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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

I think in 2012 the tech community's sentiment was actually that Bitcoin was really cool and definitely useful, since it was new and did things in a practical application that we hadn't seen before. It's interesting that hindsight clouds that, it has been viewed negatively for years now but it's not that old yet. (Either way, your main point stands of course.)

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> I think in 2012 the tech community's sentiment was actually that Bitcoin was really cool and definitely useful

I don't think there was ever really a consensus on this. Lots of people (myself included, but also quite a few friends) always thought Bitcoin was just kinda useless. It's just that in 2012 there were comparatively low stakes (i.e. no massive energy use, not yet massive amounts of people pouring money in it, no massive amounts of "crypto snakeoil") that it just wasn't worth commenting on.

Not totally useless. Some of us imagined it would keep some annoying people busy for a while. Seriously, what will we think about it 5 years from now?

My bet and hope is "good riddance"

I find this exceedingly hard to believe. Around 2009-2010, btc was definitelynot an "asset" (like the bafoons try to treat it now). It *was a currency*.

Many still believe in the idea that (certain, less well know) crypto can be used as a real currency, but unfortunately the public severely tainted it with ideas of 'being an asset'.

This comment reads as someone who is more aligned with the public's (HN) perception of modern crypto, rather than the use of it pre-2010.

Okay, sure, but I don't see how this relates to the fact there was never consensus or broad agreement on Bitcoin in the tech community in general?

I understand what you're trying to say, but I'm really curious about how you define "asset" to not include currency.

I think the idea of “hodl” bitcoin wasn’t there. One thing that changed in my perspective is that bitcoin transactions were always destined to be more expensive than I had dreamed. In my mind, I thought transactions would be fast and free of cost. In reality, there are reportedly fewer than ten thousand full nodes.

Everyone thinks of bitcoin in terms of “how many USD is it?” I don’t know what the solution is but as long as we think of bitcoin as a perverted asset like housing - apparently people once again believe we will not allow housing prices to fall to any significant degree - there is no reason to use bitcoin as a currency. With so much speculation, the price is too volatile.

I don’t know what the solution is but I believe transaction costs should be minimal if not zero. I don’t know how we will achieve this but apparently there are other projects that try to get much closer to zero transaction fees. I think that is the future

I was on the mailing list the day the paper was released, and played around with the original PoC.

Lots of us thought bitcoin was dumb back then. Lots of us still do.

There were plenty of us who knew – and said – that "cryptocurrency" was borne of technical, political, economic, societal ignorance when it started. Now it's just more obviously terrible.

I recently learned that proof of work was actually invented long before Bitcoin to combat spam, but the idea didn't take off, sadly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

https://scottpeterjohnson.github.io/hashwall/dist/index.html

Our luckily, given the way it worked out with crypto.

The sentiment I knew at the time was a mix of excitement at the cool new tech, skepticism of the usefulness of it (my camp), and drooling over using the GPU you already had to make easy money.

nope, I remember starting my first tech job in 2013, and the only people in tech who cared about it were libertarians, which was a very small subgroup of tech

It's still heavily dominated by Libertarians. They want an anarchist revolution, without the effort of actually organizing and sustaining it.

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