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People believe many things. But they are usually not so emotionally invested in proclaiming a belief. Especially when they are not involved. People who think c

People believe many things. But they are usually not so emotionally invested in proclaiming a belief. Especially when they are not involved. People who think crypto is a scam could just ignore it. So the strong emotional energy here is interesting.

onion2k 5y ago
Especially when they are not involved. Literally everyone on Earth is involved because crypto mining is massively bad for the environment. Until Proof of Stake is rolled out, every single person has a legitimate claim that crypto is bad because their great great grandchildren won't have a viable planet to live on. That's not all down to crypto, but it is a significant contributing factor.
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
  Then why do people not rally against gold? Gold mining uses 10x more resources than Bitcoin mining.
  - danaris 5y ago
    I mean, first off, [citation needed], but... Gold has utility. Some of that utility is solidly practical—it is needed in various kinds of manufacturing. Some of it is purely decorative/emotional, but that is still utility. Bitcoin has no utility beyond "make lots of money for the people who got in early". I've been asking for years now, and I've never seen anyone give a valid use case for Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general); the answers are invariably along the lines of "you can use it to make money" (that's not a use case, you can literally do that with bottlecaps if you can convince people they're worth something) or "to take monetary power away from the eeeeevil statist oppressors" which is 1) wishful thinking (for reasons I outlined elsewhere in the comments on this article), and 2) not something that most people actually see as a good thing.
    - ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
      Then why didn't the state of El Salvador settle on bottle caps as their new currency?
      - danaris 5y ago
        Because no one convinced them that they had more value.
tinco 5y ago
I'm involved, I still think people are falling into a psychological trap comparable to a Ponzi scam. I was also involved by holding TSLA, still think that's the same kind of trap. I just think this kind of trap can possibly be sustainable the way gold has been the past couple thousand years. Anyway I think you're projecting a bit. It's the people who are reacting to the claims of it being a scam that are emotionally invested. Obviously because they put their money into it. I've never seen anyone emotionally claim Bitcoin is a scam, it's usually just a plain statement of fact. They'll calmly argue it as well, though it's a hard argument.
emn13 5y ago
Well, for one, it's a scarily huge scam by now... if it's a scam. It's worth almost 50% of apple or MS at this point, and growing much more quickly than either the past year - if it were to crash, that's going to reverberate... Also, it's personally annoying that this seemingly superfluous activity is STEALIN' MAH CHIPS! Perhaps that feeling isn't reasonable, but at least without careful consideration it looks like crypto's rise is contributing to a lack of silicon supply. Perhaps more relevantly long term but less tangible are the other resources it's slurping up, including lovely things like electricity from coal-fired-power plants (though with china supposedly exiting the market, maybe it's less bad now?). Then there's the criminal element to the whole thing; the lack of transparency means it looks like at least some of those involved are also involved in criminal activities and use it as a way of avoiding some banking oversight. Finally, the people getting rich off this are pretty nebulous and don't appear to have deserved this windfall in an age when most people aren't having such an easy ride. People don't like faceless corp's either, and the structure may be different here, but it feels similarly impersonal. All in all, crypto is getting a surprisingly good rep really - probably because it's also stickin' it to the man, which is also pretty unreasonable ;-).

onion2k 5y ago

Especially when they are not involved. Literally everyone on Earth is involved because crypto mining is massively bad for the environment. Until Proof of Stake is rolled out, every single person has a legitimate claim that crypto is bad because their great great grandchildren won't have a viable planet to live on. That's not all down to crypto, but it is a significant contributing factor.

ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
Then why do people not rally against gold? Gold mining uses 10x more resources than Bitcoin mining.
- danaris 5y ago
  I mean, first off, [citation needed], but... Gold has utility. Some of that utility is solidly practical—it is needed in various kinds of manufacturing. Some of it is purely decorative/emotional, but that is still utility. Bitcoin has no utility beyond "make lots of money for the people who got in early". I've been asking for years now, and I've never seen anyone give a valid use case for Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general); the answers are invariably along the lines of "you can use it to make money" (that's not a use case, you can literally do that with bottlecaps if you can convince people they're worth something) or "to take monetary power away from the eeeeevil statist oppressors" which is 1) wishful thinking (for reasons I outlined elsewhere in the comments on this article), and 2) not something that most people actually see as a good thing.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
    Then why didn't the state of El Salvador settle on bottle caps as their new currency?
    - danaris 5y ago
      Because no one convinced them that they had more value.

tinco 5y ago

I'm involved, I still think people are falling into a psychological trap comparable to a Ponzi scam. I was also involved by holding TSLA, still think that's the same kind of trap. I just think this kind of trap can possibly be sustainable the way gold has been the past couple thousand years. Anyway I think you're projecting a bit. It's the people who are reacting to the claims of it being a scam that are emotionally invested. Obviously because they put their money into it. I've never seen anyone emotionally claim Bitcoin is a scam, it's usually just a plain statement of fact. They'll calmly argue it as well, though it's a hard argument.

emn13 5y ago

Well, for one, it's a scarily huge scam by now... if it's a scam. It's worth almost 50% of apple or MS at this point, and growing much more quickly than either the past year - if it were to crash, that's going to reverberate... Also, it's personally annoying that this seemingly superfluous activity is STEALIN' MAH CHIPS! Perhaps that feeling isn't reasonable, but at least without careful consideration it looks like crypto's rise is contributing to a lack of silicon supply. Perhaps more relevantly long term but less tangible are the other resources it's slurping up, including lovely things like electricity from coal-fired-power plants (though with china supposedly exiting the market, maybe it's less bad now?). Then there's the criminal element to the whole thing; the lack of transparency means it looks like at least some of those involved are also involved in criminal activities and use it as a way of avoiding some banking oversight. Finally, the people getting rich off this are pretty nebulous and don't appear to have deserved this windfall in an age when most people aren't having such an easy ride. People don't like faceless corp's either, and the structure may be different here, but it feels similarly impersonal. All in all, crypto is getting a surprisingly good rep really - probably because it's also stickin' it to the man, which is also pretty unreasonable ;-).