9 ms·

So many bitcoin haters in these comments... we'll see who's wrong in a decade or so.

by hypron 10y ago

clemensley 10y ago
I've always wondered why hackernews hates bitcoin so much. Can someone explain?
- mentos 10y ago
  Like anything in life I think there is a bit of 'crab mentality' here where people don't want to see something succeed if they do not stand to see any reward from it.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I think it's more a reaction to the culty "get rich quick" Bitcoin "investors". It seems that very few people are actually interested in Bitcoin for its UX and the things it enables, everyone is either get-rich-quick or anti-get-rich-quick.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >I think it's more a reaction to the culty "get rich quick" Bitcoin "investors". Are there any other kind? Besides, the fact that among the top 3 exchanges were the crap fests of "a man-week of amateur PHP code" and the like that were taken down speaks volumes about the kind of crap the bitcoin crowd can't see through.
- api 10y ago
  Different reasons for different people. There are several camps of BitCoin haters: (1) There are people who think it's a pure speculative bubble or pyramid scheme. (I disagree because it has utility.) (2) There are also people who point out that it's a deflationary currency and therefore broken. (I sympathize a bit with this view but it's not enough to make me dismiss it completely. I think this might be a solvable problem.) (3) There seem to be some who just take a contrarian position against things that have received a ton of hype or that are too fashionable.
  - ssharp 10y ago
    There is also a camp of people who don't think Bitcoin has much utility when compared to established alternatives, let alone other advances in other crypto/blockchain tech.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Can someone explain? What exactly is the news here? Some company accepts some new form of payment that hardly anyone uses. When it comes to "money", Bitcoin proponents seem massively misinformed on how it actually works. The blockchain technology is interesting, but a new currency isn't as exciting as they want you to believe. I don't care that my dollar has no inherent value, as long as people accept it in exchange, that's all I care about. And they do, everywhere.
  - jMyles 10y ago
    > that's all I care about Well that's a bit short-sighted then. Plenty of people care about a lot more than that in a currency, namely that is it responsibly and equitably managed. Bitcoin is not this, of course, but it's a giant step in the right direction compared to the Federal Reserve.
    - rhino369 10y ago
      No, it's a massive step in the wrong direction compared to the federal reserve. There is reason bitcoins value wildly fluctuates and the US dollars doesn't.
      - bigmanwalter 10y ago
        Isn't it because big ships don't maneuver so quickly?
        rhino369 10y ago
        No it's because the fed actively manages money supply while Bitcoin managed money supply by setting money growth at a predetermined rate. That and the vast majority of bitcoins are held for speculation instead of used as a currency.
        CyberDildonics 10y ago
        Many other countries have currencies that fluctuate wildly even with their own central banks. Is the US just better at managing it? The Yen lost half of its value a few years ago.
- wslh 10y ago
  I think the sector is full of bullshit and there are a lot of people looking for easy money because you can easily setup a gambling site without asking for regulatory based permissions. But, again, the core innovation about cryptocurrencies/blockchain (I risk a lot of HN karma using the later word!) is strong and has long term implications beyond the current issues on PoW, miners, etc.
- jug5 10y ago
  Nerds follow most propaganda like any other sector. Do a quick poll and see what level of encryption HN uses for day to day life.
- coldtea 10y ago
  It's because it's not just comprised of tech people, who are excited about its theoretical underpinnings, but also by business savvy people, who know that it will hardly fly for numerous reasons (and if a similar technology ever catches up, it will have so many government imposed regulations as to be totally different), plus old jaded tech persons who know a marginal at best tech and/or snake oil when they see it. Aside for people excited by the tech (and its potential applications to other fields), the core of bitcoin believes are either get-rich-quick types who buy into the pyramid scheme, tin-foil crackpots (similar to gold hoarders), and stick-it-to-the-man true believers (with a freeman-of-the-land [1] mentality) naive enough to believe it can trump regulation and disrupt "the system". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land
  - brighton36 10y ago
    Bitcoin is for the underserved. It will grow to be exactly as large as this market is regulated to be. Thus far this market is sex, drugs,gambling and capital flight. It will fly, because government subsidizes it's use here.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    A few of us look at it for uses in other countries, where local currencies are unreliable, and corruption makes it desirable to hold large amounts of your income as "black money." In areas of high corruption, a networked, global currency could be rather freeing.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I'm sorry, but you're looking at Bitcoin from a narrow viewpoint. There are in fact people who actually need Bitcoin in their day-to-day. My home country Tunisia for example has very strict currency controls in place, which means that it is impossible to purchase any goods from outside the country or even transfer money overseas. The government now provides rechargeable card with a 1000 TND (~500 USD) limit that can be used for online purchases. However, these are only issued to software developers and entrepreneurs to allow them to subscribe to online services, such as hosting, domain names, etc. Bitcoin provides a quick and easy way to circumvent that: convert your TND to BTC, and use that to purchase online goods or to transfer money outside the country. I'm actually thinking of setting up a MVP to test out this idea, but I'm struggling to come up with a solution that is completely transparent for the end-user. In other words, I don't want the user to have to understand Bitcoin or buy/sell it manually. I'd prefer instead for the system to use BTC under the hood. Another example I read about recently is Argentina. People are using Bitcoin there for daily transactions and for their savings due to high fluctuations in the local currency.
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  I can tell you my personal issues with bitcoin. 1) I'm still bitter I threw all mine away. I had a few hundred in the early days and thought, "this isnt going anywhere".... 2) I'm one of HN's resident conspiracy theorists, for lack of a better term, and bitcoin can be seen as a threat to freedom because for all the awesome things it is, it is not anonymous. This may seem innocuous at first, but if you subscribe to the globalist conspiracy view, one of the primary tenants of "their plan" involves cashless, digital only currecy easily tied to your personhood. In essence, I fear the future will be more totalitarian and dystopian than people realize, and digital currencies like bt seem ripe for abuse and use in such a system. 3) Along the same lines as 2, I feel like once banks start getting into bitcoin heavily, despite its theoretical mechanisms to prevent it, the banks will find a way to corrupt and control the system. The community has already experienced the first attempts in the form of the huge first price inflation. 4) Another problem with bitcoin is that it requires good cybersecurity, which we all know is much more rare than anyone wants to admit. It's ripe for mass thefts. Once that wallet is gone, not much can be done. Ok, thats most of it, now I have to say that I understand there are many "ifs" in what I am saying, but to me the threats are real. I still will use bitcoin for the time being anyway, and there are many good things about it and other *coins, but you didnt ask what I liked, you asked what I dont like. On that note, blockchain technology independent of bitcoin I expect to be a huuge hit. Blockchain all the things!
  - CaptainZapp 10y ago
    Can you recommend a good introductory book into the blockchain?
    - jasonisalive 10y ago
      Both the developer guide and developer reference under https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation. Deep reading but you will really understand the subject afterwards.
    - brighton36 10y ago
      There are no efficiencies to blockchain. That technology is 100% hype
- aliakhtar 10y ago
  Because a lot of us understand the underlying tech, and how bullshit it is that a $100 cell phone has a higher TPS rate than the entire bitcoin network, which consumes more electricity than a small country (and all the CO2 emissions that go with it)
  - mbmott 10y ago
    A $100 cellphone isn't a decentralized peer to peer network. You are comparing apples to nose-hairs. Bitcoin will scale in the same way the internet scaled... slowly and then suddenly.
    - aliakhtar 10y ago
      People don't use cars because they have a hard on for internal combustion engines. They use cars to go from one place to another, i.e their utility. The utility of bitcoin is its TPS rate.
      - mbmott 10y ago
        Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency. Like I said, Bitcoin will scale like the internet scaled which is in direct proportion to demand. Blocks aren't often full and if you are in a hurry then you need to pay 10 or 20 cents to prioritize your transaction.
        aliakhtar 10y ago
        There is already a global currency which works great: USD. I live in Pakistan, and I regularly pay my AWS bill, IDE subscription, Netflix, VPN, and a lot of other things with USD.
        rhino369 10y ago
        >Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency. But it's hard to get and hard to use. It's useful for a pseudo-anonymous transfer for value. Unless I'm doing something illegal, Visa is a better option.
- drcode 10y ago
  As a big bitcoin supporter from the olden days my impression is that there have always been many quite open minded people commenting on stories, and most of the criticism has at least been reasonably informed.
- blue_dinner 10y ago
  Because right now, the exchanges are run by people that have no business running it in the first place (huge hacks every month and people losing thousands of dollars), the average consumer will have no idea how to keep it secure (my parents would probably lose all of their money), and it seems the inflation rate can still easily be manipulated (the value has crashed multiple times in the last few years). Until these things are fixed, I don't think I will ever use or invest in Bitcoin.
- timbowhite 10y ago
  I wondered the same a while ago, maybe the responses there will give you some insight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711738
overcast 10y ago
Is this like the Linux on desktop prophecy?
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  It's more like the Segway prophecy.
- clemensley 10y ago
  Maybe this isn't a bad analogy. I'm sure you are aware that Linux is the most used consumer facing OS today (android). So sometimes these prophecies do come true, just almost never in the way you think in advance.
  - AlexMax 10y ago
    Extrapolating the analogy, this leads me to believe that there will eventually be a company that uses the blockchain to deliver a killer app, but it won't be Bitcoin.
- maaku 10y ago
  Linux is on the desktop. It's just the definition of "desktop" has changed... The devices people use day-to-day are predominantly either iOS or Android, just like how the devices people used day-to-day in the 90's were Windows.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    Yes! According to this new definition, about one out of every three devices run Linux at the moment.[0] I hate this "Linux of the desktop" analogy because people really fail to realize that it has already happened and that they have missed it. I blogged about this a couple of months back: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/year-of-linux/ https://blog.r3bl.me/en/year-of-linux/ http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-201503-201603 http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-201503-201603

So many bitcoin haters in these comments... we'll see who's wrong in a decade or so.

by hypron 10y ago

So many bitcoin haters in these comments... we'll see who's wrong in a decade or so.

clemensley 10y ago

I've always wondered why hackernews hates bitcoin so much. Can someone explain?

mentos 10y ago
Like anything in life I think there is a bit of 'crab mentality' here where people don't want to see something succeed if they do not stand to see any reward from it.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I think it's more a reaction to the culty "get rich quick" Bitcoin "investors". It seems that very few people are actually interested in Bitcoin for its UX and the things it enables, everyone is either get-rich-quick or anti-get-rich-quick.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >I think it's more a reaction to the culty "get rich quick" Bitcoin "investors". Are there any other kind? Besides, the fact that among the top 3 exchanges were the crap fests of "a man-week of amateur PHP code" and the like that were taken down speaks volumes about the kind of crap the bitcoin crowd can't see through.
api 10y ago
Different reasons for different people. There are several camps of BitCoin haters: (1) There are people who think it's a pure speculative bubble or pyramid scheme. (I disagree because it has utility.) (2) There are also people who point out that it's a deflationary currency and therefore broken. (I sympathize a bit with this view but it's not enough to make me dismiss it completely. I think this might be a solvable problem.) (3) There seem to be some who just take a contrarian position against things that have received a ton of hype or that are too fashionable.
- ssharp 10y ago
  There is also a camp of people who don't think Bitcoin has much utility when compared to established alternatives, let alone other advances in other crypto/blockchain tech.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>Can someone explain? What exactly is the news here? Some company accepts some new form of payment that hardly anyone uses. When it comes to "money", Bitcoin proponents seem massively misinformed on how it actually works. The blockchain technology is interesting, but a new currency isn't as exciting as they want you to believe. I don't care that my dollar has no inherent value, as long as people accept it in exchange, that's all I care about. And they do, everywhere.
- jMyles 10y ago
  > that's all I care about Well that's a bit short-sighted then. Plenty of people care about a lot more than that in a currency, namely that is it responsibly and equitably managed. Bitcoin is not this, of course, but it's a giant step in the right direction compared to the Federal Reserve.
  - rhino369 10y ago
    No, it's a massive step in the wrong direction compared to the federal reserve. There is reason bitcoins value wildly fluctuates and the US dollars doesn't.
    - bigmanwalter 10y ago
      Isn't it because big ships don't maneuver so quickly?
      - rhino369 10y ago
        No it's because the fed actively manages money supply while Bitcoin managed money supply by setting money growth at a predetermined rate. That and the vast majority of bitcoins are held for speculation instead of used as a currency.
        CyberDildonics 10y ago
        Many other countries have currencies that fluctuate wildly even with their own central banks. Is the US just better at managing it? The Yen lost half of its value a few years ago.
wslh 10y ago
I think the sector is full of bullshit and there are a lot of people looking for easy money because you can easily setup a gambling site without asking for regulatory based permissions. But, again, the core innovation about cryptocurrencies/blockchain (I risk a lot of HN karma using the later word!) is strong and has long term implications beyond the current issues on PoW, miners, etc.
jug5 10y ago
Nerds follow most propaganda like any other sector. Do a quick poll and see what level of encryption HN uses for day to day life.
coldtea 10y ago
It's because it's not just comprised of tech people, who are excited about its theoretical underpinnings, but also by business savvy people, who know that it will hardly fly for numerous reasons (and if a similar technology ever catches up, it will have so many government imposed regulations as to be totally different), plus old jaded tech persons who know a marginal at best tech and/or snake oil when they see it. Aside for people excited by the tech (and its potential applications to other fields), the core of bitcoin believes are either get-rich-quick types who buy into the pyramid scheme, tin-foil crackpots (similar to gold hoarders), and stick-it-to-the-man true believers (with a freeman-of-the-land [1] mentality) naive enough to believe it can trump regulation and disrupt "the system". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land
- brighton36 10y ago
  Bitcoin is for the underserved. It will grow to be exactly as large as this market is regulated to be. Thus far this market is sex, drugs,gambling and capital flight. It will fly, because government subsidizes it's use here.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  A few of us look at it for uses in other countries, where local currencies are unreliable, and corruption makes it desirable to hold large amounts of your income as "black money." In areas of high corruption, a networked, global currency could be rather freeing.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  I'm sorry, but you're looking at Bitcoin from a narrow viewpoint. There are in fact people who actually need Bitcoin in their day-to-day. My home country Tunisia for example has very strict currency controls in place, which means that it is impossible to purchase any goods from outside the country or even transfer money overseas. The government now provides rechargeable card with a 1000 TND (~500 USD) limit that can be used for online purchases. However, these are only issued to software developers and entrepreneurs to allow them to subscribe to online services, such as hosting, domain names, etc. Bitcoin provides a quick and easy way to circumvent that: convert your TND to BTC, and use that to purchase online goods or to transfer money outside the country. I'm actually thinking of setting up a MVP to test out this idea, but I'm struggling to come up with a solution that is completely transparent for the end-user. In other words, I don't want the user to have to understand Bitcoin or buy/sell it manually. I'd prefer instead for the system to use BTC under the hood. Another example I read about recently is Argentina. People are using Bitcoin there for daily transactions and for their savings due to high fluctuations in the local currency.
arca_vorago 10y ago
I can tell you my personal issues with bitcoin. 1) I'm still bitter I threw all mine away. I had a few hundred in the early days and thought, "this isnt going anywhere".... 2) I'm one of HN's resident conspiracy theorists, for lack of a better term, and bitcoin can be seen as a threat to freedom because for all the awesome things it is, it is not anonymous. This may seem innocuous at first, but if you subscribe to the globalist conspiracy view, one of the primary tenants of "their plan" involves cashless, digital only currecy easily tied to your personhood. In essence, I fear the future will be more totalitarian and dystopian than people realize, and digital currencies like bt seem ripe for abuse and use in such a system. 3) Along the same lines as 2, I feel like once banks start getting into bitcoin heavily, despite its theoretical mechanisms to prevent it, the banks will find a way to corrupt and control the system. The community has already experienced the first attempts in the form of the huge first price inflation. 4) Another problem with bitcoin is that it requires good cybersecurity, which we all know is much more rare than anyone wants to admit. It's ripe for mass thefts. Once that wallet is gone, not much can be done. Ok, thats most of it, now I have to say that I understand there are many "ifs" in what I am saying, but to me the threats are real. I still will use bitcoin for the time being anyway, and there are many good things about it and other *coins, but you didnt ask what I liked, you asked what I dont like. On that note, blockchain technology independent of bitcoin I expect to be a huuge hit. Blockchain all the things!
- CaptainZapp 10y ago
  Can you recommend a good introductory book into the blockchain?
  - jasonisalive 10y ago
    Both the developer guide and developer reference under https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation. Deep reading but you will really understand the subject afterwards.
  - brighton36 10y ago
    There are no efficiencies to blockchain. That technology is 100% hype
aliakhtar 10y ago
Because a lot of us understand the underlying tech, and how bullshit it is that a $100 cell phone has a higher TPS rate than the entire bitcoin network, which consumes more electricity than a small country (and all the CO2 emissions that go with it)
- mbmott 10y ago
  A $100 cellphone isn't a decentralized peer to peer network. You are comparing apples to nose-hairs. Bitcoin will scale in the same way the internet scaled... slowly and then suddenly.
  - aliakhtar 10y ago
    People don't use cars because they have a hard on for internal combustion engines. They use cars to go from one place to another, i.e their utility. The utility of bitcoin is its TPS rate.
    - mbmott 10y ago
      Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency. Like I said, Bitcoin will scale like the internet scaled which is in direct proportion to demand. Blocks aren't often full and if you are in a hurry then you need to pay 10 or 20 cents to prioritize your transaction.
      - aliakhtar 10y ago
        There is already a global currency which works great: USD. I live in Pakistan, and I regularly pay my AWS bill, IDE subscription, Netflix, VPN, and a lot of other things with USD.
      - rhino369 10y ago
        >Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency. But it's hard to get and hard to use. It's useful for a pseudo-anonymous transfer for value. Unless I'm doing something illegal, Visa is a better option.
drcode 10y ago
As a big bitcoin supporter from the olden days my impression is that there have always been many quite open minded people commenting on stories, and most of the criticism has at least been reasonably informed.
blue_dinner 10y ago
Because right now, the exchanges are run by people that have no business running it in the first place (huge hacks every month and people losing thousands of dollars), the average consumer will have no idea how to keep it secure (my parents would probably lose all of their money), and it seems the inflation rate can still easily be manipulated (the value has crashed multiple times in the last few years). Until these things are fixed, I don't think I will ever use or invest in Bitcoin.
timbowhite 10y ago
I wondered the same a while ago, maybe the responses there will give you some insight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711738

overcast 10y ago

Is this like the Linux on desktop prophecy?

jbmorgado 10y ago
It's more like the Segway prophecy.
clemensley 10y ago
Maybe this isn't a bad analogy. I'm sure you are aware that Linux is the most used consumer facing OS today (android). So sometimes these prophecies do come true, just almost never in the way you think in advance.
- AlexMax 10y ago
  Extrapolating the analogy, this leads me to believe that there will eventually be a company that uses the blockchain to deliver a killer app, but it won't be Bitcoin.
maaku 10y ago
Linux is on the desktop. It's just the definition of "desktop" has changed... The devices people use day-to-day are predominantly either iOS or Android, just like how the devices people used day-to-day in the 90's were Windows.
- r3bl 10y ago
  Yes! According to this new definition, about one out of every three devices run Linux at the moment.[0] I hate this "Linux of the desktop" analogy because people really fail to realize that it has already happened and that they have missed it. I blogged about this a couple of months back: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/year-of-linux/ https://blog.r3bl.me/en/year-of-linux/ http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-201503-201603 http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-os-ww-monthly-201503-201603