"They often view the people working on Bitcoin as a bunch of crazy Libertarians who came up with a cool idea but believe that a bunch of hired guns could put th

"They often view the people working on Bitcoin as a bunch of crazy Libertarians who came up with a cool idea but believe that a bunch of hired guns could put the same thing together given enough money." This is my favorite point. There's a lot of people out there who think "sure, yeah, hacker types can prototype creative stuff but anything they do can be done better by Serious People with Serious Degrees." The history of the original PC revolution is the history of that being proven wrong. In the 70s and 80s all the Serious People with Serious Degress from the Right Schools worked for IBM, HP, and other mainframe vendors and made 2-3 times as much as the hackers who drove them into the ground with radically cheaper and eventually better products. Due to its low capital costs, IT/CS is an inherently radically meritocratic industry. Someone with no college degree can show up an expert by actually delivering something superior... if they can, that is, and there are enough who can that it happens fairly often. If anything the pattern that I see in this industry is that the indie hackers are ahead of the curve. They're the ones who prototype the hard stuff and solve the hard problems. The Serious People take up the rear, coming in later and building out and scaling what's already been done. They're the regular army, not the special forces. Serious People run the Internet now but they didn't build it... if it had been left up to them it would be a byzantine OSI network run by telcos and we'd still be using text terminals (with limited graphics maybe) for $1/minute.