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Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

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You could argue that if not crypto, it would have been something else eventually, and that the heightened vigilance it has necessitated has made it more difficult for other motivated attackers (like state actors) to backdoor or compromise OSS. But as someone who doesn't use crypto, I completely get the "f*ck crypto" sentiment.

stealing other data is less lucrative. i'm not confident someone could empty my bank account even with my username/password

other data is less lucrative than the $0 sitting in those static attacker wallets?

i think you're comparing apples and oranges. that they have so far failed to steal any coins does not mean anything with regards to this discussion

I don't know how familiar you are with the sheer scope of malware, black markets, data theft, various extortion techniques, but gaining the ability to drop an arbitrary .exe on Xubuntu.org and actually direct enough traffic to it that people notice it is worth a LOT more than $0.

The value of your labor is being systemically destroyed through deliberate currency manipulation by the US Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the US Government and US Treasury.

You are more than twice as productive as your equivalent 1971 counterpart, but relative to inflation, he was being paid about the same as you. You make your employer twice as much money as he did but you're not rewarded twice as much.

Five, ten, twenty years from now, when the trend that has been visible in the data since the 1970s is complete, and your labor has no value at all, are you going to be okay?

The people who spent large majorities of their income accumulating scarce stores of value (gold, bitcoin, housing, profitable businesses, land, etc) are going to be fine.

And beanie babies, right? Speculative bubbles like Bitcoin grow until there are no more greater fools to pay off the people at the top of the pyramid. Then as people realize they can't fool someone else to buy their beanie baby for more than what they paid for it, the price quickly drops to 0. Bitcoin has the added benefit that North Korea can take it from you without getting access to your closet.

I'll keep taking bitcoin, gold, land, housing. You can have my worthless paper federal reserve notes - they're all forged. Unlimited supply cap, the issuing entity literally just keeps printing trillions of them. It's monopoly money. I have no interest in that toilet paper with pictures of dead presidents the federal reserve keeps printing for 100,000% markup. Just because everyone around me is jumping off a cliff with a parachute made of federal reserve notes doesn't mean I'm obligated to do the same.

You're mixing up completely different assets. Gold and land are scarce resources that have value that goes up when more people need it. The buildings on top of the land depreciate. Bitcoin is just a beanie baby that is easier to steal without recourse that you can't even sell for the materials used to produce it.

The thing with a speculative bubble is that as soon as the value stops going up, there is no reason anyone would want to buy it instead of shares in a company or land producing valuable goods and services, so people will sell it off. There is no floor on Bitcoin, so it will go to 0 when that happens. You don't want to be the last fool holding.

You're entitled to believe that, and I'm entitled to keep buying bitcoin.

My strategy is working better for me than most other human beings' strategy is working for them. They spend several decades running in a hamster wheel to make another man wealthy because of their strategy. I'm retired before 30 because of mine.

I can sleep easily with the consequences of my interaction with Bitcoin. Can you?

It's also very practical to allow open air corruption of highest level government elected officials.

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