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Most people hold Bitcoin these days in the hopes of making money. The distributed consensus nature of crypto is irrelevant.
by spamizbad 4y ago
Most people hold Bitcoin these days in the hopes of making money. The distributed consensus nature of crypto is irrelevant.
- Ajedi32 4y agoThis is the key to understanding a lot of things about the "cryptocurrency community". There are two groups there with wildly different interests. A large chunk (probably even a majority) of the people involved in the cryptocurrency space don't actually care about cryptocurrency as a technology at all, they're just there to make money. To these people, market price is everything, and the technology is irrelevant except to the extent that it affects the market price. Then in the other camp there's a group of people who don't care about the current trading price, they're just interested in the technology and the new capabilities it enables. I'm in that second camp (perhaps unsurprisingly, since this is Hacker News), so in my view this story isn't really all that interesting or surprising. From a legal/societal perspective, yeah this is terrible and probably someone should go to jail. But from a technical perspective, the fact that exchanges can scam people out of their money is hardly new information. As the saying goes: not your keys, not your crypto. Though obviously for those who are interested in cryptocurrency solely to make money on speculation, yeah this is a big story.