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Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

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VMG·

A shockingly one-sided article. Probably colored by their aversion to Libertarianism.

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Which sentences from the article do you disagree with?

The following is presented as indisputable facts in the article:

Bitcoin is a scam

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme

There is zero chance that bitcoin will ever be mainstream

Bitcoin does not have a single advantage over fiat currency

Bitcoin will never be useful for online shopping

None of the problems with bitcoin can be fixed

All bitcoin users and developers are incompetent, does not know anything about economics, does not understand people at all and has no understanding on how to build reliable financial computing infrastructure

Looks pretty one-sided to me.

The reason I asked "Which sentences from the article do you disagree with?" was to have you quote a sentence and then write a rebuttal. We strive to do better on HN than write strawman arguments, and we try to make our critique substantive and thorough. (A handy test: if I can't find a specific sentence to disagree with, I might be arguing a strawman position, so I try doubly hard to be thoughtful in that circumstance.)

Also, on HN, a line in italics usually means "this is a direct quote," so it's generally taboo to put things in italics which you didn't copy-paste from some source. For example, the word "mainstream" never appears in the article, so it shouldn't be in an italicized line.

Actually most individual sentences aren't all that bad, it's more that the overall tone of the article seeks to portray bitcoin as something bad, though it does funnily enough seem to be somewhat pro-dogecoin.

Thanks for letting me know about italics, it was meant as a list and not a quote. I'll make sure to remember for next time :)

Despite what the domain name suggests, the article is not a well-reasoned argument that even has any concrete conclusions.

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