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Comment by easymovet | Hacker News Reader

Baffling that tech types here aren’t grasping digital money, basicaly a self custody PGP key with value, and instead defending the status quo with poorly researched FUD like layer 1 scaling limits, power usage, and fear of regulators!? You guys sound like Paul Krugman, meanwhile Tesla and MicroStrategy are taking all the trending bitcoins off the table… the only point I disagree with LynAlydn, who wrote a great article, is that Bitcoin doesn’t offer yield. You can get yield on Bitcoin by either loaning it out or staking in in the lightning network to collect fees for providing liquidity.

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The reason is that this is a societal and economical issue, beyond tech.

American education is not helping either, like most people don't know about Austrian economics for instance - which is kind of a background you need to have been exposed to, to have in depth discussions that go beyond the typical posts you get on forums.

Yeah, we're not teaching people that Austrian economics doesn't work so they end up getting redpilled into thinking it's some kind of secret awesome suppressed knowledge.

It's interesting because it seems that democratizing money is what we should be good at based on founding principles - rather we have bunch of flawed central planning disasters and bailouts.

Under a system with hard money and free banking we would instead have occasional emergent disasters and nothing could be done about them.

> Under a system with hard money and free banking we would instead have occasional emergent disasters and nothing could be done about them.

And my understanding is that such disasters used to happen with some regularity, but they weren't wars so people don't typically learn about them in school.

That would be natural selection, which might be preferable in a free market. Small constant corrections, rather than larger distasters we experienced the last 50-100 years (bailouts and going to war every 10-12 years)

It would arguable allow people to safe their wealth rather than being forced to spend money all the time.

Here is a thought experiment. The current fiat system requires negative interest rates. Austrian economics doesn't believe in the existence of negative interest rates as a result of market forces. If there is a central bank in the world that introduces negative interest rates on bank accounts and cash (via serial numbers) and it works, then Austrian economics is completely wrong not in just this aspect but wrong about fiat currency in its entirety.

They would have to acknowledge that:

* negative interest rates are necessary

* austerity and permanent saving don't work

* moderate inflation is necessary for a functioning economy

* central banks are doing a good job managing the economy

Plenty of people grasp digital cash but (1) they don't want cash and (2) current cryptocurrencies aren't good digital cash. And most people don't want (digital) gold either.

I've seen this a lot with my own circle of friends, I think there's a few reasons why "techies" don't like it as much:

- they already trust the government and their institutions and don't see the need for it,

- they hear all the FUD and don't want/have time to research further,

- maybe some feeling of having missed out (especially for those that knew about it very early on or sold it for very cheap),

- seeing some "stupid loud mouths" who yolo'd and made a lot of money in it.

It's very interesting to see.

>- they already trust the government and their institutions and don't see the need for it,

Strange given that most americans don't trust their government (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/public-trust...) Maybe trust in government is correlated with how well you're doing, and techies tend to be doing very well?

What does being a "tech type" have anything to do with currency?

“Software eating the world” now applies to money.

Because we're also financial types?

Bitcoin has out performed any other asset over the past 10 years. https://www.microstrategy.com/en/hyperintelligence/asset-vs-...

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