I think Bitcoin pushes a lot of people's buttons because it was so new, exotic and difficult to understand that it really challenged a lot of people who conside

I think Bitcoin pushes a lot of people's buttons because it was so new, exotic and difficult to understand that it really challenged a lot of people who consider themselves smart. I know I didn't "get it" right off the bat but I couldn't shake the feeling that the fact that I didn't understand it was a signal that something special was going on. So I kept pushing forwards. I read the whitepaper and thought, this seems cool but I still don't get it, something must be here. So I read more books (Mastering Bitcoin by O'Reilly is amazing). Finally I got it, understood the potential and realized just how amazing these concepts were. Unfortunately at that point the price had already risen to the point where I couldn't just buy hundreds of these things. I bought a few and now that looks like a freaking amazing investment. During this story arc, I also witnessed a growing dissent against Bitcoin. A lot of it came from the media and tech adjacent people but not technologists themselves. Initial complaints were more or less ad hominems (money for filthy nerds), as the currency went up in value, the story morphed conveniently to an ecological one as the rebuttal for that requires deeper knowledge of crypto and an acknowledgement of the energy consumption used to secure regular money. Now you get on HN and it's just hated. Passionate hate. I figure it's a mix of people that could have understood it and didn't until it was too late, people who still don't understand it, and people who don't like it due to the constant barrage of negative media coverage.