9 ms·

Frankly I'm astounded by the vitriol toward Bitcoin on HN. Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world (unlike most of the BS startups coming out of

• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  There's not that much vitriol here? Tons of people here own bitcoin and obviously believe in it and tons of people here are skeptical about it. I don't usually see anyone actually "mad" about bitcoin.
  • brndnmtthws 9y ago
    Try making a positive comment about Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, and watch the downvotes come flying in.
    • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Well considering the amount of forums on the net where you can't even mention bitcoin without everyone who holds it swarming you - "Buy the dip", "This is good for bitcoin", etc. - I'd say everyone is pretty aware of the positives behind bitcoin and isn't too interested in hearing them regurgitated from yet another evangelist.
    • aquadrop 9y ago
      Bitcoin is good.
    • ska 9y ago
      downvotes == vitriol?
    • scott_s 9y ago
      HN is a large community, with many people who have opposing views of many issues. I think you're experiencing a common phenomenon in large communities: you feel the people who disagree with you much more than those that agree with you. This is, I think, a form of confirmation bias.
• giancarlostoro 9y ago
  I was skeptical. Then I remembered I mined some BTC back in the day and have it sitting on coinbase now. Now I realize your mind changes a bit once you own an actual bitcoin or some amound of btc or satoshi. Then you kinda don't become as critical. It's amazing to think of all the things I can buy with BTC without risking the paypal issues of account lockout or other similar cases.
• ufo 9y ago
  I dont think poopooing bitcoin's speculative bubble has to do with poopooing it as a technology. For its original purpose as a digital currency, USD value should not matter (as long as it doesn't fluctuate too much)
  • brndnmtthws 9y ago
    That's similar to the argument that "blockchain good, Bitcoin bad". Bitcoin is the killer app. Similarly, the internet is great not because of TCP, but because of the information (which is what gives it value).
    • deevolution 9y ago
      The medium is the message. I'd argue the underlying technology, that is blockchain, is actually the most impactful. Bitcoin is just an implementation and an example of how blockchain based technology can affect society.
  • adrianveidt 9y ago
    PoW costs money. As PoW difficulty increases, and mining reward decreases, it makes sense for value to increase to make it sustainable.
    • ufo 9y ago
      Bitcoin's price is determined by supply and demand, not by the mining reward curve. But yes, Bitcoin would need an exponentially increasing price to be sustainable in the long term without higher transaction fees.
• theli0nheart 9y ago
  > Do people fear what they don't understand? Yes. > Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? Eh, I doubt it. > Does Bitcoin's success mean their loss (like the banking folks and the government establishment)? I don't think so. It's not a zero sum game. > Did people hate the internet this much in its early days? Some parts of it, yes. In the end, Bitcoin is still a wildly insane proposition and technology. It forces people to question longly held assumptions (on a millenium scale) of what money is. HNers are probably more likely to question, critique, and debate new things, and Bitcoin doesn't get a free pass simply because it's cool and exciting.
  • nikcub 9y ago
    > > Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? > Eh, I doubt it. I think there is something to this. If you've been on HN for 5+ years and have followed the progress of Bitcoin, but never dived in - but then gone on to watch non-tech people make 10x+ returns while not understanding the currency - there must be something about that which grates some people. I also think it's easy to dislike the "down with central banks", "fiat money is fake money" faction of bitcoin
    • quickben 9y ago
      It may be easy to dislike, but the law updates to make these banks the only game in town.
    • conanbatt 9y ago
      >I also think it's easy to dislike the "down with central banks", "fiat money is fake money" faction of bitcoin Thats the most appealing part. Most people dont like the government, they just want it to do something different.
• platz 9y ago
  The hubris Bitcoiners carry is completely different. The net started among academic wonks and University faculty pages. Bitcoiners purport to bring down Central banks and subvert the state, delivering a new social order.
  • craigc 9y ago
    I encourage you to read the Bitcoin white paper if you haven't. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf I think you are a little off base in the original intentions. It was designed to solve a real problem, and its creator was likely someone who had a background in academia although we may never know for certain. It is true that maybe a lot of the proponents today want to bring down central banks, but I think it's a little unfair to imply that that was the original intention.
    • platz 9y ago
      I am not scoping\targeting my statement to bitcoin's original intensions and white papers. I am referring 'Bitcoiners', the social entity, which have a separate life from the original intensions and white papers , and why there is "vitriol towards Bitcoin", as the OP requested.
• throw2016 9y ago
  Bitcoin is a massive waste of electricity for no good reason other than indulge early adopters fantasy for unearned wealth. All the fantasies and benefits it was originally promoted for have fallen by the wayside and only greed remains. It's an inefficient protocol and is now simply a store of speculated value and can't perform any other function by design. The bitcoin ecosystem is eager to sell out to the very financial establishment they were ranting about throughout its history. News of any bank even thinking about crypto sees thousands of excitable news articles and soaring prices.
• scurvy 9y ago
  It comes down to politics really. While Silicon Valley has a large Libertarian contingent, European tech crowds are dominated by statists. The statists are fundamentally opposed to bitcoin on many levels, so the vitriol runs hot and heavy there. The Libertarians love bitcoin like their forebears liked gold and distrusted the government. What is money today but the ultimate manifestation of politics in everyday life?
  • paulgb 9y ago
    That's a tempting narrative but I think for a lot of people who oppose Bitcoin it's a matter of belief in the monetary ideas behind it. Not in a political, what should we do sense, but the actual normative economics of how money works.
• candu 9y ago
  None of the above, IMHO; it's merely a reaction to what, from the "outside", looks like a speculative bubble fueled by the usual hype cycle mixed in with a dose of wanton techno-utopianism. We're quite used by this point to new frameworks, technologies, and scientific developments promising to "CHANGE THE WORLD!!!!!11!1~~". From this perspective, Bitcoin looks no different: we have people claiming decentralized proof-of-work consensus-finding will solve all our social / societal ills. Currency isn't as internationally portable as it should be? Use the blockchain! Voting systems are broken / poorly designed? Use the blockchain! The NSA is spying on all of us? Use the blockchain! In this hype cycle atmosphere, I think a good measure of skepticism is healthy: it reminds us that Bitcoin, like other technologies, has limitations, and that those hyping the technology have a vested interest in downplaying those limitations while promising the moon. While the underlying technology might in fact be part of a reasonable solution to each of these problems, it's easy to forget that the technology is only part of the puzzle. Technology is always embedded in a human context: modifying the habits, social pressures, incentives, laws, etc. that support a broken system is as important, if not more so, than changing the technical implementation. (In fact, I'd argue changing the technical implementation is impossible without addressing some of these social / psychological factors.)
• Marazan 9y ago
  Proof of work is intrinsically dumb. To store wealth in Bitcoin you are committing to the constant burn of energy in perpetuity.
  • krupan 9y ago
    Are you saying our fiat systems of transfers and settlements use no energy?
    • UncleMeat 9y ago
      It uses like seven orders of magnitude less per transaction.
      • krupan 9y ago
        Citation? And remember a Bitcoin transaction is cash moving from my account to yours. Not just a promise of cash, after a few days of settlement, if no chargeback happens
        • BLanen 9y ago
          You really think that a wire transfer takes a week's household of energy(Because that's the current energy per btc transaction)...?
          • krupan 9y ago
            What really goes into a wire transfer in order make it happen securely? And is it as secure as a Bitcoin transfer? See also: Xiphias' comment about Proof of Military Power.
            • NTDF9 9y ago
              Right...so you want a world where there is no collective security. But hey, at least we all have bitcoins in our wallets?
• beefield 9y ago
  The problem is that it has potential to change world for the worse, not the better. Fixed supply monetary systems have been tried in the history and there are reasons other than evil bankers wanting to get power for their dismissal. And claiming that bitcoin's success would be bankers loss indicates that you don't quite get what is the utility finance sector creates. One of the main things banks do is they convert short term deposits to long term loans. There is nothing in bitcoin that reduces the need for that service in our economy. There were banks at gold standard times and there will be banks in the extremely unlikely world where bitcoin is main currency in a society. There is no mechanism in bitcoin that would manage the volatility of the currency (against the price of bread and butter, not other currencies) That in itself makes it DOA as a proper currency. Further, even if that was sorted out and a society would want to have bitcoin as their currency, why the f*ck (pardon my french) the society would want to give the seignorage to bunch of cryptonerds? It is not like it is difficult to make a fork. I am not mad about missing one more tulip bubble/ponzi scheme. I am mad that people never seem to learn. Modern money is debt. It is a marker who in the society is owed and how much. Thinking that those markers should have fixed supply is just not smart.
  • stevep98 9y ago
    I wonder whether scrutiny of those tax avoidance schemes revealed in the paradise papers or Panama papers will lead to those investors moving their funds to bitcoin.
    • bringtheaction 9y ago
      Rather they would use a crypto currency with actual anonymity don't you think? I'm not going to mention it by name lest someone thinks I'm here to "shill" it (which btw I'm not, I only hold BTC and ETH currently).
      • bitveil 9y ago
        Or use a Bitcoin mixer.
  • omio 9y ago
• granitosaurus 9y ago
  You shouldn't be surprised - HN is literally a platform built off startup and IPO culture. Where's bitcoin and crypto in general are complete opposite - decentralised and bleeding-edge.
• marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world I really doubt this. I have never seen a convincing argument about how BTC would solve any of its many technical issues, and the political ones are even larger. I would gain a lot from Bitcoin's success. Really. Just by making it possible to do business without the gov being a bottleneck it would already change the lives of mostly everybody around here. I just don't see it happening, for obvious and important reasons, that a bunch of people insist on ignoring. It's hard enough not to pass judgment on the people making an effort to ignore the obvious, now those same people trying to paint the others in a bad way is a bit too much.
• quickben 9y ago
  If you are looking through the 'change the world' pink glasses, take a look at gridcoin. With Bitcoin you are only burning electricity. Also, no need to talk that much down on the rest of us with your last paragraph. We get what Bitcoin is all to well (heck I even have a research paper published for hashing algorithms). some of us are decently well off to not need to gamble for cash. If Bitcoin hit 10m a piece, I don't think I've lost anything (same if tulips or dogs are sold 10m a piece). I did SETI cpu donating time in the olden days, ran a BBS, and brought email to a small mountain village. I loved internet in the early days and now. Sometimes, people like me, just want to stop the fools being burned on a pyramidal snake oil, because we are older, and have seen the shit in various forms. On this forum, I assume the rest are similar to me, but perhaps a bit younger, so the anti Bitcoin sentiment is just a sentiment to maybe save you some of your hard earned money. That is my reason. I won't guess the others. Tldr, we get it all to well. There is no hate. But do ask yourself why we still maintain our stance/advices.
• matt4077 9y ago
  My problem with bitcoin is that, fundamentally, it is born of mistrust of even the concept of “politics”. It considers, for example, the ability of established and democratically-controlled institutions such as central banks to conduct monetary policy as a net negative, and tries to replace it with the supposedly objective reality of an algorithm doing its thing without regards to the outside world. That’s why you will find, if you go down this rabbit hole, a large overlap of blockchain enthusiasts and the political spectrum somewhere between nihilism, Ayn-Rand-style social darwinism, and anarchism; All the handwringing over the supposed conspiracy that abolished the gold standard follows naturally. This is even more obvious for the disaster that is the DAO: the idea that the nuances of human life and its conflicts currently settled by courts can adequately and unambiguously captured in code is, as has now been shown repeatedly, laughable. Personally, I also consider it somewhat frightening that people would actually subscribe to a philosophy so myopic as to completely deny the value of anything that isn't technology. Technologically, bitcoin it is certainly fascinating. And a decentralised, electronic competitor to cash does seem more attractive than a future where VISA and PayPal control all that data. Unfortunately, bitcoin has completely failed in that regard. Adoption as an actual means of payment is declining. Even experts frequently lose money to hacks, hardware failures, or inattentiveness. Settlements take longer than many competing technologies, and the one area currently underserved, namely micropayment, is also priced out of bitcoin. Bitcoin evangelist are also not doing the technology any favours. See, for example: > Do people fear what they don't understand? This implies that bitcoin critics are stupid. They're not. > Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? This implies that they are jealous. While that's obviously something that happens, I can assure you it is in no way a significant in the opposition. I do own a few dozen bitcoin, for example, because I used mining to get into cuda a few years back. > Does Bitcoin's success mean their loss (like the banking folks and the government establishment)? That implies some sort of conspiracy, and also portraits any critic as being a shill, or bot, or similar, whose opinion can then be considered illegitimate. It's interesting to see how the bitcoin community was, from the start, driving by this antagonism versus government and the financial system. Bitcoin was considered as some sort of grand threat to the established order, and the government was expected to come down hart on it "any day now". In reality, however, regulatory bodies have almost without exception taken a rather relaxed approach. Questions of taxation were clarified, and existing rules such as KYC enforced to discourage the use of bc for illegal activity, yes. But overall, governments' reaction was nowhere near what the community expected, or what would be expected from a corrupt system trying to defend its power against a credible threat. It is only with the rather obvious overheating, and widespread fraud, of ICOs that scrutiny of this market has somewhat increased.
• thisisit 9y ago
  There are both sides to this argument, there have been posts which ask the opposite - why does every bitcoin post gets voted up so quickly. And frankly no thread goes without someone asking - but what is the "world changing" use case for bitcoin? There are no straight forward answers. Then there is the constant use of strawman like you did here with internet question.
• BLanen 9y ago
  The fact that you believe it can change the world is the reason of the hatred.
• mywittyname 9y ago
  > Bitcoin has the potential to actually change the world Statements like this are, IHMO, the driver behind the BTC hate. It's the pure hyperbole typical of the tech scene. It's not world-changing, it's just a payment processing platform. The decentralized aspect is interesting, but doesn't add value for most use cases. Venmo is free, super easy to use and there's little risk of my Mom permanently losing all of her funds from the account. For the general public, the only thing BTC has changed in the world is it has given hackers the facilities to extort them.