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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

Earlier post 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

"Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency."

Written by co-founder/CEO of Pachyderm and first employee of RethinkDB none the less.

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People love to pick out the comments of the past that seem most wrong now, because—let's be honest—it makes us feel superior. But if you go back and look at that original 3-comment Bitcoin thread, what you find is that those 3 comments span an entire spectrum: elated, skeptical, and bewildered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852.

The first cryptocurrency thread on HN—about 9 months earlier—was even more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253963. It contains another skeptical comment: "The bigger problem is that everyone has a incentive to run their computers day and night cranking out solutions, which burns up lots of natural resources and processor time for a zero-sum result." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999), which seems astonishingly prescient now, even though the objection is still hotly (no pun intended) debated.

Cherry-picking the wrongest-seeming skeptical comment from that collection of data points is a case study in survivorship bias. (I don't mean to pick on you personally! This is common of course.) The infamous Dropbox comment from 2008 is similar in that it has gotten repeated out of context in a way that is unfair to the original commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275). When we repeat these things, it says more about us than it does about the thing we're repeating.

> People love to pick out the comments of the past that seem most wrong now, because—let's be honest—it makes us feel superior.

I like to see wrong “obvious” predictions to humble myself, even if not from me.

Ok, you get a pass. I'm generalizing from myself of course.

Ho boy looking up Xinjiang then reading this comment was a trip. Any ways Dropbox is pretty great and seeing the differences in sentiment towards TSLA stock compared to Bitcoin over the years has been great. Can't pick all the winners.

What this also shows to me is just how difficult it is to predict the future. Here is another thought experiment: There is probably a wonderful technology / opportunity, perhaps lying in plain sight, that we will be kicking ourselves in ten years for not having gotten involved in. But what is it? "Every day brings new opportunities to become very rich, most of which we are bound to miss" [1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/missed-teslas-12-551-rise-dont-...

It's just humbling. Others and me, everyday we miss out hundreds of opportunities, it's a good reminder of life complexity. Things like that should be printed and posted on an office wall.

Also from a creator's perspective it's important to see these cases of once in a generation invention (good or bad) and the comments on it.

Not really a superiority thing for me. I just think it’s funny how much perceptions change over time and how reasonable assumptions can be proven wrong

I still don't think many people have faith in it. The vast majority of people who own it are speculators who never actually use it as a currency.

At the time it felt astonishing that central banks allowed non-state currencies to exist on national ground, for the first time. It still feels astonishing.

Reminds me of the infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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