9 ms·

Bitcoin makes journalists say stupid things

114 points by cs702 14y ago

Sambdala 14y ago
Moreso even than being wrong about a lot of things, I've been continuously amazed at how polarized coverage on Bitcoin is. It's very rarely been approached, by journalists, as "here's an interesting technology. It's a little kooky, but it's getting more popular. I wonder if anything interesting is here?". Instead, you get either intense fandom or intense vitriol.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Most potentially disruptive things seem to be similarly polarizing.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I suspect that is a function of pandering to their audience. There is an active readership that wants to believe Bitcoin is an escalation in the "drug war", there is a readership that wants to believe that Bitcoin can remove the influence of financial institutions on government. Articles that pander to their targeted readers get a lot of 'shares' and what ever counts as upvotes for them. This in turn is used by the author to represent their own "value" to the agency where they are providing the page views. I thought the priceonomics coverage was quite good, but I tend to look at it through an economics lens rather than a particular idealism.
clarkmoody 14y ago
It's all about incentives: online bloggers and mainstream media types have an incentive to get a story out to keep people coming back to their websites / TV stations. They have no incentive to tell the truth, since no one holds the media responsible. In crisis situations, the media reports whatever rumor is floating in the air at the time, just to fill the airwaves. Regarding the Bitcoin exchange rate surge since the beginning of the year, the media conflates it with "concerns" over the Cyprus situation, just to make news. Regarding markets in general, the financial media loves to say that the Dow moved down on "worries" over this or that, when in reality the price action usually has nothing to do with that imaginary concern. Since Bitcoin is difficult to understand for most, it's asking WAY too much of the media to report on it correctly. How often have you seen quotes from "experts" over their concerns that Bitcoin will get "hacked" and become worthless? How often do they refer to "shares" of Bitcoin? Have you ever seen a mainstream article about Bitcoin network strength increases / decreases?
Perceval 14y ago
The bitcoin should be renamed the Dunning-Krugerrand.
- spenrose 14y ago
  You sir have won the Internet. Well played.
  - slinkyavenger 14y ago
    Not so fast, that term was coined in a SomethingAwful thread about bitcoins.
  - pseudonym 14y ago
    It's actually a fairly dated reference[1]. The "original thread" referenced is from 2011, but I don't want to work through 500 pages of posts to find the initial instantiation of it. [1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486823&pagenumber=159&perpage=40#post408226004 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...
pico303 14y ago
I was researching Bitcoins for use in a project I'm working on, so I've been slogging through this and other articles lately with great dismay. The biggest problem right now with these kinds of articles (this one included) is that while yes, they are dramatic, they are technology-focused. We're not getting a lot of economists writing on Bitcoin. Paul Krugman has written a bit that I think is spot on. Every article I read seems to compare Bitcoin to other currencies and say it's the same because those currencies are made up too. This is a patently false statement, and why we need more economists involved. Real-world currencies are valued on the GDP and credit-worthiness of the nations that issue the currency. Bitcoin lacks this fundamental property. As it stands, Bitcoin is more like gold or the old tulip craze: it's based on the desire of those involved to have it. As Paul Krugman indicates, Bitcoin is actually a pretty bad currency. It's difficult to convert to, few places accept it as currency, and worst there's rampant speculation on the fictitious value of the currency. Take the exciting tech out of the picture, and you've got a currency that is about as interesting and useful as the Zimbabwean dollar. For example, one author writes about how he purchase 92% of a single Bitcoin for $130. One site I found that accepts Bitcoin will send you a free t-shirt if you spend more than 1.5 Bitcoin. So if you spend over $200, they'll send you a $10 t-shirt. What an incentive. And I'm not sure how the site deals with the wildly fluctuating value of the currency. I know banks and governments don't always manage money well, but there is something to be said for the regulation and support we do get from traditional currencies. If the USD fluctuated like Bitcoin, the US economy would probably collapse. Needless to say I've decided to just go with plain credit card transactions in our project, and stay away from this volatility and uncertainty.
- lenazegher 14y ago
  >As Paul Krugman indicates, Bitcoin is actually a pretty bad currency. It's difficult to convert to, few places accept it as currency I'm not sure this is a fair criticism because literally every non-governmental currency would suffer from this problem at first. There is nothing inherent to bitcoin that precludes it being easy to convert to or being widely accepted. In fact, there are qualities inherent to bitcoin that make it easy to convert to and to be widely accepted. The problem is that there is no appropriate frame of reference for these qualities because there have been so few digital currencies in the history of the world. A fairer assessment might be that bitcoin is a fairly bad currency at the moment but has the potential to be a pretty great currency. The same is not true for the Zimbabwean dollar. I agree, however, that currency speculation is currently the biggest problem facing bitcoin (by far).
trotsky 14y ago
The interesting thing about the bitcoin community is that they've discovered that nearly everyone else besides themselves and F. A. Hayek is stupid.
- harryh 14y ago
  Can't decide at all if you're being sarcastic or not. Well played sir!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- BrokenPipe 14y ago
  Thank you! I checked out https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Hayek https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Hayek and it is very interesting!
ruswick 14y ago
This is true of any remotely complex process or occurrence. The proletariat is dumb, and the news media that caters to them feels compelled to dumb their work down so that it can be read by the most technically-naive person. As a result, the threshold for what constitutes adequate reporting is lowered. 99% of people don't give even a remote shit about Bitcoin, nor are they likely to ever purchase any; and, if they do, they will never pay even a perfunctory thought to the cryptographic and economic implications. Because of this, writers have little incentive to pour effort into considering and/or researching the actual nature of Bitcoin. If they can get away publishing ill-though out arguments and include outright falsehoods in their writing, why would writers opt to incur more work by attempting to write a thoughtful, correct piece? If the market will tollerate lazy writing, laziness is what the market will get...
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  It isn't just mainstream journalists though. Frankly, I can't remember another topic on HN about which so many low-quality tech blog articles were promoted to the front page.
- danielweber 14y ago
  they will never pay even a perfunctory thought to the cryptographic [] implications They better not. The crypto of Bitcoin is amazing, and Satoshi should get a medal for it. But it's not important because of its crypto.
zeteo 14y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see the incentives here. We have on the one hand a number of professional economics writers (e.g. Krugman) who are skeptical or dismissive of Bitcoin. On the other hand, we have a number of bloggers who already own Bitcoins and have a direct financial interest in their appreciation. I think it's pretty clear which side the hacks are on. Arguments such as "this is obviously not Tulip Mania because Bitcoin is not a tulip" only confirm it. (By the way, Tulip Mania involved some pretty sophisticated financial instruments - futures, options, insurance etc. Those 17th century Dutch who invented the stock exchange were actually pretty good at breaking a tulip into a million pieces and selling it repeatedly without its changing location.)
- CWilliams1013 14y ago
  Paul Krugman was also skeptical and dismissive of the Internet: > The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law" -- which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants -- becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. > As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
  - buss 14y ago
    Being wrong once doesn't make you wrong forever.
    - cle 14y ago
      Of course not, but it does affect your credibility, and rightly so. I don't know what his track record is on technology in general, but dismissing something as important and revolutionary as the Internet makes me seriously wonder about his ability to understand the impact of new technologies.
      - 14y ago
slinkyavenger 14y ago
I didn't know horribly-written opinion pieces like this could make it to the top of HN.
- jack_trades 14y ago
  It's almost like there's an IRC channel devoted to dispatching those invested in the scheme to flood the online community consciousness with fanciful ideas of wealth and splendour.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  We seem to be in a midst of a bitcoin article bubble.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    If you could seize 51% of the computer power of HN readers we could make them disappear.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    The value of "bitcoin frenzy" articles will only rise and never stop! I'll bet you ten bitcoin articles that this will be the case.
aneth4 14y ago
One thing you learn about the press as you have a few experiences as an "insider": they almost never get it right. Reporters rarely have the time, intelligence, and information to research and write an accurate report on every subject. There is no Bitcoin correspondant for Bloomberg, just an overworked, underpaid English major.
andylei 14y ago
tldr: some things that people have said about Bitcoin are innacurate, therefore "financial journalists are way over their heads here, their “sources” are useless, and you will learn less than nothing by reading them"
qwertzlcoatl 14y ago
I think Bitcoin itself isn't making the media say stupid things. I think the media says stupid things all the time, it just happens that a lot of us, who knew Bitcoin from the beginnings and already have a fair share of knowledge on this subject, can see more clearly how inherently flawed a lot of the information is. This sudden uprise of awareness and the news coverage that came with it, surely made me even more skeptical about mainstream media, as no one is to be trusted. Financial Times, Bloomberg and all the big ones that have such a tremendous amount of weight behind them, are in the end inseparable from blogspam, as they have the same sensationalistic tendencies and didn't do their homework, at all. It's not easy to digest the phenomena Bitcoin, but at least have the decency towards your followers of not commenting on it until you have established at least a semi-understanding of the matter.
- alexwright 14y ago
  This has always worried me about news/media. When ever they cover anything I have the slightest background in, they get something, or everything, about it glaringly and completely wrong. So what else are the getting wrong the rest of the time? My guess has to be everything I suppose.
  - mrweasel 14y ago
    I believe that John C. Dvorak made the same argument on the No Agenda podcast a few weeks back. It has really made me rethink how news is reported. We simply have no way of knowing if what is being reported and explained is correct. Even in the rare cases where true expects a interviewed we rarely get a completely objective opinion. This, I believe, is either because the journalist are trying to steer the conversation into a direction he or she understands or because it make for more "exciting" news. It's truly sad that the media believes that it should dumb down content, or make it more "easily available" at the cost of the truth and correctness. I don't think the average media consumers are so dumb that it's necessary and if they are presenting the with incorrect information surely can't be helping the issue.
  - aj700 14y ago
    Cowboy BeBop at His Computer http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisComputer http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisC... Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge. —Erwin Knoll
tlrobinson 14y ago
Here are a few recent articles I found to be relatively accurate and fair (several of which have already appeared on HN): http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-t... https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb https://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins https://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reason-you-shouldnt-buy-bitcoins/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reaso... http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-plunge-protection-team.html?spref=tw&m=1 http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-plunge-protect...
- drcode 14y ago
  that first article is fantastic.
- alwillis 14y ago
  This BusinessWeek article is also good: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-be-the-global-economys-last-safe-haven http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-...
jack_trades 14y ago
So financial journalists have no idea how these things are made, used, or what place they have within transactions, economies, etc. and you expect masses of people to eventually feel comfortable with the stuff? The fear that is engendered by a non-tangible, value-containing set of bytes of data on a computer in the age of hacker doom-dom is quite likely the extent of what you need to know about its foreseeable viability and should put the current "value rollercoaster" into perspective. How does the layman NOT lump the early adopters/hype pumpers in with the same crowd vandalizing paypal and credit card companies? So these kids created a currency to reject the system and they think this is the future? It's like watching some unruly teenagers with a very large potato gun mounted to their friend's back and saying... "This is the future of the postal service. Buy stamps while they're cheap." It's the emperor's new clothes. That's not a currency. It's barely a digital promise to anonymous posters on 4chan. As long as there isn't anybody with a strong incentive to pull the plug, this thing will continue to eat up every online "watering hole." It's great for silk road, but spare us the hype machine. The only people with incentive are adopters. They shut that zeek's reqards down in NC and now everyone is hopping on the p2p currency train. Start your own business! Invest in the peoples' coin!
ontheinternets 14y ago
I think this has been posted on every bitcoin discussion so far: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.ht... http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm... so here it is again
brown9-2 14y ago
So there you have it: The government is the people, and to oppose mega-banks is to oppose democracy itself. Pretty sure I read that in the Federalist Papers. 1. Is "the government is the people" meant to be a criticism? 2. Interesting that in the quote from Felix Salmon that this is criticizing, Salmon never mentions mega-banks or that the size of the bank is related to their civic responsibility. It's the author of this piece who is inserting a bias against "mega-banks", and assuming that anyone who is pro- the existence of banks in democratic society is also pro-mega-bank.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Bitcoin is at the brackish between macroeconomics and cryptography. Macroeconomics, despite every reporter professing to understand it to a T, is immensely complicated, in both its theoretical and empirical aspects. Cryptography is similarly esoteric (and subject to popular Dunning-Krueger effects) within the tech community. Thus, we see a lot of tech journalists busy making a trash job of nineteenth-century economics while FT Alphaville finds its analyst who made easy work of dynamically-tranches credit products stumped by cryptography 101. It will take time for the theoreticians on either side to get a handle of things, and a good deal of hot air will be expended in the process. I can't say I'm not excited about this - it's a grassroots experimental verification of a lot of economic theory. But if people are ploughing savings they cannot afford to lose into the currency out of anger against the present economic situation, ideology, or a mis-understanding of economics, that is a problem, and it is irresponsible not to at least try and give fair warning.
tptacek 14y ago
Does it make economics professors say stupid things, too? Because the first Felix Salmon callout in this post, the one followed by "blah blah blah", also happened to be Tyler Cowan's "best sentences I read all week". I guess we can debate whether Tyler Cowan is paid to think --- or, as Moldbug puts it, even allowed to think --- and so on/forth in No True Scotsman style until we've narrowed the conversation to "hackers" who think exactly like we do.
aj700 14y ago
"could not be stolen through any amount of force". If bitcoins are practically unstealable/unconfiscatable then that'd be neat, but they aren't. They are stolen in vast quantities all the time by malware. If the government wants your bitcoins badly enough it can run a tank into your house, use force to compel you to tell them your password, torture you etc. You're not screwing the state over, you're giving it an incentive to take a hostile interest in you. Did anyone download the clients anonymously? Not many did. They will know.

114 points by cs702 14y ago

Moreso even than being wrong about a lot of things, I've been continuously amazed at how polarized coverage on Bitcoin is. It's very rarely been approached, by journalists, as "here's an interesting technology. It's a little kooky, but it's getting more popular. I wonder if anything interesting is here?". Instead, you get either intense fandom or intense vitriol.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Most potentially disruptive things seem to be similarly polarizing.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I suspect that is a function of pandering to their audience. There is an active readership that wants to believe Bitcoin is an escalation in the "drug war", there is a readership that wants to believe that Bitcoin can remove the influence of financial institutions on government. Articles that pander to their targeted readers get a lot of 'shares' and what ever counts as upvotes for them. This in turn is used by the author to represent their own "value" to the agency where they are providing the page views. I thought the priceonomics coverage was quite good, but I tend to look at it through an economics lens rather than a particular idealism.

clarkmoody 14y ago

It's all about incentives: online bloggers and mainstream media types have an incentive to get a story out to keep people coming back to their websites / TV stations. They have no incentive to tell the truth, since no one holds the media responsible. In crisis situations, the media reports whatever rumor is floating in the air at the time, just to fill the airwaves. Regarding the Bitcoin exchange rate surge since the beginning of the year, the media conflates it with "concerns" over the Cyprus situation, just to make news. Regarding markets in general, the financial media loves to say that the Dow moved down on "worries" over this or that, when in reality the price action usually has nothing to do with that imaginary concern. Since Bitcoin is difficult to understand for most, it's asking WAY too much of the media to report on it correctly. How often have you seen quotes from "experts" over their concerns that Bitcoin will get "hacked" and become worthless? How often do they refer to "shares" of Bitcoin? Have you ever seen a mainstream article about Bitcoin network strength increases / decreases?

Perceval 14y ago

The bitcoin should be renamed the Dunning-Krugerrand.

spenrose 14y ago
You sir have won the Internet. Well played.
- slinkyavenger 14y ago
  Not so fast, that term was coined in a SomethingAwful thread about bitcoins.
- pseudonym 14y ago
  It's actually a fairly dated reference[1]. The "original thread" referenced is from 2011, but I don't want to work through 500 pages of posts to find the initial instantiation of it. [1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486823&pagenumber=159&perpage=40#post408226004 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...

pico303 14y ago

I was researching Bitcoins for use in a project I'm working on, so I've been slogging through this and other articles lately with great dismay. The biggest problem right now with these kinds of articles (this one included) is that while yes, they are dramatic, they are technology-focused. We're not getting a lot of economists writing on Bitcoin. Paul Krugman has written a bit that I think is spot on. Every article I read seems to compare Bitcoin to other currencies and say it's the same because those currencies are made up too. This is a patently false statement, and why we need more economists involved. Real-world currencies are valued on the GDP and credit-worthiness of the nations that issue the currency. Bitcoin lacks this fundamental property. As it stands, Bitcoin is more like gold or the old tulip craze: it's based on the desire of those involved to have it. As Paul Krugman indicates, Bitcoin is actually a pretty bad currency. It's difficult to convert to, few places accept it as currency, and worst there's rampant speculation on the fictitious value of the currency. Take the exciting tech out of the picture, and you've got a currency that is about as interesting and useful as the Zimbabwean dollar. For example, one author writes about how he purchase 92% of a single Bitcoin for $130. One site I found that accepts Bitcoin will send you a free t-shirt if you spend more than 1.5 Bitcoin. So if you spend over $200, they'll send you a $10 t-shirt. What an incentive. And I'm not sure how the site deals with the wildly fluctuating value of the currency. I know banks and governments don't always manage money well, but there is something to be said for the regulation and support we do get from traditional currencies. If the USD fluctuated like Bitcoin, the US economy would probably collapse. Needless to say I've decided to just go with plain credit card transactions in our project, and stay away from this volatility and uncertainty.

lenazegher 14y ago
>As Paul Krugman indicates, Bitcoin is actually a pretty bad currency. It's difficult to convert to, few places accept it as currency I'm not sure this is a fair criticism because literally every non-governmental currency would suffer from this problem at first. There is nothing inherent to bitcoin that precludes it being easy to convert to or being widely accepted. In fact, there are qualities inherent to bitcoin that make it easy to convert to and to be widely accepted. The problem is that there is no appropriate frame of reference for these qualities because there have been so few digital currencies in the history of the world. A fairer assessment might be that bitcoin is a fairly bad currency at the moment but has the potential to be a pretty great currency. The same is not true for the Zimbabwean dollar. I agree, however, that currency speculation is currently the biggest problem facing bitcoin (by far).

trotsky 14y ago

The interesting thing about the bitcoin community is that they've discovered that nearly everyone else besides themselves and F. A. Hayek is stupid.

harryh 14y ago
Can't decide at all if you're being sarcastic or not. Well played sir!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
BrokenPipe 14y ago
Thank you! I checked out https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Hayek https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Hayek and it is very interesting!

ruswick 14y ago

This is true of any remotely complex process or occurrence. The proletariat is dumb, and the news media that caters to them feels compelled to dumb their work down so that it can be read by the most technically-naive person. As a result, the threshold for what constitutes adequate reporting is lowered. 99% of people don't give even a remote shit about Bitcoin, nor are they likely to ever purchase any; and, if they do, they will never pay even a perfunctory thought to the cryptographic and economic implications. Because of this, writers have little incentive to pour effort into considering and/or researching the actual nature of Bitcoin. If they can get away publishing ill-though out arguments and include outright falsehoods in their writing, why would writers opt to incur more work by attempting to write a thoughtful, correct piece? If the market will tollerate lazy writing, laziness is what the market will get...

jeremyjh 14y ago
It isn't just mainstream journalists though. Frankly, I can't remember another topic on HN about which so many low-quality tech blog articles were promoted to the front page.
danielweber 14y ago
they will never pay even a perfunctory thought to the cryptographic [] implications They better not. The crypto of Bitcoin is amazing, and Satoshi should get a medal for it. But it's not important because of its crypto.

zeteo 14y ago

I'm sorry, but I don't see the incentives here. We have on the one hand a number of professional economics writers (e.g. Krugman) who are skeptical or dismissive of Bitcoin. On the other hand, we have a number of bloggers who already own Bitcoins and have a direct financial interest in their appreciation. I think it's pretty clear which side the hacks are on. Arguments such as "this is obviously not Tulip Mania because Bitcoin is not a tulip" only confirm it. (By the way, Tulip Mania involved some pretty sophisticated financial instruments - futures, options, insurance etc. Those 17th century Dutch who invented the stock exchange were actually pretty good at breaking a tulip into a million pieces and selling it repeatedly without its changing location.)

CWilliams1013 14y ago
Paul Krugman was also skeptical and dismissive of the Internet: > The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law" -- which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants -- becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's. > As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
- buss 14y ago
  Being wrong once doesn't make you wrong forever.
  - cle 14y ago
    Of course not, but it does affect your credibility, and rightly so. I don't know what his track record is on technology in general, but dismissing something as important and revolutionary as the Internet makes me seriously wonder about his ability to understand the impact of new technologies.
    - 14y ago

slinkyavenger 14y ago

I didn't know horribly-written opinion pieces like this could make it to the top of HN.

jack_trades 14y ago
It's almost like there's an IRC channel devoted to dispatching those invested in the scheme to flood the online community consciousness with fanciful ideas of wealth and splendour.
brown9-2 14y ago
We seem to be in a midst of a bitcoin article bubble.
- danielweber 14y ago
  If you could seize 51% of the computer power of HN readers we could make them disappear.
- illuminate 14y ago
  The value of "bitcoin frenzy" articles will only rise and never stop! I'll bet you ten bitcoin articles that this will be the case.

aneth4 14y ago

One thing you learn about the press as you have a few experiences as an "insider": they almost never get it right. Reporters rarely have the time, intelligence, and information to research and write an accurate report on every subject. There is no Bitcoin correspondant for Bloomberg, just an overworked, underpaid English major.

andylei 14y ago

tldr: some things that people have said about Bitcoin are innacurate, therefore "financial journalists are way over their heads here, their “sources” are useless, and you will learn less than nothing by reading them"

qwertzlcoatl 14y ago

I think Bitcoin itself isn't making the media say stupid things. I think the media says stupid things all the time, it just happens that a lot of us, who knew Bitcoin from the beginnings and already have a fair share of knowledge on this subject, can see more clearly how inherently flawed a lot of the information is. This sudden uprise of awareness and the news coverage that came with it, surely made me even more skeptical about mainstream media, as no one is to be trusted. Financial Times, Bloomberg and all the big ones that have such a tremendous amount of weight behind them, are in the end inseparable from blogspam, as they have the same sensationalistic tendencies and didn't do their homework, at all. It's not easy to digest the phenomena Bitcoin, but at least have the decency towards your followers of not commenting on it until you have established at least a semi-understanding of the matter.

alexwright 14y ago
This has always worried me about news/media. When ever they cover anything I have the slightest background in, they get something, or everything, about it glaringly and completely wrong. So what else are the getting wrong the rest of the time? My guess has to be everything I suppose.
- mrweasel 14y ago
  I believe that John C. Dvorak made the same argument on the No Agenda podcast a few weeks back. It has really made me rethink how news is reported. We simply have no way of knowing if what is being reported and explained is correct. Even in the rare cases where true expects a interviewed we rarely get a completely objective opinion. This, I believe, is either because the journalist are trying to steer the conversation into a direction he or she understands or because it make for more "exciting" news. It's truly sad that the media believes that it should dumb down content, or make it more "easily available" at the cost of the truth and correctness. I don't think the average media consumers are so dumb that it's necessary and if they are presenting the with incorrect information surely can't be helping the issue.
- aj700 14y ago
  Cowboy BeBop at His Computer http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisComputer http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisC... Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge. —Erwin Knoll

tlrobinson 14y ago

Here are a few recent articles I found to be relatively accurate and fair (several of which have already appeared on HN): http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-the-future http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47135650437/are-bitcoins-t... https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb https://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins https://mises.org/daily/6399/The-Moneyness-of-Bitcoins http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reason-you-shouldnt-buy-bitcoins/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reaso... http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-plunge-protection-team.html?spref=tw&m=1 http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-plunge-protect...

drcode 14y ago
that first article is fantastic.
alwillis 14y ago
This BusinessWeek article is also good: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-be-the-global-economys-last-safe-haven http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-28/bitcoin-may-...

jack_trades 14y ago

So financial journalists have no idea how these things are made, used, or what place they have within transactions, economies, etc. and you expect masses of people to eventually feel comfortable with the stuff? The fear that is engendered by a non-tangible, value-containing set of bytes of data on a computer in the age of hacker doom-dom is quite likely the extent of what you need to know about its foreseeable viability and should put the current "value rollercoaster" into perspective. How does the layman NOT lump the early adopters/hype pumpers in with the same crowd vandalizing paypal and credit card companies? So these kids created a currency to reject the system and they think this is the future? It's like watching some unruly teenagers with a very large potato gun mounted to their friend's back and saying... "This is the future of the postal service. Buy stamps while they're cheap." It's the emperor's new clothes. That's not a currency. It's barely a digital promise to anonymous posters on 4chan. As long as there isn't anybody with a strong incentive to pull the plug, this thing will continue to eat up every online "watering hole." It's great for silk road, but spare us the hype machine. The only people with incentive are adopters. They shut that zeek's reqards down in NC and now everyone is hopping on the p2p currency train. Start your own business! Invest in the peoples' coin!

ontheinternets 14y ago

I think this has been posted on every bitcoin discussion so far: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CompetingMoneySupplies.ht... http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm... so here it is again

brown9-2 14y ago

So there you have it: The government is the people, and to oppose mega-banks is to oppose democracy itself. Pretty sure I read that in the Federalist Papers. 1. Is "the government is the people" meant to be a criticism? 2. Interesting that in the quote from Felix Salmon that this is criticizing, Salmon never mentions mega-banks or that the size of the bank is related to their civic responsibility. It's the author of this piece who is inserting a bias against "mega-banks", and assuming that anyone who is pro- the existence of banks in democratic society is also pro-mega-bank.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Bitcoin is at the brackish between macroeconomics and cryptography. Macroeconomics, despite every reporter professing to understand it to a T, is immensely complicated, in both its theoretical and empirical aspects. Cryptography is similarly esoteric (and subject to popular Dunning-Krueger effects) within the tech community. Thus, we see a lot of tech journalists busy making a trash job of nineteenth-century economics while FT Alphaville finds its analyst who made easy work of dynamically-tranches credit products stumped by cryptography 101. It will take time for the theoreticians on either side to get a handle of things, and a good deal of hot air will be expended in the process. I can't say I'm not excited about this - it's a grassroots experimental verification of a lot of economic theory. But if people are ploughing savings they cannot afford to lose into the currency out of anger against the present economic situation, ideology, or a mis-understanding of economics, that is a problem, and it is irresponsible not to at least try and give fair warning.

tptacek 14y ago

Does it make economics professors say stupid things, too? Because the first Felix Salmon callout in this post, the one followed by "blah blah blah", also happened to be Tyler Cowan's "best sentences I read all week". I guess we can debate whether Tyler Cowan is paid to think --- or, as Moldbug puts it, even allowed to think --- and so on/forth in No True Scotsman style until we've narrowed the conversation to "hackers" who think exactly like we do.

aj700 14y ago

"could not be stolen through any amount of force". If bitcoins are practically unstealable/unconfiscatable then that'd be neat, but they aren't. They are stolen in vast quantities all the time by malware. If the government wants your bitcoins badly enough it can run a tank into your house, use force to compel you to tell them your password, torture you etc. You're not screwing the state over, you're giving it an incentive to take a hostile interest in you. Did anyone download the clients anonymously? Not many did. They will know.