit: Elon Musk didn't created Dogecoin