Hacker News Reader

Comment by ossreality | Hacker News Reader

>I imagine the average Bitcoin user as more a fedora-toting internet troll than a crypto-enthusiast.

Well, at least you disclosed that you're just projecting that image onto strangers you don't know.

I can make up reasonable sounding things too! Bitcoin supporters are more likely to be libertarians and thus are more likely to respect individuality, boundaries and privacy. Thus, I'm shocked to hear of a bitcoin supporter creeping on a female. (Of course, I'm not, but it has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself)

What does encryption, proof of work algorithms or anything else have to do with one's likelihood of being gross towards women? It's such a weird thing to even allege. Seems like another cheap "lol bitcoin fans are dumb neckbeards" remark to me.

View on HN

>What does encryption, proof of work algorithms or anything else have to do with one's likelihood of being gross towards women?

I think it's safe to say that the average Bitcoin user, today in this year 2014, only cares about getting rich quick by speculating on it and other cryptocurrencies and doesn't give a rat's ass about how the technology is implemented or what impact it might have on our future. Those are the people I'm stereotyping, not people (presumably) like our fellow Hacker News readers who see it for the fascinating and potentially century-defining idea it is.

Yes, based on experience on cryptocurrency forums and similar things, I have a negative stereotype ingrained in me of the kinds of people who are interested in get-rich-quick schemes and speculating on bubbles. Which is all Bitcoin is to most of its users: a get-rich-quick scheme.

I find basically none of your assumptions to be accurate, or more importantly, I don't understand how it is useful to assert as a broad generalization. Certainly here in this thread.

It's just frustrating, I'm clearly outspoken against groping and misogyny, but then I get lazily lumped in with them because I also am a fledgling bitcoin fan? Stereotypes are just a good way to reduce a conversation to a nearly useless set of tropes and blur away the details of reality.

In this case, it's a distraction. The problem is the groping and the mentality that led to that guy touching her without her consent. Unless the crypto communities are fostering that, or something about the tech makes that prevalent, it just seems like a distraction. Right? Instead, now we're talking about Bitcoin... instead of a problem that spans ALL of tech, not just Bitcoin.

Why on earth are you taking this personally? All I'm saying is that I hold the community of tech professionals to a different standard than I do every random person running cgminer, and that "tech" shouldn't be judged by the actions of those people, which makes about as much sense as judging the community of professional artists by the actions of random anime fans.

>In this case, it's a distraction. The problem is the groping and the mentality that led to that guy touching her without her consent. Unless the crypto communities are fostering that, or something about the tech makes that prevalent, it just seems like a distraction. Right? Instead, now we're talking about Bitcoin... instead of a problem that spans ALL of tech, not just Bitcoin.

I think you're more interested in imagining my post as an attack on your identity, because you somehow missed that making the discussion about Bitcoin was the entire point: My parent comment asserted that this was an example of bad behavior in the general tech community, and I claimed that this is far worse than normal behavior that is probably isolated to the "community" of cryptocurrency speculators. You can disagree if you'd like, but I'm not "distracting" or "derailing" the conversation, I'm just... having a conversation?

Sorry, I wasn't taking it personally. I was having a meta discussion about how we were talking about it more than anything. I don't think we have a problem with each other. :)

>I claimed that this is far worse than normal behavior that is probably isolated to the "community" of cryptocurrency speculators. [...] You can disagree if you'd like, but I'm not "distracting" or "derailing" the conversation, I'm just... having a conversation?

Fair enough, I think you're right and that we simply disagree on that fundamental pivot point.

Still though, what is the point of making this distinction? Like, I don't think anyone ever /was/ asserting that running cgminer or holding some doges makes you "as legit" or "in the same vein as" someone who works in SV or works for Microsoft or something.

I guess if you think it's specific to cryptocommunities then you would advocate for crypto-currency-specific gender training/education materials maybe?

>Still though, what is the point of making this distinction? Like, I don't think anyone ever /was/ asserting that running cgminer or holding some doges makes you "as legit" or "in the same vein as" someone who works in SV or works for Microsoft or something.

See the parent comment:

>How many more posts like this are needed to convince you that the whole community of tech meetups is hostile towards women?

Which implies that a Bitcoin meetup is a tech community meetup in the same vein as a Python meetup, and that their behavior reflects negatively on tech professionals.

Ok. Wait now. You both are generalizing regarding Bitcoin supporters.

Yes, libertarians are likely to endorse Bitcoin, but at this point I'm pretty sure that libertarians are a minority in the Bitcoin world, because the Bitcoin world now had its eternal september.

(I was intentionally generalizing to make a point, nothing more, I don't want to speak for any groups of people in general!)

edit: To those that apparently don't grok, I explicitly wrote "Of course not" in the post, pointing out that I wasn't actually asserting a hard connection between bitcoin and libertarianism.

Fair enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com