Hacker News Reader

Comment by hanswesterbeek | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's ad-hominem, but alas.

I don't feel the need to provide the list of arguments that I'm sure critics of Bitcoin have provided on this forum lots of times and I am confident you are already familiar with. Don't mean to waste your time.

I /did/ want to respond to this article because the original author symptoms of blind faith in Bitcoin, where even when something disastrous happens to it, is portrayed as beneficial. I'm sure you'll agree that this is a bit of a stretch.

View on HN

Since you probably know, why do liberals / progressives / whatever seem to hate on what essentially amounts to an opt-in currency that is not legally backed and regulated? Is it only because people propose that it replace legal tender? Does opposition decrease when you view it only as an alternative? Is it because you associate it with libertarians, who tend to rustle jimmies on the internet?

I'm genuinely curious, as I fail to see anything wrong with keeping the big social experiment running.

Disclaimer: I own zero bitcoins, and have no dog in this fight. Not even a doge.

Personally, I just get annoyed at the libertarian dreamers. It's not that I hate bitcoin or even that I want it to fail. On balance, I'm probably in favor of it succeeding. But it's really hard to keep wanting that after hearing all the ideological claptrap.. I find myself hoping it'll crash just to shut these people up.

A movement that started as a reaction to the failures of communism has become just as ideological and unrealistic. "The whole world would have peace and prosperity if only people acted the way we think they should." That's aside from the libertarians who are basically just garden-variety tribal Republicans but want to be hip.

I'd also note that, for the purpose of this discussion, "liberals/progressives/moderates/whatevers" basically includes everyone who's not a true libertarian believer.

Well, I never said moderates. I guess I primarily meant 'pro-regulation', specifically when it comes to currency, who tend to inhabit the left side of the political spectrum. I've seen quite a few others who find the whole thing interesting, but also a lot of hate, so it looked like it was being used as a proxy to hate on libertarians. I'm just intrigued by the whole thing, and have a few friends who made pretty good money by mining up coins early (made money in spite of burned out graphics cards).

EDIT:

Should I have used the phrase pro-existing-regulations-or-more? That's basically what I meant. I'm personally a fan of some level of regulation when it comes to my legally recognized 'can pay the IRS this and they will probably not send you to jail' kind of tender.

That's the ideological thing I'm talking about. "Pro-regulation" is literally 100% of people on some level, aside from anarchists. It's a meaningless statement.

EDIT: But yeah, a 'proxy to hate on libertarians' is sort of correct, although from my viewpoint a better wording would be 'reaction to ideological statements and straw-manning by libertarians'. I think a successful online crypto-currency whether it's BTC or something else would be a good thing for the world, but there's only so much nonsense I can hear before hoping it'll crash just to take some people down a peg.

Do you see it the same way you view goldbugs?

I can grok all sorts of reasons to speculate on gold, but I see that as speculation and not some rational investment that provides a greater value to society. It's ok, as long as it's a niche. The bitcoin rage seemed, IMO, to be about speculation wrapped in anarcho-libertarian talk about threatening the existing financial world. It's one thing to be a niche, it's another if it's destructive (whether it is capable of that or not, but just the perception).

Some other thinking that makes me wonder about that: http://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2013/12/bitcoin-what-again...

Fine to upend reality if you can produce a cogent explanation of how everything will work afterwards.

True believers will not be swayed by catastrophic failure, or any other evidence, that is what makes them true believers.

Here's the short version from Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-wa...

Personally I'm a progressive who is somewhat supportive of the privacy potential of the cryptocurrencies but after the Silk Road bust it seems like the bitcoin community only cares about speculation and hoarding...

So, it's because its the digital equivalent of a 'digital gold standard' that is hard to track and tax (by design). I guess that explains why it rustles many jimmies, even moreso when it keeps gaining value and marketshare.

Charlie Stross also doesn't even understand why he hates BTC. He complains that it's deflationary, but then completely botches the reason why standard left wing theories claim deflation is bad.

http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2014/bitcoin_critics_not_e...

Jbooth was far more honest than Stross: "Personally, I just get annoyed at the libertarian dreamers...I find myself hoping it'll crash just to shut these people up."

My point is that a claim like "Bitcoin [isn't] like your average software-project, where you fix a bug and just move on," is a potentially valuable insight if you can elaborate and support it.

It's not immediately obvious to me that the statement is true, though. Certainly it's not an average software project, since it's, among other things, a protocol. But, if you look at the history of others, like SSL/TLS, there's a lot of precedence for fixing buggy protocols, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com