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> For the longest time Wikipedia claimed Bitcoin was a pyramid scheme > Wikipedia claimed it was a ponzi scheme. The rest still applies. It was added to a lis

by sago 8y ago

> For the longest time Wikipedia claimed Bitcoin was a pyramid scheme > Wikipedia claimed it was a ponzi scheme. The rest still applies. It was added to a list of Ponzi schemes with the qualification "Bitcoin has been called a Ponzi scheme" and a citation to an article on April 11, 2013. It was deleted on May 7 that year, in the very next edit to touch it. Your characterisation seems to me tendentious in the extreme. > Who cares if they're economists? Anyone who understands that knowledge is not syntactic, and that expertise trumps word lawyering. > Quit with the ad hominem. I apologise if you felt it was so. Nothing I said referred to any personal quality of you or anyone else. It was intended as purely an attack on the argument you made. The opposite of ad hominem. > The journalists at all these places feel strongly that it's OK to mislead people if it's in support of the 'right' cause. [citation needed]

repolfx 8y ago
Here's another discussion of the same Wikipedia problem of calling Bitcoin a ponzi scheme from 2012: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123760.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123760.0 As you can see, people were arguing with some editor who kept sitting on the page. It was an on-going problem that lasted a long time. I wish I didn't have to keep repeatedly backing this claim up. OK, I mixed up pyramid and ponzi scheme, but the original point is sound (and "economists agree" isn't a valid argument given that plenty of economists also disagree, and being an economist doesn't automatically make someone right anyway). Sigh. Nothing I said referred to any personal quality of you or anyone else I'm not sure how to interpret "gaslighting the evidence". From what I understand "gaslighting" is an insulting verb that means an activity someone is engaged in, to deliberately confuse other people. That's not at all my intent. As for your last paragraph, that's what this entire thread is about. Look at how media outlets consistently get certain subjects factually wrong, again and again and as Greenwald puts it "always wrong in the same direction". These aren't random mistakes caused by simple carelessness. They keep happening because journalists want them to happen - if they didn't the mistakes wouldn't be so correlated, or so consistent, or so frequently replicated across so many outlets, and they'd put in place more robust systems to stop them.

by sago 8y ago

repolfx 8y ago

Here's another discussion of the same Wikipedia problem of calling Bitcoin a ponzi scheme from 2012: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123760.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123760.0 As you can see, people were arguing with some editor who kept sitting on the page. It was an on-going problem that lasted a long time. I wish I didn't have to keep repeatedly backing this claim up. OK, I mixed up pyramid and ponzi scheme, but the original point is sound (and "economists agree" isn't a valid argument given that plenty of economists also disagree, and being an economist doesn't automatically make someone right anyway). Sigh. Nothing I said referred to any personal quality of you or anyone else I'm not sure how to interpret "gaslighting the evidence". From what I understand "gaslighting" is an insulting verb that means an activity someone is engaged in, to deliberately confuse other people. That's not at all my intent. As for your last paragraph, that's what this entire thread is about. Look at how media outlets consistently get certain subjects factually wrong, again and again and as Greenwald puts it "always wrong in the same direction". These aren't random mistakes caused by simple carelessness. They keep happening because journalists want them to happen - if they didn't the mistakes wouldn't be so correlated, or so consistent, or so frequently replicated across so many outlets, and they'd put in place more robust systems to stop them.