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I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I use

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5? From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

ebbv 10y ago
> If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. Back in the 90's when there was more of a religious fervor around Linux the way there is around Bitcoin right now, yeah you would have. The vitriol is no mystery, it's an obvious reaction to the way so many people have rapturously talked about Bitcoin as if it's going to make governments irrelevant. We're at the beginning of Bitcoin being treated more like the novelty that it is, and possibly finding a niche where it can be useful over the long term. As it enters this phase where the hype around it dies down, the vitriol will as well.
brighton36 10y ago
Money is a religion
echelon 10y ago
I have no stake or interest in Bitcoin, and I wrote it off some years ago. I find it kind of annoying when there are stories about it or altcoins in my news feed (in lieu of other things). It's noise in my signal. This is just my own personal feeling; I wouldn't go as far as to describe my feeling towards Bitcoin as hate. I can't explain the feelings or motivations of those who actively detract from the technology. It's probably similar to Apple "hate". Or inverse "fanboyism".
- kbenzle 10y ago
  I saw Bitcoin as another Second Life, great for smart young programmers to have a new sandbox to play in, but not actually useful for working adults. I was similarly "annoyed" by all the Second Life media hype happening after I had written it off.
  - dmihal 10y ago
    The difference is that Bitcoin/Blockchain technology really is a groundbreaking invention from a computer science perspective. Bitcoin may or may not succeed, but something can't be un-invented. Furthermore, it's interesting to see companies like Steam, and even Wall Street players, embracing this new technology.
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      > Bitcoin may or may not succeed Thats what people were saying in 2012, 2013 The network is working fine. This is success. What is your metric of success in this statement? I find it counterintuitive.
      - andypants 10y ago
        They are waiting for bitcoin to become the number #1 currency. Just like people joke about 'the year of linux'. Guess what, linux is still around. It doesn't need to be #1. There may never be a 'year of linux', but it doesn't mean linux is a failure.
        cloudjacker 10y ago
        I see, I don't see it being successful at that, in trade. I see it's blockchain and consensus model being used as settlement on a broad and broader scale.
  - solotronics 10y ago
    People made these same comments about the internet when it was young.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  I find Apple 'hate' far more understandable because of their market share. Bitcoin makes up a tiny portion of the market and is completely optional. I mean, it barely even exists. Apple's activities (notably 'tivoization'), threaten general purpose computing. Regardless I still try to come to peace with it (i think it's very important to have a positive mindset). As long as I can still buy my ARM SoC boards, x86 machines, etc, I'll be happy. If that starts looking dim, eh. We'll see.
  - balls187 10y ago
    Apple hate existed long before Apple had dominant market share.
    - justratsinacoat 10y ago
      But the elemental composition of Apple hate has changed since.
      - balls187 10y ago
        Yes: Haters gonna Hate.
wyldfire 10y ago
It's really polarizing because it forces us to question what we think of as currency. Is it sufficient for it to be scarce, durable, verifyable and fungible or should it have some independent utility or backing? Some of the vitriol is backlash against the zealots who feel that Bitcoin can/should enable elements of anarchy.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  There is one important property of currency that you are missing in your list: accepted. Currency that is not accepted as payment for things has little use as currency. It is easy enough to create something that meets all of your requirements, but unless people are willing to accept the currency in exchange for goods and services, it is useless. Of course, currency has a very strong network effect. Its value is tied very closely to the number of people who use it.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  I think that's only true if you follow this idea that Bitcoin is going to take over the world, become a global reserve currency, we should hold 100% net worth in it, whatever. Regardless of correctness, that sort of attitude feels really stressful to me (to think about the ultimate endgame of anything that ever happens under some 'ideal' circumstances). I don't think it's healthy. For the time being, we have a cool technology that lets me use asymmetric crypto to send people a tenner on the other side of the world. If it all fails or drops massively in value tomorrow, I lose the small amount I have in my wallet. I'm sure some cypherpunks figured that GPG meant we would all plug ourselves into the wall and be anonymous and stateless and stuff. That probably won't happen, but does it make GPG useless, worthy of ranting about?
  - chc 10y ago
    If it were borderline impossible to have a discussion of GPG without getting swamped by those cypherpunks, people would totally rant about it.
jerf 10y ago
Actually, I'd suggest you do sometimes see people saying that about Linux, especially when Linux "on the desktop" comes up. And the reason is that neither project is simply a neutral software development project, but are politically charged. Linux at this point really just has a political "tinge" to it with the free software stuff, but Bitcoin is drenched in politics. So people are responding with their political brains rather than their raw technical brains. I am not trying to imply this is bad. The politics are intrinsically worthy of thought and discussion. I could wish for a higher level of discourse on political matters, but humans have been doing that for lo these many thousands of years and I doubt this is the year that's going to change. Our "political brains" are complicated, messy things, tied into tribal instincts, personal identity, and all sorts of other messy things that make it difficult.
- stegosaurus 10y ago
  I think you're spot on with this. The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up. We seem to be able to leave each other alone when it comes to using vi vs. emacs - the odd joke comes up, but that's about it. But politics? There seems to be this attitude of conversion, missionaries, convincing, it's kind of frustrating. I think it's healthy to question one's views sometimes, but not to face a constant onslaught. Looking a bit harder, the language people use here is quite clearly politicized and strange - people use past tense, which I find difficult to interpret as anything other than trolling. No-one would say 'Linux was a good OS', because it currently exists and is used daily...?
  - deepnet 10y ago
    Experimentally it can be informative to refresh one's controversial comments as this can show the total may have received many more up and down votes than the final total suggests. My inner statistician would be interested to see up & down totals as a metric of controversy. FUD merchants, social media management, astroturf, superpacs, brigades, vendettas are common enough on Reddit and the Post-Snowden zeitgeist demands we consider Orwell's '84 where the mere possibilty of being observed is enough to bring general opinion & behaviour to heel.
  - 10y ago
apo 10y ago
I've run into the sentiment you're talking about both online and IRL. It puzzles me as well. Three factors come to mind: 1. There's a deep-rooted idea today that money comes from the government and that everything else is a scam. Bitcoin challenges that idea. 2. Bitcoin refuses to die despite the predictions of just about everyone who first learns about it. 3. The technical underpinnings of Bitcoin are counterintuitive to say the least. That makes Bitcoin hard to understand even for the technically-oriented. The combination of longevity, casual disregard for convention, and counterintuitive nature gets annoying after awhile. Nor are these factors restricted to those who can't stand Bitcoin, its users, or the idea of private money. Many of the most vocal Bitcoin advocates today went through a period of disbelief or outright hostility toward the idea.
- btcprint 10y ago
  To point 1. Most who don't understand bitcoin think the federal Reserve is a government agency. But these same people got (and still are) angry at the banks for their part in the great recession. If they really understood what happened in 1913 with the creation of the fed their heads would spin. Those that understand the big picture and the threat central banks pose to a nations sovereignty, and the debt slavery of its citizens, are the ones who truly appreciate bitcoin
  - wyck 10y ago
    This is why many bitcoin proponents comes across as naive, broad political statements bordering on false beliefs come across as juvenile and in many cases fanatic. Stay with the facts and reality, a.k.a. the technology, statements like the above create a toxic environment in which the bitcoin community currently finds itself deeply mired in.
    - fjidodhofjf 10y ago
      How false is it criticize central bank policy? They are dragging the world into another great depression, destroying the lives of billions along the way. At some point it gets tiresome to speak with those who have no understanding of economics nor history. Can you defend the last 8 years of Central Bank policy, are you even schooled in this area of study? Your criticisms are naïve.
Kinnard 10y ago
HTML actually sucks, technically . . . It was never meant to be used to build modern web apps, just documents with links.
draw_down 10y ago
I dunno about vitriol, it just seems like a really silly and pointless thing to me.
vectorpush 10y ago
I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion. The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and blockchain companies making extraordinary claims while consistently under-delivering or outright scamming customers, the warped world-view where communities of impoverished people who can barely meet their daily needs and have markedly poor computer literacy and limited access to computers and internet will be lifted out of poverty by banking with bitcoin, the constant dismissal of bitcoin skeptics as "not understanding" bitcoin, the self-aggrandizing elevation of satoshi and bitcoin programmers as programming prodigies, the condescendingly absurd notion that detractors, the banks and the governments are afraid of bitcoin or afraid of the bitcoin money revolution, the tone-deaf advocacy of bitcoin as a safer method of payment than credit cards, the general refusal to acknowledge bitcoin's practical challenges as real problems (non-technical people being scammed or permanently losing their money due to data-loss, theft, misconfiguration of software, sending bitcoin to the wrong address, downloading a scam wallet), the oversaturation of the underwhelming "x but with bitcoin" formula that pops up every couple weeks... and much more. As heated, vitriolic and personal as linux discussions can get, its taken for granted that everyone is at least operating in the same objective reality (systemd vs upstart, gnome vs unity, mir vs wayland, even windows vs linux), but a large swath of bitcoin enthusiasts look at bitcoin as something that eclipses every other technical topic in importance to the point where it comes off as quasi-religious.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people. Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay. Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good. Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak. That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future. This because while inflation can be bad when it runs riot (though money printing in itself is rarely if ever the cause) it is better in the long run than deflation, as that allows some entity or other to corner the market. And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.
exbitcoinuser 10y ago
I believe most people don't realize that to support Bitcoin you either have to adhere to extremely polarizing political beliefs or be completely neutral about it (because you don't care or you don't know). (IMO, of course) People who are neutral might fail to realize the political implications of Bitcoin and immediately jump to "those people are mental, why do they hate us?" That applies pretty much to any political discussion ever.
lmm 10y ago
It's a technology for allowing money to bypass the rule of law. By design it concentrates power in the hands of property owners, and allows them to undercut democratic rules against activities with negative externalities - and since it's more expensive than currency, those are the only use cases that make sense; prime use cases would be things like drugs, smuggling, tax evasion, child porn, terrorism. I think IED control software is a pretty fair comparison actually, except that IEDs are somewhat more democratic.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  Are you talking about Bitcoin, or cash?
  - lmm 10y ago
    Cash isn't quite as bad because it's less practical, but yes both are primarily useful for crime and antisocial activity. I would be suspicious of someone who paid a large bill in cash (or used gold, or bricks of drugs); wouldn't you?
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      I'm not answering your question as written because I disagree with the concept of cash and "bricks of drugs" as being equally suspicious. Being suspicious of cash is very dangerous. Historically, the poor rely on cash far more than the rich, so if we start demonizing it, really you're demonizing the poor. Politicians know this and often exploit it to help their rich friends. Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. Your fear of it seems unfounded, though the paranoid part of me does wonder if you work for Visa or some other financial institution.
      - lmm 10y ago
        > Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. That's backwards. Bitcoin is directly controlled by the owners of property (miners), in proportion to how much they own.
easuter 10y ago
For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap. There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke. IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments). You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.
- statoshi 10y ago
  I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.
  - easuter 10y ago
    I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild. Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware. Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.

ebbv 10y ago

> If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. Back in the 90's when there was more of a religious fervor around Linux the way there is around Bitcoin right now, yeah you would have. The vitriol is no mystery, it's an obvious reaction to the way so many people have rapturously talked about Bitcoin as if it's going to make governments irrelevant. We're at the beginning of Bitcoin being treated more like the novelty that it is, and possibly finding a niche where it can be useful over the long term. As it enters this phase where the hype around it dies down, the vitriol will as well.

brighton36 10y ago

Money is a religion

echelon 10y ago

I have no stake or interest in Bitcoin, and I wrote it off some years ago. I find it kind of annoying when there are stories about it or altcoins in my news feed (in lieu of other things). It's noise in my signal. This is just my own personal feeling; I wouldn't go as far as to describe my feeling towards Bitcoin as hate. I can't explain the feelings or motivations of those who actively detract from the technology. It's probably similar to Apple "hate". Or inverse "fanboyism".

kbenzle 10y ago
I saw Bitcoin as another Second Life, great for smart young programmers to have a new sandbox to play in, but not actually useful for working adults. I was similarly "annoyed" by all the Second Life media hype happening after I had written it off.
- dmihal 10y ago
  The difference is that Bitcoin/Blockchain technology really is a groundbreaking invention from a computer science perspective. Bitcoin may or may not succeed, but something can't be un-invented. Furthermore, it's interesting to see companies like Steam, and even Wall Street players, embracing this new technology.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    > Bitcoin may or may not succeed Thats what people were saying in 2012, 2013 The network is working fine. This is success. What is your metric of success in this statement? I find it counterintuitive.
    - andypants 10y ago
      They are waiting for bitcoin to become the number #1 currency. Just like people joke about 'the year of linux'. Guess what, linux is still around. It doesn't need to be #1. There may never be a 'year of linux', but it doesn't mean linux is a failure.
      - cloudjacker 10y ago
        I see, I don't see it being successful at that, in trade. I see it's blockchain and consensus model being used as settlement on a broad and broader scale.
- solotronics 10y ago
  People made these same comments about the internet when it was young.
stegosaurus 10y ago
I find Apple 'hate' far more understandable because of their market share. Bitcoin makes up a tiny portion of the market and is completely optional. I mean, it barely even exists. Apple's activities (notably 'tivoization'), threaten general purpose computing. Regardless I still try to come to peace with it (i think it's very important to have a positive mindset). As long as I can still buy my ARM SoC boards, x86 machines, etc, I'll be happy. If that starts looking dim, eh. We'll see.
- balls187 10y ago
  Apple hate existed long before Apple had dominant market share.
  - justratsinacoat 10y ago
    But the elemental composition of Apple hate has changed since.
    - balls187 10y ago
      Yes: Haters gonna Hate.

wyldfire 10y ago

It's really polarizing because it forces us to question what we think of as currency. Is it sufficient for it to be scarce, durable, verifyable and fungible or should it have some independent utility or backing? Some of the vitriol is backlash against the zealots who feel that Bitcoin can/should enable elements of anarchy.

cortesoft 10y ago
There is one important property of currency that you are missing in your list: accepted. Currency that is not accepted as payment for things has little use as currency. It is easy enough to create something that meets all of your requirements, but unless people are willing to accept the currency in exchange for goods and services, it is useless. Of course, currency has a very strong network effect. Its value is tied very closely to the number of people who use it.
stegosaurus 10y ago
I think that's only true if you follow this idea that Bitcoin is going to take over the world, become a global reserve currency, we should hold 100% net worth in it, whatever. Regardless of correctness, that sort of attitude feels really stressful to me (to think about the ultimate endgame of anything that ever happens under some 'ideal' circumstances). I don't think it's healthy. For the time being, we have a cool technology that lets me use asymmetric crypto to send people a tenner on the other side of the world. If it all fails or drops massively in value tomorrow, I lose the small amount I have in my wallet. I'm sure some cypherpunks figured that GPG meant we would all plug ourselves into the wall and be anonymous and stateless and stuff. That probably won't happen, but does it make GPG useless, worthy of ranting about?
- chc 10y ago
  If it were borderline impossible to have a discussion of GPG without getting swamped by those cypherpunks, people would totally rant about it.

jerf 10y ago

Actually, I'd suggest you do sometimes see people saying that about Linux, especially when Linux "on the desktop" comes up. And the reason is that neither project is simply a neutral software development project, but are politically charged. Linux at this point really just has a political "tinge" to it with the free software stuff, but Bitcoin is drenched in politics. So people are responding with their political brains rather than their raw technical brains. I am not trying to imply this is bad. The politics are intrinsically worthy of thought and discussion. I could wish for a higher level of discourse on political matters, but humans have been doing that for lo these many thousands of years and I doubt this is the year that's going to change. Our "political brains" are complicated, messy things, tied into tribal instincts, personal identity, and all sorts of other messy things that make it difficult.

stegosaurus 10y ago
I think you're spot on with this. The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up. We seem to be able to leave each other alone when it comes to using vi vs. emacs - the odd joke comes up, but that's about it. But politics? There seems to be this attitude of conversion, missionaries, convincing, it's kind of frustrating. I think it's healthy to question one's views sometimes, but not to face a constant onslaught. Looking a bit harder, the language people use here is quite clearly politicized and strange - people use past tense, which I find difficult to interpret as anything other than trolling. No-one would say 'Linux was a good OS', because it currently exists and is used daily...?
- deepnet 10y ago
  Experimentally it can be informative to refresh one's controversial comments as this can show the total may have received many more up and down votes than the final total suggests. My inner statistician would be interested to see up & down totals as a metric of controversy. FUD merchants, social media management, astroturf, superpacs, brigades, vendettas are common enough on Reddit and the Post-Snowden zeitgeist demands we consider Orwell's '84 where the mere possibilty of being observed is enough to bring general opinion & behaviour to heel.
- 10y ago

apo 10y ago

I've run into the sentiment you're talking about both online and IRL. It puzzles me as well. Three factors come to mind: 1. There's a deep-rooted idea today that money comes from the government and that everything else is a scam. Bitcoin challenges that idea. 2. Bitcoin refuses to die despite the predictions of just about everyone who first learns about it. 3. The technical underpinnings of Bitcoin are counterintuitive to say the least. That makes Bitcoin hard to understand even for the technically-oriented. The combination of longevity, casual disregard for convention, and counterintuitive nature gets annoying after awhile. Nor are these factors restricted to those who can't stand Bitcoin, its users, or the idea of private money. Many of the most vocal Bitcoin advocates today went through a period of disbelief or outright hostility toward the idea.

btcprint 10y ago
To point 1. Most who don't understand bitcoin think the federal Reserve is a government agency. But these same people got (and still are) angry at the banks for their part in the great recession. If they really understood what happened in 1913 with the creation of the fed their heads would spin. Those that understand the big picture and the threat central banks pose to a nations sovereignty, and the debt slavery of its citizens, are the ones who truly appreciate bitcoin
- wyck 10y ago
  This is why many bitcoin proponents comes across as naive, broad political statements bordering on false beliefs come across as juvenile and in many cases fanatic. Stay with the facts and reality, a.k.a. the technology, statements like the above create a toxic environment in which the bitcoin community currently finds itself deeply mired in.
  - fjidodhofjf 10y ago
    How false is it criticize central bank policy? They are dragging the world into another great depression, destroying the lives of billions along the way. At some point it gets tiresome to speak with those who have no understanding of economics nor history. Can you defend the last 8 years of Central Bank policy, are you even schooled in this area of study? Your criticisms are naïve.

Kinnard 10y ago

HTML actually sucks, technically . . . It was never meant to be used to build modern web apps, just documents with links.

draw_down 10y ago

I dunno about vitriol, it just seems like a really silly and pointless thing to me.

vectorpush 10y ago

I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion. The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and blockchain companies making extraordinary claims while consistently under-delivering or outright scamming customers, the warped world-view where communities of impoverished people who can barely meet their daily needs and have markedly poor computer literacy and limited access to computers and internet will be lifted out of poverty by banking with bitcoin, the constant dismissal of bitcoin skeptics as "not understanding" bitcoin, the self-aggrandizing elevation of satoshi and bitcoin programmers as programming prodigies, the condescendingly absurd notion that detractors, the banks and the governments are afraid of bitcoin or afraid of the bitcoin money revolution, the tone-deaf advocacy of bitcoin as a safer method of payment than credit cards, the general refusal to acknowledge bitcoin's practical challenges as real problems (non-technical people being scammed or permanently losing their money due to data-loss, theft, misconfiguration of software, sending bitcoin to the wrong address, downloading a scam wallet), the oversaturation of the underwhelming "x but with bitcoin" formula that pops up every couple weeks... and much more. As heated, vitriolic and personal as linux discussions can get, its taken for granted that everyone is at least operating in the same objective reality (systemd vs upstart, gnome vs unity, mir vs wayland, even windows vs linux), but a large swath of bitcoin enthusiasts look at bitcoin as something that eclipses every other technical topic in importance to the point where it comes off as quasi-religious.

digi_owl 10y ago
You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people. Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay. Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good. Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak. That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future. This because while inflation can be bad when it runs riot (though money printing in itself is rarely if ever the cause) it is better in the long run than deflation, as that allows some entity or other to corner the market. And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.

exbitcoinuser 10y ago

I believe most people don't realize that to support Bitcoin you either have to adhere to extremely polarizing political beliefs or be completely neutral about it (because you don't care or you don't know). (IMO, of course) People who are neutral might fail to realize the political implications of Bitcoin and immediately jump to "those people are mental, why do they hate us?" That applies pretty much to any political discussion ever.

lmm 10y ago

It's a technology for allowing money to bypass the rule of law. By design it concentrates power in the hands of property owners, and allows them to undercut democratic rules against activities with negative externalities - and since it's more expensive than currency, those are the only use cases that make sense; prime use cases would be things like drugs, smuggling, tax evasion, child porn, terrorism. I think IED control software is a pretty fair comparison actually, except that IEDs are somewhat more democratic.

LeoPanthera 10y ago
Are you talking about Bitcoin, or cash?
- lmm 10y ago
  Cash isn't quite as bad because it's less practical, but yes both are primarily useful for crime and antisocial activity. I would be suspicious of someone who paid a large bill in cash (or used gold, or bricks of drugs); wouldn't you?
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    I'm not answering your question as written because I disagree with the concept of cash and "bricks of drugs" as being equally suspicious. Being suspicious of cash is very dangerous. Historically, the poor rely on cash far more than the rich, so if we start demonizing it, really you're demonizing the poor. Politicians know this and often exploit it to help their rich friends. Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. Your fear of it seems unfounded, though the paranoid part of me does wonder if you work for Visa or some other financial institution.
    - lmm 10y ago
      > Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. That's backwards. Bitcoin is directly controlled by the owners of property (miners), in proportion to how much they own.

easuter 10y ago

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap. There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke. IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.

Natanael_L 10y ago
Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments). You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.
statoshi 10y ago
I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.
- easuter 10y ago
  I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild. Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware. Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.