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Bitcoin enthusiast here. Pretty surprising how antagonistic the HN crowd is to bitcoin.

• bootlooped 6y ago
  Why? The downsides are obvious and the realized upsides are extremely limited. The best thing I can say about it is that it's enabled cheaper international money transfers for some people. The worst thing is that it consumes an entire nation's worth of electricity. Compare those two things; is it worth it?
• Applejinx 6y ago
  Hackers are capable of thinking through an argument and, at their best, coming up with disruptive and/or unexpected solutions to a situation. This is of course how Bitcoin came to be in the first place. That's also why hackers may be the first to figure out the catastrophic failure of cryptocurrency, or perhaps ALL cryptocurrency as a class, or the exploit to disrupt the disruptor and render cryptocurrency a useless dead end. It's founded on assumptions both explicit and implicit. One of the implicit ones is that capitalism will continue to be the force that checkmates any argument against crypto: get enough capital into it and the capital will seek to protect itself, honestly or dishonestly, peacefully or violently, with no consideration for any other concern. Hackers are capable of thinking through that scenario and asking whether, by contrast, something like bitcoin might be the exploit that destroys capitalism by increasing its efficiencies until they're untenable.