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Downvote me all you want, but HN really needs to cure this bitcoin-jealousy. Yes, people who invested early became millionares and billionares with a single mou

Downvote me all you want, but HN really needs to cure this bitcoin-jealousy. Yes, people who invested early became millionares and billionares with a single mouse click. I know it feels unfair when you spend countless hours creating and innovating and not being rewarded. But some of you here needs to stop hating and being bitter. I have been watching HN and bitcoin related threads for months now. Same pattern.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
I think there are three elements contributing to the negativity: (1) People may get hurt. I was in an Uber two weeks ago where my driver talked about taking out a second line on his home to buy Bitcoin. By today's mark, he's lost money. That people who clearly have no idea what they're doing are being preyed on is disturbing to many, myself included. (2) ICOs are a cesspool of frauds. They allow promoters to make money without putting anything up. That's different from early Bitcoin adopters, who actually put time or money or computing power at risk. (3) Bitcoin is an article of faith. Discussions around its value often devolve into "does god exist" arguments.
- anonemouse145 9y ago
  And transaction fees. I saw someone reporting over $30 fee to get processed within 20 minutes. That's why Steam dropped Bitcoin. As a skeptic, people thinking this is a good currency are hilarious. Day trading and making money off them is simple sport.
  - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
    You are missing the reason the fees are high: it's because Bitcoins it the most widely used cryptocurrency today. Scaling something like Bcash, which doesn't have that many transactions - is easy. The fees can be low because nobody wants to use it. Because there is no real demand for those transcations, and so the price can be low. For a crypto like Bitcoin, which does have high demand for transactions, some of the fees have to be high right now. (Does not mean they will be high in the future.) Are there scalability problems? Yes they are, it's very evident in the transaction fees. But are technical solutions being developed to mitigate this? Yes they are - that's the real work that actually goes on in the background, by the people who actually work, instead of spending their time on internet posting about the price. It's not an easy task, but it is being done. When people bring up the transaction fees, sometimes it sounds like they think that real Bitcoin developer's don't know that this is a problem. They do, and they work on it! It's just that regular person doesn't want to hear developers, he wants to hear someone that tells them they can make 3x their money over a weekend.
    - asciimo 9y ago
      What if Bcoin increased the block size?
      - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
        Increasing the blocksize will never realistically bring a Bitcoin-like network to the truly global scale of say Visa or MasterCard. Many people think that other technical solutions are needed, and that only they can work. These people are broadcasting their choice through the markets and the price of each coin. Bcash has increased the blocksize (and forked), which is a perfectly valid solution for such a task, in terms of how a cryptocurrency should be governed: no wars, no lawsuits, if some users don't think a certain decision is valid, they are free to fork off their own chain. No one stopped them, no one tried to shut them down. But the market will ultimately show what is a good solution and what is a bad solution. And you can already see what the market decided in terms of the decision of increasing the block size - by comparing Bitcoin market cap to Bcash market cap.
        asciimo 9y ago
        I wanted to make a small Bcoin transaction a couple weeks ago to test a wallet and the fee was over $20. That doesn't seem like a good fee compared to Visa. Is this something that could be fixed now with a block size increase?
  - thealfreds 9y ago
    Hoping the introduction of the Lightning Network (or really any tech that can batch transactions together) will help here.
  - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
    This is total bs. Segwit transactions are under a dollar.
nxsynonym 9y ago
It's not about being bitter IMO. Sure, some people are mad they missed the boat, but I don't think that is the general consensus (at least here on HN). There's no valuable discussion to be had anymore regarding BTC because every discussion turns into price point speculation, FUD, or "I told you so" remarks. Bring some real discussion and critical thought the table, and not just repost the same WSJ articles that sensationalize the tiniest price movements.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > There's no valuable discussion to be had anymore regarding BTC because every discussion turns into price point speculation There are tangential discussions around market structure, regulations (their existence, interpretation and necessity) and other matters I've found genuinely interesting. Bitcoin appears to have attempted a clean reboot of modern finance. It's interesting seeing where common solutions are found. It's fascinating considering where divergent conclusions could be reached, and whether that could help us in the mainline economy. Price discussions are inane for this asset, but it doesn't mean that's the only thing we can talk about.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    Let me clarify - I agree with you. Price discussion shouldn't be the only discussion, but the media frenzy and run away increase in value makes it the main topic of focus. The things that you mentioned are what I am most interested around Bitcoin, and what should be talked about - but that is only happening in very small amounts and (in my experience) by people who don't have any horses in the race. As a side note - I would add that Bitcoin in theory attempted to reboot modern finance. The idea, passion, maybe even necessity is there - but I don't think the tech is there yet. Clearly people are more interested in generating value based on our current monetary system vs. pushing for widespread Bitcoin adoption.
    - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
      I think thI discussion should no longer be about bitcoin but about blockchains and how they are going to make the current financial system obsolete. Take for example EOS and Cardano, the two are 3ed generation blockchains that will enable all sorts of uses for crypto coins. Yes the median is fixated on Bitcoin, and I say let them be. People are overlooking what will be the most impactful technology of our lifetime and that is a damn shame. But hey, what do I care; I'm one of those greedy bastards scooping up virtual land I'm decentraland, investing in amazing projects that will eliminate billions of waste in financial and healthcare world and will connect the other 4 billion people currently not participating in the virtual economy.
djsumdog 9y ago
Who is buying coin? Like if you seriously found 3 BTC you had on an old hard drive from years ago, remembered that password, who would pay you the $30k? You'd have to try different exchanges, try small amounts first, pay the insane transaction fees and wait for confirmation. Anyone who truly had a huge stash of like 400k USD in BTC would need to grab a lawyer, an escrow company and enter into a pretty strict legal contract with a coin exchange to guarantee that money. Are there really large amounts being traded? I guess you could just look at the block chain ledger and see. But I'm just wondering how much of this is due to people cashing in/out vs market manipulation.
- sowbug 9y ago
  Your numbers are off by more than a factor of 1,000. As of a couple days ago, you could liquidate $30M (not $30K) on GDAX with a market sell order (which would be the worst possible way to sell) for more than 95% of last-quoted price.
  - SippinLean 9y ago
    What would be a better way to sell?
    - sowbug 9y ago
      Limit orders in smaller lots, preferably into buying strength. (Don't take trading advice from me, though!)
    - lifty 9y ago
      An over the counter(OTC) trade with a firm that specialises in high worth trades. They quote you a mid market price and they fill your whole amount at the same price.
    - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
      A littl bit at a time. You don't want to cash 10m in a subsequent number of sells, that would fluctuate the price too much.
- 9y ago
tedeh 9y ago
I've always thought of HN as the place where you can reliably get a contrarian opinion. See for instance that research some time ago showing the top-voted comment of most submissions on HN being a refutation of the thing that was submitted. Cryptocurrencies have been rising in value at an astronomical pace the last few months, and Bitcoin may currently be the biggest asset bubble in human history [1]. It would seem it is only quite logical that the general HN comment would be quite skeptical at the very least. [1]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/its-official-bitcoin-surpasses-tulip-mania-now-biggest-bubble-world-history?page=1 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/its-official-bitcoi...
- oelmekki 9y ago
  There's an other group who is very good at refuting everything: conspirationists. I love how HN comments often provide more insight into subjects that the article they are discussing, but this is no excuse for the blatant discarding of any new idea it often demonstrates. I've been around for a while, and quite frankly, I more and more skip top comments to find really interesting content. Note that I reply here on the general HN sentiment, not regarding cryptocurrencies specifically. Although I would say that on the topic at hand : beware making general judgments based on one bad day.
soundwave106 9y ago
I don't think a lot of what I'm hearing was bitterness. Instead, there was a (seemingly correct) assumption that Bitcoin was undergoing a massive bubble at the moment. There was a lot of signs similar to other bubbles, such as the late 1990s dot com bubble and the mid 2000s real estate bubble. There's no problem with putting a little into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but at the moment, it is a very speculative investment. If you diversify, and don't do something silly like massively borrow, then that's fine. In fact, this sort of investor probably doesn't care too much that Bitcoin crashed in value. It may go up by silly amounts, or it may go down by silly amounts. That's life with any speculative investment. I personally can't see Bitcoin justifying its valuation unless it fixes its transaction issues, but there is plenty of room for disagreement there. Now, the fact that a fair bit of current marketing / promotions of crypto has the whiff of pyramid schemes and other dodgy "make money fast" type things is of concern to me. Mainly because these sorts of things usually never end well. I think it would be very foolish to put a significant percentage of your assets into crypto right now, and it would be extremely dicey to invest in crypto on the margin. In fact, it would probably be better if one was seriously interested in crypto to wait until a major crash clears these sort of "you're gonna get rich instantly with CRYPTO!" players out of the market.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

I think there are three elements contributing to the negativity: (1) People may get hurt. I was in an Uber two weeks ago where my driver talked about taking out a second line on his home to buy Bitcoin. By today's mark, he's lost money. That people who clearly have no idea what they're doing are being preyed on is disturbing to many, myself included. (2) ICOs are a cesspool of frauds. They allow promoters to make money without putting anything up. That's different from early Bitcoin adopters, who actually put time or money or computing power at risk. (3) Bitcoin is an article of faith. Discussions around its value often devolve into "does god exist" arguments.

anonemouse145 9y ago
And transaction fees. I saw someone reporting over $30 fee to get processed within 20 minutes. That's why Steam dropped Bitcoin. As a skeptic, people thinking this is a good currency are hilarious. Day trading and making money off them is simple sport.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  You are missing the reason the fees are high: it's because Bitcoins it the most widely used cryptocurrency today. Scaling something like Bcash, which doesn't have that many transactions - is easy. The fees can be low because nobody wants to use it. Because there is no real demand for those transcations, and so the price can be low. For a crypto like Bitcoin, which does have high demand for transactions, some of the fees have to be high right now. (Does not mean they will be high in the future.) Are there scalability problems? Yes they are, it's very evident in the transaction fees. But are technical solutions being developed to mitigate this? Yes they are - that's the real work that actually goes on in the background, by the people who actually work, instead of spending their time on internet posting about the price. It's not an easy task, but it is being done. When people bring up the transaction fees, sometimes it sounds like they think that real Bitcoin developer's don't know that this is a problem. They do, and they work on it! It's just that regular person doesn't want to hear developers, he wants to hear someone that tells them they can make 3x their money over a weekend.
  - asciimo 9y ago
    What if Bcoin increased the block size?
    - Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
      Increasing the blocksize will never realistically bring a Bitcoin-like network to the truly global scale of say Visa or MasterCard. Many people think that other technical solutions are needed, and that only they can work. These people are broadcasting their choice through the markets and the price of each coin. Bcash has increased the blocksize (and forked), which is a perfectly valid solution for such a task, in terms of how a cryptocurrency should be governed: no wars, no lawsuits, if some users don't think a certain decision is valid, they are free to fork off their own chain. No one stopped them, no one tried to shut them down. But the market will ultimately show what is a good solution and what is a bad solution. And you can already see what the market decided in terms of the decision of increasing the block size - by comparing Bitcoin market cap to Bcash market cap.
      - asciimo 9y ago
        I wanted to make a small Bcoin transaction a couple weeks ago to test a wallet and the fee was over $20. That doesn't seem like a good fee compared to Visa. Is this something that could be fixed now with a block size increase?
- thealfreds 9y ago
  Hoping the introduction of the Lightning Network (or really any tech that can batch transactions together) will help here.
- mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
  This is total bs. Segwit transactions are under a dollar.

nxsynonym 9y ago

It's not about being bitter IMO. Sure, some people are mad they missed the boat, but I don't think that is the general consensus (at least here on HN). There's no valuable discussion to be had anymore regarding BTC because every discussion turns into price point speculation, FUD, or "I told you so" remarks. Bring some real discussion and critical thought the table, and not just repost the same WSJ articles that sensationalize the tiniest price movements.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> There's no valuable discussion to be had anymore regarding BTC because every discussion turns into price point speculation There are tangential discussions around market structure, regulations (their existence, interpretation and necessity) and other matters I've found genuinely interesting. Bitcoin appears to have attempted a clean reboot of modern finance. It's interesting seeing where common solutions are found. It's fascinating considering where divergent conclusions could be reached, and whether that could help us in the mainline economy. Price discussions are inane for this asset, but it doesn't mean that's the only thing we can talk about.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  Let me clarify - I agree with you. Price discussion shouldn't be the only discussion, but the media frenzy and run away increase in value makes it the main topic of focus. The things that you mentioned are what I am most interested around Bitcoin, and what should be talked about - but that is only happening in very small amounts and (in my experience) by people who don't have any horses in the race. As a side note - I would add that Bitcoin in theory attempted to reboot modern finance. The idea, passion, maybe even necessity is there - but I don't think the tech is there yet. Clearly people are more interested in generating value based on our current monetary system vs. pushing for widespread Bitcoin adoption.
  - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
    I think thI discussion should no longer be about bitcoin but about blockchains and how they are going to make the current financial system obsolete. Take for example EOS and Cardano, the two are 3ed generation blockchains that will enable all sorts of uses for crypto coins. Yes the median is fixated on Bitcoin, and I say let them be. People are overlooking what will be the most impactful technology of our lifetime and that is a damn shame. But hey, what do I care; I'm one of those greedy bastards scooping up virtual land I'm decentraland, investing in amazing projects that will eliminate billions of waste in financial and healthcare world and will connect the other 4 billion people currently not participating in the virtual economy.

djsumdog 9y ago

Who is buying coin? Like if you seriously found 3 BTC you had on an old hard drive from years ago, remembered that password, who would pay you the $30k? You'd have to try different exchanges, try small amounts first, pay the insane transaction fees and wait for confirmation. Anyone who truly had a huge stash of like 400k USD in BTC would need to grab a lawyer, an escrow company and enter into a pretty strict legal contract with a coin exchange to guarantee that money. Are there really large amounts being traded? I guess you could just look at the block chain ledger and see. But I'm just wondering how much of this is due to people cashing in/out vs market manipulation.

sowbug 9y ago
Your numbers are off by more than a factor of 1,000. As of a couple days ago, you could liquidate $30M (not $30K) on GDAX with a market sell order (which would be the worst possible way to sell) for more than 95% of last-quoted price.
- SippinLean 9y ago
  What would be a better way to sell?
  - sowbug 9y ago
    Limit orders in smaller lots, preferably into buying strength. (Don't take trading advice from me, though!)
  - lifty 9y ago
    An over the counter(OTC) trade with a firm that specialises in high worth trades. They quote you a mid market price and they fill your whole amount at the same price.
  - mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
    A littl bit at a time. You don't want to cash 10m in a subsequent number of sells, that would fluctuate the price too much.
9y ago

tedeh 9y ago

I've always thought of HN as the place where you can reliably get a contrarian opinion. See for instance that research some time ago showing the top-voted comment of most submissions on HN being a refutation of the thing that was submitted. Cryptocurrencies have been rising in value at an astronomical pace the last few months, and Bitcoin may currently be the biggest asset bubble in human history [1]. It would seem it is only quite logical that the general HN comment would be quite skeptical at the very least. [1]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/its-official-bitcoin-surpasses-tulip-mania-now-biggest-bubble-world-history?page=1 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/its-official-bitcoi...

oelmekki 9y ago
There's an other group who is very good at refuting everything: conspirationists. I love how HN comments often provide more insight into subjects that the article they are discussing, but this is no excuse for the blatant discarding of any new idea it often demonstrates. I've been around for a while, and quite frankly, I more and more skip top comments to find really interesting content. Note that I reply here on the general HN sentiment, not regarding cryptocurrencies specifically. Although I would say that on the topic at hand : beware making general judgments based on one bad day.

soundwave106 9y ago

I don't think a lot of what I'm hearing was bitterness. Instead, there was a (seemingly correct) assumption that Bitcoin was undergoing a massive bubble at the moment. There was a lot of signs similar to other bubbles, such as the late 1990s dot com bubble and the mid 2000s real estate bubble. There's no problem with putting a little into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, but at the moment, it is a very speculative investment. If you diversify, and don't do something silly like massively borrow, then that's fine. In fact, this sort of investor probably doesn't care too much that Bitcoin crashed in value. It may go up by silly amounts, or it may go down by silly amounts. That's life with any speculative investment. I personally can't see Bitcoin justifying its valuation unless it fixes its transaction issues, but there is plenty of room for disagreement there. Now, the fact that a fair bit of current marketing / promotions of crypto has the whiff of pyramid schemes and other dodgy "make money fast" type things is of concern to me. Mainly because these sorts of things usually never end well. I think it would be very foolish to put a significant percentage of your assets into crypto right now, and it would be extremely dicey to invest in crypto on the margin. In fact, it would probably be better if one was seriously interested in crypto to wait until a major crash clears these sort of "you're gonna get rich instantly with CRYPTO!" players out of the market.