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Comment by 111111101101 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a typical sort of projection I see from crypto-owners. They can't seem to contemplate the fact that there are people that think crypto is a bad idea _regardless_ of how much profit they might or might not have made by buying or selling at various points in history.

Nor that cryptocurrency doesn't create value out of nowhere -- for every person who "built generational wealth" (gag) by speculating on cryptocurrency, there's probably quite a few people who lost money. It's a zero-sum system.

If people can somehow keep cryptocurrency values high, they can take USD margin loans out of their Bitcoin holdings, which increases the amount of total dollars laying around. That’s what happened in 2021 that bumped crypto asset prices due to extremely low USD interest rate and quantitative easing. In terms of USD it is really not zero-sum, though you may take it in other ways.

Worse than that, it's actively undermining a system of laws and fair play that do create stability and value. It's strip-mining a rainforest for kicks. I came to Bitcoin naiively as a libertarian curiosity and after examining it fairly closely I'm convinced Satoshi was a black market kingpin and Bitcoin was conceived as a money laundering vehicle.

Yup, it's a version of telling critics "Enjoy being poor", which is an incredibly lazy, unfalsifiable argument. "You disagree with my position because you are broken" is not a sound argument, but has many variations (including "You dislike Apple/Elon because you are poor")

It's really not. How would a self proclaimed technology enthusiast react to missing out on one of the greatest tech investment opportunities of their lifetime? I suspect that they would react exactly the way hn's crypto haters do now.

No, you didn't make a huge mistake. It's crypto that's wrong.

Speculative opportunity maybe. I don't think I would call it an investment.

I can contemplate that. What I can't understand is wanting the government to tell people they can't buy it because they think it's a bad idea.

It's not 'you can't buy it', it's 'you can't sell it and also steal the funds of the people you sold it to'.

That was never legal in the first place.

Crypto made a mockery of the authorities and their war on drugs. A bad idea lol? No, it started a revolution.

Counterview: those who made gobs of money who transpose that outcome to "gosh, crypto must be great and I don't know why everyone is bashing it so much".

Lots of older generations felt that way about housing price increases as well -- are they right too?

> those who made gobs of money who transpose that outcome to "gosh, crypto must be great and I don't know why everyone is bashing it so much"

Most of us can profit off something while decrying it as dumb. I’ve made money from crypto, and I think I did so ethically. But the whole thing is stupid, and I think we have a civic responsibility to ensuring that is understood.

They're right in that, seeing how it turned out, everyone who could have bought a house really should have bought a house. The thing about bitcoin is that EVERYONE could have bought in, either with cash or through mining. You didn't need to save a large deposit or get approved for a loan. It was an opportunity that was right there for everyone.

I regret not investing more or mining. I can only imagine how those who missed the boat completely feel.

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