21 ms·

Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitco

Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" What Bitcoin has done is that it taught people they can come together in a sustained flash mob (like an on-the-fly hedge fund operation) and manipulate the price of speculative assets by creating artificial short-term pump-n-dump type demand. Bitcoin has trained our collective neural network to do this. The huddled masses can take their new superpower and apply it to stock, crypto, commodities on the commodity exchange, and all kinds of speculative assets, especially the virtual kind. It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino.

reader_mode 6y ago
Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.
- epx 6y ago
  This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yes this is true. What people want is a less risky investment/inflation hedge and the Fed is forcing people to accept more risk. That's not a good thing because there are better ways to utilize the stimulus money.
anthropodie 6y ago
> Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?
- screaminghawk 6y ago
  Yes. It's a common pattern on reddit (and probably other sites) to let people know your intentions, thoughts and feelings to give context to the content of your post
- renewiltord 6y ago
  It's a very effective meme. Like most such memes, it worms itself inside, and the vehicle doesn't consciously know of its presence. These people aren't thinking "I'll do this. It'll get me votes". It is unconscious mimetic memetics, if you will :) Some of these memes become elevated into conscious actions. For instance, people cynically exploit "Linux can't do X" to get help for X. But some memes are unconscious and I think "I'll be downvoted for this" or "Get out of here with your facts and reason" or "Source?" are definitely examples of these. Personally, I think many of the privacy and security comments are also memes that propagate through mimicry of success, but that's its own thing.
  - rtrdea 6y ago
    I was with you til the last sentence. Have an upvote
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Haha, that was unnecessarily controversial on my part. I can totally accept that other people disagree on that.
      - floydnoel 6y ago
        but you didn't even add the requisite "go ahead and downvote me!"
fredfoobar 6y ago
I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars. Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I guess the difference is cars are useful. What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
  - tony101 6y ago
    Transfer funds across borders without dealing with multi-business-day bank delays or capital controls in countries like China. Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
    - Igelau 6y ago
      Sounds legit! What are we buying?
    - danShumway 6y ago
      > Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard. And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter! I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving. But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives. The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
thebean11 6y ago
Are you implying a cause and effect relationship from crypto to the GME stuff? I think thats a big "citation needed" from me..seems more likely both are on the "effect" side. > Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. How brave..
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rafale 6y ago
How many "bubbles" you know that have been through multiple boom and bust cycles? The US economy doesn't count.
dgs_sgd 6y ago
Do you think all the institutional investors who have bought billions worth of bitcoin in the last several months see it as a pump-n-dump?
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  They make money from you when you use their services. If FinancialCo thinks you'll buy Bitcoin, they'll offer it to you for a fee. They'd sell investments in inflatable dinosaurs if they could make enough money from fees for doing so.
  - dgs_sgd 6y ago
    Institutions selling bitcoin investments for a fee is just one category. There are hedge funds and companies purchasing with their own money.
  - m00dy 6y ago
    They use Bitcoin as a hedge against US dollar. It looks like stimulus packages are the new normal.
nathias 6y ago
do you think bitcoin invented capitalism?
jksmith 6y ago
In the analog perception of time it takes for me to complain about kids getting on my lawn, a measurable percentage of the pics taken in the 20th century were just now taken digitally.
nightski 6y ago
This distinction is so tiring. It's just not interesting calling something gambling as if that is supposed to be bad. Every move we make is a gamble (yes, even storing that precious cash in the bank). Money is all about opportunity cost and choosing to do nothing is just as much of a gamble as doing something like storing it in bitcoin. Sticking ones head in the sand doesn't change the fact that your only choice is to place your bets and gamble.
- lxgr 6y ago
  Everything is indeed a game, but not all games are zero-sum. I feel like when people criticize games, they are often implicitly referring to the latter kind, and in that sense, it‘s often constructive criticism.
  - Taek 6y ago
    Bitcoin is also not zero sum, it's a monetary system with unique properties (particularly censorship resistance and resistance to seizure) that can't be found in any other monetary system. Those qualities add value in a way that makes it attractive to buyers even if they expect the price to go down over time.
    - briatx 6y ago
      You're right! It's actually negative sum.
- nexthash 6y ago
  I think you are the one with your head firmly shoved in the sand. Bitcoin has enormous problems with legality, energy usage, lack of trust, hacking, and slow, expensive transactions that make it a really shitty alternative to fiat. Bitcoin isn't just a gamble - its sole use as of now is as a pump and dump scam. There is no earthly reason why a digital token should be worth $50k a pop. Bitcoin is a shitty bet, and I'd take USD and a bank account any day over it.
  - deleted 6y ago
thenoblesunfish 6y ago
I love when you come to write a comment and someone did it for you :D
99_00 6y ago
It's not new. History is full of these schemes. Eventually everyone who wants bitcoin has bought it, and there are no more bids.
- Scott_Sanderson 6y ago
  But yet . . . Would you say eventually everyone who wants dollars will have enough and the demand for new dollars will be zero?
  - 99_00 6y ago
    Bitcoin and dollars are not comparable. The US government forces you to use dollars under threat of violence. To exist as a legal entity in society you must use dollars, to pay fees, taxes, etc. And if you depend on the government, you must accept dollars. No one needs to use bitcoin. Its demand is chiefly speculation. It has very little use other than a speculative vehicle.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      I think you describe quite well the fundamental reasons bitcoin was created.
      - 99_00 6y ago
        Everything created by people was created for a reason. Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything.
        BLKNSLVR 6y ago
        I disagree 100%. Having a reason for existing is, literally, it's meaning. Something may become meaningless over time if the landscape changes to undermine the reasons for existence, but that underscores the point that 'reason for existence' is another way of saying 'it means something'. Bitcoin's reason for existence was the bank bailouts of 2008. It has found supplemental reason in the current economic climate of quantitative easing. That means everything. "Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything" is an absurd statement.
oliv__ 6y ago
I'm genuinely amazed at how you're able to take such an in-depth, thoughtfully written article, and reduce it into a mere "bitcoin is a waste of time, people are gamblers".
- Igelau 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trying to dismiss the parent comment, or if this is a damning observation on "thought" regarding bitcoin. Probably some of both, right?
- fwiwm2c 6y ago
  He likely didn't read it. People have strong visceral reactions when they hear about Bitcoin - mostly because a lot of them are salty.
  - anthropodie 6y ago
    Earlier I thought it had some obscure use case but this article convinced me that Bitcoin does not deserve the hate it does. It needs more discussion on ways to improve it and solve energy problem! Full disclosure I have 0 bitcoins.
    - curuinor 6y ago
      BTC is as old as android, and as likely to change basically and fundamentally as android.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        This is compounded by the fact that people don't want Bitcoin to change. The very critics of Bitcoin want it to change to be more useful. Isn't it absurd how there are people (HODLers) that insist that it is valuable and should go up and simultaneously insist on keeping the value of Bitcoin down?
- matwood 6y ago
  I was a little disappointed since the poster didn't weave in tulips...
silasdavis 6y ago
The idea you could be downvoted on hacker news for being anti-crypto is a novel one
- jakupovic 6y ago
  I do remember when Linux was the useless technology and didn't have any use case, we already had all the OSes we needed. This wasn't the story on this forum, but it was popular. Same thing here.
ta1234567890 6y ago
You just described the stock market. The only difference is that before, there were only a handful of people with the power and tools to manipulate it (ie. Wall Street), whereas now, due to the power of the Internet and social networks, masses of people are able to coordinate to achieve similar effects. In a way, what has been happening lately, is the democratization of the power to game the system. Which doesn’t mean that now anyone can do it, but rather that it is not limited only to the rich and powerful anymore (until they figure out a way to gate-keep it again).
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  The stock market is a place to purchase productive assets. That share I own represents actual work done by human beings to produce goods and services. That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing.
  - MrMan 6y ago
    A BTC is a receipt for compute wasted
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    The stock market is also a place for those of significant means to gamble on bets of variable terms. Your description is correct, but it's far from the full picture.
  - teeblo 6y ago
    > That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing. Part of BTC's value is probably the hope (speculation) that it will one day be used as an alternative payment system / store of value / whatever, and that will cause it to maintain value. As of right now, a share of AMZN itself does virtually nothing either. Its value lies in the hope (speculation) that one day Amazon will pay us money for holding it.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      Mining is productive. It supports the payment system. BTC does not. If we took 90% of all coins, shoved them in a wallet, and destroyed the key it wouldn't change the network's capabilities at supporting payments or storing value or whatever. That's the difference between a productive asset and something else. An AMZN share on the other hand represents some small percentage of actual labor and production being done by Amazon's employees.
olalonde 6y ago
Why are no-coiners so obsessed with price? You dismiss a breakthrough technology, and probably skipped on reading a quite interesting article, because you don't like Bitcoin's price graph and the fact it attracts speculators?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hoka-one-one 6y ago
Thank you, HN top-comment Bitcoin pessimist blogposter #378
2-tpg 6y ago
In my country, bitcoin guards against inflation. Local currency in relation to the dollar, in 2020, I lost 50%. Bitcoin in relation to the dollar, in 2020, did 300%. Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fund innovation and progress. Several people I know funded their own startups. Of course the crypto market attracts tons of scum and shady people too. And the hype can be damaging (older generation buying in at all-time-highs, and panic selling, causing high variance). Early adopters were far from the huddled masses. Can't really blame them for others jumping on the hype train, just like you can't judge someone holding gold, by all the criminals holding gold or states going to war over it. Forget energy usage for a second, and wonder, "how many people actually die yearly to keep the dollar valuation high?" I feel the "resource waste" is more a feature, than a bug. If you need the electricity of entire countries to attack the network, the network becomes more robust. And then let the new rich generation use their profits on creating more green or nuclear energy, then keep on mining and holding. Tesla could perhaps help here. Industries where energy is a large part of the budget have the right economic incentives to make renewable energy more cost-effective. Older economies, industries, and hegemonies are married to oil, in aggregate pollute far more, and lack the right incentives. Poker is a game of skill which will serve you well if trading. Don't judge the game by the drunk pot-splashing tourists, or the risk-averse spectators in the stands, or the regulators looking for a ban after being lobbied by the older generation. Edit: I stopped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! I got into Bitcoin and ETH early due to an enthusiastic post on HN. Please think back a few years, has your viewpoint changed? Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?
- 1996 6y ago
  > I topped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong. Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind. It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community. > Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes? These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating. Sad, really sad.
ball_of_lint 6y ago
Why do you think young people today are willing to take these extreme risks? Casinos and speculative instruments existed decades ago. I think it's because of the massive economic inequality that people experience today. Working an unskilled, or even a skilled job doesn't go as far today as it has in the past. Many people have internalized that they will never be as "successful" or as rich as their elders. Given that situation, it's easy to see why these risky asymmetrical bets are attractive. A failed investment pushes you deeper into poverty, but doesn't fundamentally change your situation. A successful one has the potential to change your life and break the cycle of poverty for you. For someone who's about to declare bankruptcy, a lottery ticket is an excellent deal. For the lower class of America, so are these investments.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  It's not an extreme risk if you only invest a small amount of money. I wouldn't suggest anyone remortgage their house to put that into bitcoin, but I've invested ~$1200 in there and I'm willing to wait and see what happens. If I lose it, it will be a learning experience and I'll be just fine.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    People bet big when the ETA to payoff is perceived as near and possibly large. A number of elements impede this behavior wrt BTC I wager since it was always pitched as a slow roasting investment, whereas in the case of GME, being a stock and not Bitcoin, we saw this behavior more liberally I think
- imtringued 6y ago
  You're absolutely correct. The inability to "make it" through honest work makes people hopeless and thus they would rather lose money because of their gambling decisions than to give up on the potential for massive gains that are otherwise impossible. I just wish it didn't have to be this way.
eloff 6y ago
It's a ten year pump and dump scheme? I'm also skeptical of bitcoin, but it can't be dismissed so easily anymore. There's clearly something to it, but what? Is it it just speculation about future value, a hedge against inflation and government control? A way around laws and currency export controls? I'm not sure.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  Bitcoin obviously offers some value to some people, but I think bitcoin's greatest innovations were social. The bitcoin community has innovated all sorts of social tools for advocating causes and pumping assets. Could $TSLA have reached $850 post-split without these techniques? Maybe. Could $GME have reached around $350 without an army of "diamond hands" and "to the moon" (read: crypto memes)? Definitely not. This may feel like a stupid point, but I mean it. Goldbugs have been a thing for forever, but the sort of digital advocacy that bitcoin sees puts them to shame by comparison. Not only is there a hoard of crypto fanatics ready to tell you why sitting out of bitcoin is the worst decision you've been making your entire life, but you can even get several entirely disjoint explanations for why bitcoin is something you should invest in (some at a glance: it's going to make digital payments easy, it's a scarce asset like gold and will only increase in price, it will replace fiat as a global currency, it's a revolutionary technology and nothing else like it has been seen before, etc). Similarly, if you try to critique any one of these, another supporter will instantly take up the fight by moving the goalposts to their preferred explanation on why bitcoin is great. (Oh sure it can't do many transactions, but it's not actually for payments it's digital gold...) This isn't meant to be derogatory against bitcoin supporters, but rather an expression of wonder. It's clearly not a fluke: bitcoin drops off the radar for most people and comes back every couple of years, clearly whatever the supporters and investors are doing to advocate for it is working.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
chrischen 6y ago
Just because people use an asset for gambling doesn’t mean it is worthless.
untilHellbanned 6y ago
What's the correlation of people who hate on crypto who lost money or missed out on it?
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  There's a whole subreddit of them at /r/buttcoin.
- loceng 6y ago
  I just posted this in another comment: "Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda."
loceng 6y ago
Financially aligning people through greed, speculation, is certainly one way to gain "consensus" - however that ignores, attempts to circumvent the harder work - which takes healthy individuals who have genuine community via regular, conversations that go deep - of building trust; Bitcoin is a virus that has spread because our immune system isn't working, we're currently weak due to a lack of real connection, interconnection.
- boredpandas777 6y ago
  Thank you. Upvoted.
zby 6y ago
And yet this is the way to create money - money is what we believe other people will want and will give us something valuable in exchange. It only works because other people also believe in it. It started with shells and gold and other collectibles - and we still collectively manipulate the price of gold in a kind of sustained flash mob. It is all circular - but it works and when you want to create a new kind of money you have to do the same trick again.
Gatsky 6y ago
Well what you say has some merit, but... Goldrush FOMO is a very powerful force. Not saying this applies to you, but I think some people can’t stand the cognitive dissonance of being a hacker and not getting into bitcoin, missing out on life-changing money. To deal with it, they need to vilify bitcoin often on quasi-moral grounds.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  That's a fallacy into which they're falling. Not a logical one, just a mental fault in their thinking. You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money. I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc. There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on. I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them. But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.
  - Gatsky 6y ago
    Yes, this is true of course. FOMO is a fallacy. Nonetheless, I think it does play a role in the nature of bitcoin criticism, which I otherwise find is somewhat odd and repetitive and moralising. You clearly don't have this problem - I think it is most severe in those people that never owned any bitcoin.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      >which I otherwise find is somewhat odd and repetitive The problem is thousands of years old. At some point you have enumerated all possible criticism.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on. Definitively, I don't have enough money to execute all the possible investment strategies I want to follow up on. It's also weird that the bet size is being ignored. With Bitcoin your maximum bet size is much smaller than with stocks because of the high risk. I can put more money into stocks because they are less risky and thus I can actually end up being exposed to greater gains.
aerosmile 6y ago
Gutsy, but it paid off. 86 karma points at the time of this writing.
centimeter 6y ago
You're describing the concept known as "money".
suifbwish 6y ago
I believe it takes 72 TERAWATTS running for 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. How is that justifiable when we are slipping deeper into an environmental crisis?
- 908087 6y ago
  Don't worry, the bitcoin "investment advisors" on social media all bought Teslas, so it's basically a wash.
- minitech 6y ago
  > I believe it takes 72 TERAWATTS running for 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. Some corrections: - 10 minutes per block, not per bitcoin (block reward is currently 6.25 bitcoin) - it’s more like 14 GW, not 72 TW
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  simple answer: i don't have to justify wasting my own money to other people.
rpowers 6y ago
I'm really glad someone can articulate what I've bee thinking for a long time. It started when I realized that bitcoin was being used to fuel dark markets then again when I saw that anyone was able to make a coin and pre-mine thousands before sharing with others struck with FOMO.
- cyphertruck 6y ago
  You can easily make rpowerscoin. But it won’t be bitcoin. And its existence will have negligible impact on bitcoin. There have been 100,000 clones of bitcoin (according to someone who claimed to have counted)but none are genuinely successful. Even forks if bitcoin fail despite spending millions on propaganda. Think there might be a reason?
  - ebcode 6y ago
    I think that can be adequately explained by this entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash have already surpassed bitcoin in transaction throughput. If anyone has spent millions on propaganda it is the people pushing the second layer on bitcoin's crippled transaction throughput.
usernamefk 6y ago
thanks for the comment. I totally agree. sadly, we are stuck with it...
malwarebytess 6y ago
> It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino. I agree with your post overall, but I think you'd be foolish to think that it wasn't always this way. The only difference is another strata of folk now can play as well.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
The most boring, tired take around. Ignorant people like to call it Dutch Tulips. Was Dutch Tulips a one-tie event? Or did it continue to increase in value and usage with higher highs and higher lows every couple years? By your "waste of resources" take, which is again so tired - at least Bitcoin is helping Venezuelans and Nigerians and others who have purchased it, unlike video games, which waste FAR more electricity and are a larger waste of resources.
hooande 6y ago
Ugh. I appreciate and agree with your perspective, but this isn't related to the content of the article at all. You just responded to the title
mr_toad 6y ago
You can’t blame Bitcoin for starting the fire, people have been speculating on financial assets as long as they’ve existed. And not just the huddled masses; smart people like Isaac Newton have been burned by bubbles.
tasssko 6y ago
Yes I agree, but I think you miss the point. The reality is folks buying bitcoin are also indirectly betting on the failure of our globalised central banking systems. This was the pitch in the early days and it remains a key value proposition. Think of it like this how much reach does a USD have? It’s limited by some factors but all things equal the reach of a USD is pretty good. I can use USD in most African and Asian countries. However the USD in China has limited reach. I’m using the word reach to loosely describe how usable the currency is in a foreign country. The sterling pound has a very limited reach if I were travelling I would convert it before. So one day in the future when the SHTF and no one wants to trade there will be a currency that is decentralised that has an unlimited reach. The reality is we need to get serious about the predicament of our financial systems or the folks with the BTC will be holding all the cards. I own no crypto and am just a interested observer wanting to share my perspective.
- spiralx 6y ago
  Your comment would have made more sense before everyone had the ability to use their debit/credit cards almost anywhere in the world, meaning the fact that other countries don't take GBP doesn't matter a huge amount at all. Last few times I was abroad if I needed cash I got it out of an ATM in the local currency.
vmception 6y ago
yes, bitcoin was specifically invented to co-opt our consciousness to self-propagate. it is successful in this. some people recognized that capability 10 years ago, some people recognize it today.
hourislate 6y ago
The Wolf of Wall St would agree with you. Although I agree with the the following article, I have taken a small position and bought the hype. My intention is to exit long before the jig is up. https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-casino/ https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c...
aaron695 6y ago
> Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. > "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" The fact this clever whoring works on HN, saying you'll be downvoted then saying something mainstream popular to get upvoted says a lot about the HN community. Absolutely 100% off topic to the article and painting the garden shed. Good work to OP turning their claimed karma level from 11 to 177, that's hacking.
wonderwonder 6y ago
You are right. I own Btc and other crypto assets for that very reason. The desire to hit big is the primary motivator and it unfortunately bleeds into other investments such as stocks etc. I very much am attempting to go back to the buy and long term hold mentality but you are right, crypto has mentally ruined it for me.
pascalxus 6y ago
bitcoin isn't just for speculators. It's also for longer term buy and hold investors. there's a very real demand for investments that will hold their value against inflation. can you name a single asset class that will do that, other than equities or gold? real estate is out of the question because the overhead of buying and selling it is to expensive, not to mention it's so hard to execute that you'd loose your shirt if you dont know what your doing.

reader_mode 6y ago

Interest rates are negative - if you're saving in cash you're losing money. Everyone is happy to gamble in assets and commodities because the money has to go somewhere and it's not like there's infinite opportunities the money can go into, so it's "to the moon" on the markets.

epx 6y ago
This is one of the few positives about Bitcoin - if people choose to sink money into it, effectively redistributing weatlh to people that bought these useless hashes when they were sold at $100, real estate, gold and other useful things we want will not appreciate as fast as if it didn't exist :)
imtringued 6y ago
Yes this is true. What people want is a less risky investment/inflation hedge and the Fed is forcing people to accept more risk. That's not a good thing because there are better ways to utilize the stimulus money.

anthropodie 6y ago

> Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I see another comment on top doing the same. Why do people start with this? If you don't bother you should not even brought that up. Seems like an underhanded way of getting more points. Do people even fall for this?

screaminghawk 6y ago
Yes. It's a common pattern on reddit (and probably other sites) to let people know your intentions, thoughts and feelings to give context to the content of your post
renewiltord 6y ago
It's a very effective meme. Like most such memes, it worms itself inside, and the vehicle doesn't consciously know of its presence. These people aren't thinking "I'll do this. It'll get me votes". It is unconscious mimetic memetics, if you will :) Some of these memes become elevated into conscious actions. For instance, people cynically exploit "Linux can't do X" to get help for X. But some memes are unconscious and I think "I'll be downvoted for this" or "Get out of here with your facts and reason" or "Source?" are definitely examples of these. Personally, I think many of the privacy and security comments are also memes that propagate through mimicry of success, but that's its own thing.
- rtrdea 6y ago
  I was with you til the last sentence. Have an upvote
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Haha, that was unnecessarily controversial on my part. I can totally accept that other people disagree on that.
    - floydnoel 6y ago
      but you didn't even add the requisite "go ahead and downvote me!"

fredfoobar 6y ago

I've been saying the same damn thing about automobiles man, horses already have self driving even! and they don't pollute like cars. Look at the mess we're in now! who's laughing?? Cars pollute and need roads, we had to build so many roads and gas stations. We even had to go to war to make sure we have enough oil.

ForHackernews 6y ago
I guess the difference is cars are useful. What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
- tony101 6y ago
  Transfer funds across borders without dealing with multi-business-day bank delays or capital controls in countries like China. Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    Sounds legit! What are we buying?
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > Accept donations or other online transactions without relying on Visa/Mastercard. And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter! I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving. But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives. The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.

thebean11 6y ago

Are you implying a cause and effect relationship from crypto to the GME stuff? I think thats a big "citation needed" from me..seems more likely both are on the "effect" side. > Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. How brave..

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rafale 6y ago

How many "bubbles" you know that have been through multiple boom and bust cycles? The US economy doesn't count.

dgs_sgd 6y ago

Do you think all the institutional investors who have bought billions worth of bitcoin in the last several months see it as a pump-n-dump?

devoutsalsa 6y ago
They make money from you when you use their services. If FinancialCo thinks you'll buy Bitcoin, they'll offer it to you for a fee. They'd sell investments in inflatable dinosaurs if they could make enough money from fees for doing so.
- dgs_sgd 6y ago
  Institutions selling bitcoin investments for a fee is just one category. There are hedge funds and companies purchasing with their own money.
- m00dy 6y ago
  They use Bitcoin as a hedge against US dollar. It looks like stimulus packages are the new normal.

nathias 6y ago

do you think bitcoin invented capitalism?

jksmith 6y ago

In the analog perception of time it takes for me to complain about kids getting on my lawn, a measurable percentage of the pics taken in the 20th century were just now taken digitally.

nightski 6y ago

This distinction is so tiring. It's just not interesting calling something gambling as if that is supposed to be bad. Every move we make is a gamble (yes, even storing that precious cash in the bank). Money is all about opportunity cost and choosing to do nothing is just as much of a gamble as doing something like storing it in bitcoin. Sticking ones head in the sand doesn't change the fact that your only choice is to place your bets and gamble.

lxgr 6y ago
Everything is indeed a game, but not all games are zero-sum. I feel like when people criticize games, they are often implicitly referring to the latter kind, and in that sense, it‘s often constructive criticism.
- Taek 6y ago
  Bitcoin is also not zero sum, it's a monetary system with unique properties (particularly censorship resistance and resistance to seizure) that can't be found in any other monetary system. Those qualities add value in a way that makes it attractive to buyers even if they expect the price to go down over time.
  - briatx 6y ago
    You're right! It's actually negative sum.
nexthash 6y ago
I think you are the one with your head firmly shoved in the sand. Bitcoin has enormous problems with legality, energy usage, lack of trust, hacking, and slow, expensive transactions that make it a really shitty alternative to fiat. Bitcoin isn't just a gamble - its sole use as of now is as a pump and dump scam. There is no earthly reason why a digital token should be worth $50k a pop. Bitcoin is a shitty bet, and I'd take USD and a bank account any day over it.
- deleted 6y ago

thenoblesunfish 6y ago

I love when you come to write a comment and someone did it for you :D

99_00 6y ago

It's not new. History is full of these schemes. Eventually everyone who wants bitcoin has bought it, and there are no more bids.

Scott_Sanderson 6y ago
But yet . . . Would you say eventually everyone who wants dollars will have enough and the demand for new dollars will be zero?
- 99_00 6y ago
  Bitcoin and dollars are not comparable. The US government forces you to use dollars under threat of violence. To exist as a legal entity in society you must use dollars, to pay fees, taxes, etc. And if you depend on the government, you must accept dollars. No one needs to use bitcoin. Its demand is chiefly speculation. It has very little use other than a speculative vehicle.
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    I think you describe quite well the fundamental reasons bitcoin was created.
    - 99_00 6y ago
      Everything created by people was created for a reason. Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything.
      - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
        I disagree 100%. Having a reason for existing is, literally, it's meaning. Something may become meaningless over time if the landscape changes to undermine the reasons for existence, but that underscores the point that 'reason for existence' is another way of saying 'it means something'. Bitcoin's reason for existence was the bank bailouts of 2008. It has found supplemental reason in the current economic climate of quantitative easing. That means everything. "Having a reason for existing doesn't mean anything" is an absurd statement.

oliv__ 6y ago

I'm genuinely amazed at how you're able to take such an in-depth, thoughtfully written article, and reduce it into a mere "bitcoin is a waste of time, people are gamblers".

Igelau 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're trying to dismiss the parent comment, or if this is a damning observation on "thought" regarding bitcoin. Probably some of both, right?
fwiwm2c 6y ago
He likely didn't read it. People have strong visceral reactions when they hear about Bitcoin - mostly because a lot of them are salty.
- anthropodie 6y ago
  Earlier I thought it had some obscure use case but this article convinced me that Bitcoin does not deserve the hate it does. It needs more discussion on ways to improve it and solve energy problem! Full disclosure I have 0 bitcoins.
  - curuinor 6y ago
    BTC is as old as android, and as likely to change basically and fundamentally as android.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      This is compounded by the fact that people don't want Bitcoin to change. The very critics of Bitcoin want it to change to be more useful. Isn't it absurd how there are people (HODLers) that insist that it is valuable and should go up and simultaneously insist on keeping the value of Bitcoin down?
matwood 6y ago
I was a little disappointed since the poster didn't weave in tulips...

silasdavis 6y ago

The idea you could be downvoted on hacker news for being anti-crypto is a novel one

jakupovic 6y ago
I do remember when Linux was the useless technology and didn't have any use case, we already had all the OSes we needed. This wasn't the story on this forum, but it was popular. Same thing here.

ta1234567890 6y ago

You just described the stock market. The only difference is that before, there were only a handful of people with the power and tools to manipulate it (ie. Wall Street), whereas now, due to the power of the Internet and social networks, masses of people are able to coordinate to achieve similar effects. In a way, what has been happening lately, is the democratization of the power to game the system. Which doesn’t mean that now anyone can do it, but rather that it is not limited only to the rich and powerful anymore (until they figure out a way to gate-keep it again).

UncleMeat 6y ago
The stock market is a place to purchase productive assets. That share I own represents actual work done by human beings to produce goods and services. That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing.
- MrMan 6y ago
  A BTC is a receipt for compute wasted
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  The stock market is also a place for those of significant means to gamble on bets of variable terms. Your description is correct, but it's far from the full picture.
- teeblo 6y ago
  > That BTC I own represents an immutable thing that itself does nothing. Part of BTC's value is probably the hope (speculation) that it will one day be used as an alternative payment system / store of value / whatever, and that will cause it to maintain value. As of right now, a share of AMZN itself does virtually nothing either. Its value lies in the hope (speculation) that one day Amazon will pay us money for holding it.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Mining is productive. It supports the payment system. BTC does not. If we took 90% of all coins, shoved them in a wallet, and destroyed the key it wouldn't change the network's capabilities at supporting payments or storing value or whatever. That's the difference between a productive asset and something else. An AMZN share on the other hand represents some small percentage of actual labor and production being done by Amazon's employees.

olalonde 6y ago

Why are no-coiners so obsessed with price? You dismiss a breakthrough technology, and probably skipped on reading a quite interesting article, because you don't like Bitcoin's price graph and the fact it attracts speculators?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

hoka-one-one 6y ago

Thank you, HN top-comment Bitcoin pessimist blogposter #378

2-tpg 6y ago

In my country, bitcoin guards against inflation. Local currency in relation to the dollar, in 2020, I lost 50%. Bitcoin in relation to the dollar, in 2020, did 300%. Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fund innovation and progress. Several people I know funded their own startups. Of course the crypto market attracts tons of scum and shady people too. And the hype can be damaging (older generation buying in at all-time-highs, and panic selling, causing high variance). Early adopters were far from the huddled masses. Can't really blame them for others jumping on the hype train, just like you can't judge someone holding gold, by all the criminals holding gold or states going to war over it. Forget energy usage for a second, and wonder, "how many people actually die yearly to keep the dollar valuation high?" I feel the "resource waste" is more a feature, than a bug. If you need the electricity of entire countries to attack the network, the network becomes more robust. And then let the new rich generation use their profits on creating more green or nuclear energy, then keep on mining and holding. Tesla could perhaps help here. Industries where energy is a large part of the budget have the right economic incentives to make renewable energy more cost-effective. Older economies, industries, and hegemonies are married to oil, in aggregate pollute far more, and lack the right incentives. Poker is a game of skill which will serve you well if trading. Don't judge the game by the drunk pot-splashing tourists, or the risk-averse spectators in the stands, or the regulators looking for a ban after being lobbied by the older generation. Edit: I stopped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! I got into Bitcoin and ETH early due to an enthusiastic post on HN. Please think back a few years, has your viewpoint changed? Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?

1996 6y ago
> I topped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! Same. I did cost me dearly to listen to the loud voices on HN, people so certain about themselves that they just couldn't envision the possibility they could be wrong. Fortunately, I did not suffer from this hubris, so when confronted to evidence that I was wrong, I changed my mind. It served me well, but like you I feel so sad these stupid people caused so many hackers to remain poor, and are still hurting the community. > Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes? These negative people are the reason may bright minds will remain chained to a day job at a FANG selling ads and dopamine, instead of really innovating. Sad, really sad.

ball_of_lint 6y ago

Why do you think young people today are willing to take these extreme risks? Casinos and speculative instruments existed decades ago. I think it's because of the massive economic inequality that people experience today. Working an unskilled, or even a skilled job doesn't go as far today as it has in the past. Many people have internalized that they will never be as "successful" or as rich as their elders. Given that situation, it's easy to see why these risky asymmetrical bets are attractive. A failed investment pushes you deeper into poverty, but doesn't fundamentally change your situation. A successful one has the potential to change your life and break the cycle of poverty for you. For someone who's about to declare bankruptcy, a lottery ticket is an excellent deal. For the lower class of America, so are these investments.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
It's not an extreme risk if you only invest a small amount of money. I wouldn't suggest anyone remortgage their house to put that into bitcoin, but I've invested ~$1200 in there and I'm willing to wait and see what happens. If I lose it, it will be a learning experience and I'll be just fine.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  People bet big when the ETA to payoff is perceived as near and possibly large. A number of elements impede this behavior wrt BTC I wager since it was always pitched as a slow roasting investment, whereas in the case of GME, being a stock and not Bitcoin, we saw this behavior more liberally I think
imtringued 6y ago
You're absolutely correct. The inability to "make it" through honest work makes people hopeless and thus they would rather lose money because of their gambling decisions than to give up on the potential for massive gains that are otherwise impossible. I just wish it didn't have to be this way.

eloff 6y ago

It's a ten year pump and dump scheme? I'm also skeptical of bitcoin, but it can't be dismissed so easily anymore. There's clearly something to it, but what? Is it it just speculation about future value, a hedge against inflation and government control? A way around laws and currency export controls? I'm not sure.

helen___keller 6y ago
Bitcoin obviously offers some value to some people, but I think bitcoin's greatest innovations were social. The bitcoin community has innovated all sorts of social tools for advocating causes and pumping assets. Could $TSLA have reached $850 post-split without these techniques? Maybe. Could $GME have reached around $350 without an army of "diamond hands" and "to the moon" (read: crypto memes)? Definitely not. This may feel like a stupid point, but I mean it. Goldbugs have been a thing for forever, but the sort of digital advocacy that bitcoin sees puts them to shame by comparison. Not only is there a hoard of crypto fanatics ready to tell you why sitting out of bitcoin is the worst decision you've been making your entire life, but you can even get several entirely disjoint explanations for why bitcoin is something you should invest in (some at a glance: it's going to make digital payments easy, it's a scarce asset like gold and will only increase in price, it will replace fiat as a global currency, it's a revolutionary technology and nothing else like it has been seen before, etc). Similarly, if you try to critique any one of these, another supporter will instantly take up the fight by moving the goalposts to their preferred explanation on why bitcoin is great. (Oh sure it can't do many transactions, but it's not actually for payments it's digital gold...) This isn't meant to be derogatory against bitcoin supporters, but rather an expression of wonder. It's clearly not a fluke: bitcoin drops off the radar for most people and comes back every couple of years, clearly whatever the supporters and investors are doing to advocate for it is working.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

chrischen 6y ago

Just because people use an asset for gambling doesn’t mean it is worthless.

untilHellbanned 6y ago

What's the correlation of people who hate on crypto who lost money or missed out on it?

rawtxapp 6y ago
There's a whole subreddit of them at /r/buttcoin.
loceng 6y ago
I just posted this in another comment: "Convincing yourself that someone commenting negatively about Bitcoin is simply jealous is also a common thing I've seen many Bitcoin owners use to justify ignoring legitimate counter-narratives of a lot of propaganda."

loceng 6y ago

Financially aligning people through greed, speculation, is certainly one way to gain "consensus" - however that ignores, attempts to circumvent the harder work - which takes healthy individuals who have genuine community via regular, conversations that go deep - of building trust; Bitcoin is a virus that has spread because our immune system isn't working, we're currently weak due to a lack of real connection, interconnection.

boredpandas777 6y ago
Thank you. Upvoted.

zby 6y ago

And yet this is the way to create money - money is what we believe other people will want and will give us something valuable in exchange. It only works because other people also believe in it. It started with shells and gold and other collectibles - and we still collectively manipulate the price of gold in a kind of sustained flash mob. It is all circular - but it works and when you want to create a new kind of money you have to do the same trick again.

Gatsky 6y ago

Well what you say has some merit, but... Goldrush FOMO is a very powerful force. Not saying this applies to you, but I think some people can’t stand the cognitive dissonance of being a hacker and not getting into bitcoin, missing out on life-changing money. To deal with it, they need to vilify bitcoin often on quasi-moral grounds.

cbozeman 6y ago
That's a fallacy into which they're falling. Not a logical one, just a mental fault in their thinking. You and everyone else around you are always missing out on life-changing money. I missed out on GameStop when it was $4. Roaring Kitty was posting on YouTube then... but I didn't know about him. I didn't hear anything about GameStop until it was already in the hundreds of dollars. I missed out on Tesla. I missed out on Microsoft, Apple, Apple's resurgence in the 90s, etc. There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on. I'm biased, because I've been mining Bitcoin since 2010, starting with an old Asus Core2Duo laptop, then I got a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno miner, and then the Chinese miners took over the scene and I got out because I didn't see the point trying to compete with them. But I'm still missing out of all kinds of life-changing money scenarios even today. And so is everyone else.
- Gatsky 6y ago
  Yes, this is true of course. FOMO is a fallacy. Nonetheless, I think it does play a role in the nature of bitcoin criticism, which I otherwise find is somewhat odd and repetitive and moralising. You clearly don't have this problem - I think it is most severe in those people that never owned any bitcoin.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >which I otherwise find is somewhat odd and repetitive The problem is thousands of years old. At some point you have enumerated all possible criticism.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >There's always going to be some thing that everyone misses out on. Definitively, I don't have enough money to execute all the possible investment strategies I want to follow up on. It's also weird that the bet size is being ignored. With Bitcoin your maximum bet size is much smaller than with stocks because of the high risk. I can put more money into stocks because they are less risky and thus I can actually end up being exposed to greater gains.

aerosmile 6y ago

Gutsy, but it paid off. 86 karma points at the time of this writing.

centimeter 6y ago

You're describing the concept known as "money".

suifbwish 6y ago

I believe it takes 72 TERAWATTS running for 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. How is that justifiable when we are slipping deeper into an environmental crisis?

908087 6y ago
Don't worry, the bitcoin "investment advisors" on social media all bought Teslas, so it's basically a wash.
minitech 6y ago
> I believe it takes 72 TERAWATTS running for 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. Some corrections: - 10 minutes per block, not per bitcoin (block reward is currently 6.25 bitcoin) - it’s more like 14 GW, not 72 TW
marshmallow_12 6y ago
simple answer: i don't have to justify wasting my own money to other people.

rpowers 6y ago

I'm really glad someone can articulate what I've bee thinking for a long time. It started when I realized that bitcoin was being used to fuel dark markets then again when I saw that anyone was able to make a coin and pre-mine thousands before sharing with others struck with FOMO.

cyphertruck 6y ago
You can easily make rpowerscoin. But it won’t be bitcoin. And its existence will have negligible impact on bitcoin. There have been 100,000 clones of bitcoin (according to someone who claimed to have counted)but none are genuinely successful. Even forks if bitcoin fail despite spending millions on propaganda. Think there might be a reason?
- ebcode 6y ago
  I think that can be adequately explained by this entry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash have already surpassed bitcoin in transaction throughput. If anyone has spent millions on propaganda it is the people pushing the second layer on bitcoin's crippled transaction throughput.

usernamefk 6y ago

thanks for the comment. I totally agree. sadly, we are stuck with it...

malwarebytess 6y ago

> It's taken a gambling-friendly society with feverish lust for winning (think for-profit fantasy sports, online poker, day trading, Vegas et al) and turned us into a giant decentralized casino. I agree with your post overall, but I think you'd be foolish to think that it wasn't always this way. The only difference is another strata of folk now can play as well.

oarabbus_ 6y ago

The most boring, tired take around. Ignorant people like to call it Dutch Tulips. Was Dutch Tulips a one-tie event? Or did it continue to increase in value and usage with higher highs and higher lows every couple years? By your "waste of resources" take, which is again so tired - at least Bitcoin is helping Venezuelans and Nigerians and others who have purchased it, unlike video games, which waste FAR more electricity and are a larger waste of resources.

hooande 6y ago

Ugh. I appreciate and agree with your perspective, but this isn't related to the content of the article at all. You just responded to the title

mr_toad 6y ago

You can’t blame Bitcoin for starting the fire, people have been speculating on financial assets as long as they’ve existed. And not just the huddled masses; smart people like Isaac Newton have been burned by bubbles.

tasssko 6y ago

Yes I agree, but I think you miss the point. The reality is folks buying bitcoin are also indirectly betting on the failure of our globalised central banking systems. This was the pitch in the early days and it remains a key value proposition. Think of it like this how much reach does a USD have? It’s limited by some factors but all things equal the reach of a USD is pretty good. I can use USD in most African and Asian countries. However the USD in China has limited reach. I’m using the word reach to loosely describe how usable the currency is in a foreign country. The sterling pound has a very limited reach if I were travelling I would convert it before. So one day in the future when the SHTF and no one wants to trade there will be a currency that is decentralised that has an unlimited reach. The reality is we need to get serious about the predicament of our financial systems or the folks with the BTC will be holding all the cards. I own no crypto and am just a interested observer wanting to share my perspective.

spiralx 6y ago
Your comment would have made more sense before everyone had the ability to use their debit/credit cards almost anywhere in the world, meaning the fact that other countries don't take GBP doesn't matter a huge amount at all. Last few times I was abroad if I needed cash I got it out of an ATM in the local currency.

vmception 6y ago

yes, bitcoin was specifically invented to co-opt our consciousness to self-propagate. it is successful in this. some people recognized that capability 10 years ago, some people recognize it today.

hourislate 6y ago

The Wolf of Wall St would agree with you. Although I agree with the the following article, I have taken a small position and bought the hype. My intention is to exit long before the jig is up. https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-casino/ https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-c...

aaron695 6y ago

> Let me fix that title. Happy to be downvoted into negative territory. I only have 11 points. Go ahead. > "Bitcoin Is A Waste of Time (and Resources)" The fact this clever whoring works on HN, saying you'll be downvoted then saying something mainstream popular to get upvoted says a lot about the HN community. Absolutely 100% off topic to the article and painting the garden shed. Good work to OP turning their claimed karma level from 11 to 177, that's hacking.

wonderwonder 6y ago

You are right. I own Btc and other crypto assets for that very reason. The desire to hit big is the primary motivator and it unfortunately bleeds into other investments such as stocks etc. I very much am attempting to go back to the buy and long term hold mentality but you are right, crypto has mentally ruined it for me.

pascalxus 6y ago

bitcoin isn't just for speculators. It's also for longer term buy and hold investors. there's a very real demand for investments that will hold their value against inflation. can you name a single asset class that will do that, other than equities or gold? real estate is out of the question because the overhead of buying and selling it is to expensive, not to mention it's so hard to execute that you'd loose your shirt if you dont know what your doing.