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Comment by alchemist1e9 | Hacker News Reader

why is Bitcoin so divisive? why some people just “get it” and other scream until they are blue in their face it’s a scam?

it’s such a curious litmus test for something but I’m not sure exactly what.

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I suspect what you are missing here is that both sides just "get it", they disagree what "it" is. I don't find the anti-crypto folks to be particularly more or less screamy than the pro-crypto folks, for what it's worth.

The only use case is getting rich of of other people's losses. There's no social value creation. Some people love that and some hate that.

to be fair, one side (people with coins) is highly incentivised to preach the gospel. people seem to generally have no shortage of opinions about money/wealth, and hot takes about the topic du jour

And the other side (people with fiat) are incentivized to preach that gospel as well, as the value of their tokens continues to decrease relative to crypto.

Disclaimer: I actually dislike bitcoin (and other proof of work cryptos) very much, but the jury's still out on which side is more correct in their criticism of the other.

and the people without much of either token also have an opinion :)

PoS ledgers seem like a better design, but they alone don't solve very uneven/concentrated token distributions that you end up with every monetary system

Yeah, crypto maxis (and especially bitcoin maxis) really do talk about it like it's the next coming of Jesus.

Crypto absolutely will not solve that specific problem of any monetary system. It may solve some others though, in addition to introducing many novel problems

Probably because of the insane costs of securing the network. If it used trivial resources people probably wouldn't care

Every time bitcoin goes up $1 N number of people will die from the networks CO2 output over the coming centuries.

N may be five to seven digits.

Bitcoin has an incredibly small effect in that space if you insist on using that as an argument against.

Bitcoin mining doesn't produce any more CO2 than your computer or mobile phone does.

all faith based stuff is like that

religion

politics

they work because people believe they work

there is nothing divisive about pointing out the inherent risk of using debt to buy a highly volaille asset on leverage

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