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I think the undermining of Bitcoin's original promise by speculators is just as inevitable as Obamacare's undermining by conservatives. Both are driven by hype.

I think the undermining of Bitcoin's original promise by speculators is just as inevitable as Obamacare's undermining by conservatives. Both are driven by hype. Both are primarily driven by greed ("temporarily embarrassed millionaire" greed, in many cases). Both are aspirational. Both run counter to the cynical "humans will always subvert" narratives of their times. That's not a judgement on either one. Just an observation of similarities. They're very different in many ways, too.

MBCook 9y ago
What I meant about undermining is that I don’t think the speculators are out to sabotage bitcoin, it’s a side effect of what they’re doing. When it comes to Obamacare it’s very clear that the sabotage is intentional. The more I think about it the more I wonder if bitcoin could have ever worked. The way my name works pretty much guarantees a individual or small group would end up with the majority of the hash power if bitcoin was ever actually valuable. And that immediately undermines the peer-to-peer decentralized no one in charge of it aspect. Without something that disincentiveses people with significantly more cpu power people are just going to run away with it. That kind of seems like a flaw in all of these crypto currencies, even if it’s not CPU power that you use.