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Setting aside the contents of the article for a moment, I find the tone fascinating. Consider these phrases: "everything wrong with Silicon Valley" "crypto-l

Setting aside the contents of the article for a moment, I find the tone fascinating. Consider these phrases: "everything wrong with Silicon Valley" "crypto-libertarian political agenda that smacks of nerds-do-it-better paternalism" "intellectual sinkhole" "near-total obliviousness to reality" "alarmingly magical thinking" "unchecked predatory capitalism" "short-sighted hypercapitalism" There are interesting conversations to have around bitcoins but I can't quite put my finger on why they tend to get so intense.

seiji 13y ago
When you're confronted with people getting rich off of other's unfettered optimism with zero grounding in reality while you see the truth of the matter, it can drive you batty. It's like trying to explain to an 8 year old why Justin Beiber is just a fad. They have their hopes and dreams tied up in something you can't battle no matter how hard you argue.
- johndevor 13y ago
  I don't think it's appropriate to tell an 8-year-old they should be listening to better music. Why would you argue with such intensity over something that, presumably, doesn't or won't affect you in the least.
- Crito 13y ago
  I think the Justin Beiber analogy is probably pretty good. Certainly there are adults that get rather upset over what children like to listen to.. but should they? I am not a Justin Beiber fan, but why in the world would anyone waste their time being upset that other people are? The fact that there are adults who get upset that children like Justin Beiber probably suggests that irrational negative reactions do not necessarily suggest that there is an element of feeling as though your political ideology is being threatened (as others and myself have already suggested in this discussion).
- baddox 13y ago
  It's interesting that you point to music, one of the most subjective and deeply personal areas of human culture, as your analogy for supposed objective qualities of Bitcoin.
hack_edu 13y ago
Hand-waving is easy, dialog is hard.
- kordless 13y ago
  Us technobabblers need to unite on why Bitcoin is valuable. I've been hammering on the part where the Bitcoin network is doing 7 quadrillion hashes a second right now. All of that work/energy is going into securing the coin for current and future transactions. It is, simply put, a platform of trust powered by the most massive compute engine humanity has ever built.
  - ashray 13y ago
    It doesn't matter. There are plenty of good things about Bitcoin which folks need to do <5mins of research to find out about. The vitriol on HN shocks me though. I would've thought this community would love something like bitcoin. But instead of good quality discussions most bitcoin threads here turn into haters vs 'fanboys'. You are a 'fanboy'. It's pretty hard to get taken seriously once that happens.... :(
jwesley 13y ago
It's because Bitcoin is truly a massive political issue, with the potential to completely overhaul existing power dynamics. It is Establishment Leftism vs everyone else, and the battle lines are being drawn.
thecoffman 13y ago
Freedom is a terrifying thing to people who have a naturally authoritarian mindset. I don't personally believe that Bitcoin is the road to some techno-utopia. Frankly, I expect that ultimately it will just be a blip on the radar; but there's no reason to get so angry about it unless its fundamentally a scary idea. Its a direct challenge to the authoritarian worldview and that's frightening.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- msandford 13y ago
  That's really insightful. Well put.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  I don't think it's accurate to characterize the OP as criticizing (or being terrified by, for that matter) the freedom offered by Bitcoin as if freedom is a bad thing. Rather, he argues (somewhat convincingly) that the freedom offered by Bitcoin is of most value to the people who are already rich enough (either in time, resources, or USD) to profit from speculation, asic mining, and other aspects of the Bitcoin market. The freedom provided by this new financial system does nothing to enrich the people who are imperiled by the existing financial system; quite the opposite, the lack of regulations endangers them because they are not highly educated, rational financiers so they have increased exposure to risk/fraud.
  - nostromo 13y ago
    I don't find it convincing at all. When I was in college, I hated banks. Once I bought a cup of coffee for $2 only to find I had racked up $40 worth of NSF fees accidentally. I'm sure this happens to poor folks all the time. Poor people often don't use banks because banks prey on the poor and often make them poorer. Why didn't I just use cash? Because I wanted to buy things online, accept payments from others, and didn't want to carry cash around all the time. If Bitcoin was less volatile, it would actually do a good job of solving some of the issues faced by poorer "underbanked" people.
Crito 13y ago
Most people who are not interested or excited about bitcoin are also not threatened or offended by it. They don't write articles about it because they just think it is a silly fad. Only people who really care one way or the other are going to be bothered to write about their feelings towards it. (I own no bitcoin, but am not threatened by it either. It is fun to watch and read about, and I'm not getting hurt so I don't see any reason to be angry at it.)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
altoz 13y ago
I've noticed this, too. There's often a violent rejection of bitcoin at an intensity that doesn't correlate to how much it's hurt them. In fact, the nastiest remarks about bitcoin come from people that own zero bitcoins. My theory is that the more something challenges your world view, the more violently against something you will be.
javert 13y ago
The blogger has an incredibly malicious attitude towards individual people. Everyone is ruining everything, everybody is bad, and we ought to regulate everything to fix it. Because somehow bureaucrats are immune from whatever ails people that are seeking the pursuit of happiness. The blog post is disconnected from reality in so many places that I couldn't even begin to respond. Somebody who kept their thinking connected to reality would have a pretty hard time getting to those kinds of views in the first place.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  I don't understand why you think a person with experience in the banking and software industries who wrote a detailed post sharing thoughts on Bitcoin and surrounding culture, with links to reference material that he believes supports his argument, is 'disconnected from reality'. All I see in your post is a really weak generalization of the themes of his post in an attempt to undermine them.
  - javert 13y ago
    Because he is disconnected from reality. The post is absolutely chock full of mistaken and fantastic premises. It's just an observation I've made. People will have to agree or disagree based on their own judgement. I acknowledge that I am not providing any evidence for this. It wouldn't be worth the effort to me of deconstructing his post sentence by sentence.
    - logjam 13y ago
      ~sigh~ Enough. Save your unsupported observations and your fucking breath. Your contributions and the contributions of other libertarians in this thread amount to little more than endlessly bleating that (in the opinion of the greedy), greed couldn't possibly have led to financial calamities, and that impediments to greed like democratically elected governments and legislated, popular laws are to blame for financial calamities....the disasters that history has shown repeatedly arise only when those same laws are weakened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economic_disasters_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economic_disasters_in_...
saraid216 13y ago
> There are interesting conversations to have around bitcoins but I can't quite put my finger on why they tend to get so intense. It's because it's more a religious discussion than a rational debate. You see the exact same pattern of phrasing used by proponents of Bitcoin, by American fundamentalists and spinoffs, and by atheists who are actively pushing for the complete removal of religion. I've given up learning anything useful about Bitcoin since I don't find any of the people talking about it trustworthy.
- kordless 13y ago
  So it's a chicken and the egg problem...Bitcoin provides a platform of trust, but you don't trust anyone enough to explain it to you. Edit: I hear you below! :) I should have clarified that Bitcoin will GIVE WAY to a way to trust people through their monetary transactions. Think credit agencies and lobbyists.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't provide a platform of trust for explaining concepts. It provides a platform of trust for monetary transactions. It's like a preacher once told me. God is good because the Bible says so. The Bible is right because God says so. At no point is there anyone qualified to say, "Look. This is God and this is what he's doing. Come to your own conclusion." Edited to add: > I should have clarified that Bitcoin will GIVE WAY to a way to trust people through their monetary transactions. Think credit agencies and lobbyists. That's still a different problem. If I give someone a million dollars, that doesn't make me trust them to teach me truthful information; it makes me trust them to teach me the truth as they know it. A preacher will tell me God is good whether or not I've given them a million dollars. That doesn't actually verify that God is, in fact, good.
- baddox 13y ago
  Why not just read about Bitcoin itself, on a technical level? All politics and economics aside, it's a remarkable technical achievement, even if you just phrase the problem it solves as "how can we coordinate and agree upon a list of arbitrary transactions without a central authority that we have to agree to trust?" Obviously, anyone who realized that Bitcoin provides a solution to this problem will immediately theorize that it could potentially replace things in the world they don't like (and thus really like Bitcoin), and anyone who likes those things which could be replaced will really dislike Bitcoin, and maybe most of them will be so passionate that they become untrustworthy. But still, the technical marvel of Bitcoin is still there and can still be enjoyed.
gelutu 13y ago
The author is working for Simple which is "Worry free alternative for traditional banking". :)
- kevingadd 13y ago
  The author is no longer involved with Simple, and he notes this in the article, so you would have known that if you had read the article.
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    Does he own any stock of Simple?
  - gelutu 13y ago
    "am now an advisor to the company as well as a happy customer" From the about page.
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    And I'm sure he's severed all his ties to the payment space, right? No more friends or stocks at Simple? No future ventures planned? If not, he's got a very good reason to talk down Bitcoin, since it's catching on and he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking. Add to that his political biases, and there's no way he could ever form a positive opinion of Bitcoin, no matter how innovative or positive a force in society.
    - Helianthus 13y ago
      >he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking. ... for Christ's sake. Give it a rest, he's not a mustache-twiddling dastardly capitalist and the banking system is not trying to keep Bitcoin down. The banking system is ignoring you. I'm not talking about Winklevii clowns or a few comments from a few figures or a Senate hearing. I'm talking about the corporations for whom 8 billion ('market cap' for Bitcoin) is pennies. Chase has 2.5 trillion in assets. It does not care about Bitcoin. More importantly, no one in Bitcoinland seems to realize that Bitcoin is re-implementing our financial system, and doing it badly--perhaps because when they do, they realize how silly it all is.
baddox 13y ago
If there's anyone more irrational and emotional that a Bitcoin fan, it's someone who dislikes Bitcoin. I'm not sure where all the vitriol comes from, and I'm not sure where the straw man arguments come from.
badman_ting 13y ago
I suppose the intensity is interesting, but I'm not crazy about focusing fully on the tone of an argument. You didn't set aside the contents of the article for a moment, you completely set them aside to make a point about tone.
alphonse23 13y ago
I felt it was a little hard to follow honestly. To me it felt more like a piece of creative writing than really trying to get at anything, politically/economically/philosophically/whatever. Nice writing, but it hasn't change how I think or feel about bitcoins. Though, even the recent events that have caused the price to crash hasn't changed my views. I still think bitcoins show a huge amount of potential and 2014 is going to be a big year for crytocurrencies.

seiji 13y ago

When you're confronted with people getting rich off of other's unfettered optimism with zero grounding in reality while you see the truth of the matter, it can drive you batty. It's like trying to explain to an 8 year old why Justin Beiber is just a fad. They have their hopes and dreams tied up in something you can't battle no matter how hard you argue.

johndevor 13y ago
I don't think it's appropriate to tell an 8-year-old they should be listening to better music. Why would you argue with such intensity over something that, presumably, doesn't or won't affect you in the least.
Crito 13y ago
I think the Justin Beiber analogy is probably pretty good. Certainly there are adults that get rather upset over what children like to listen to.. but should they? I am not a Justin Beiber fan, but why in the world would anyone waste their time being upset that other people are? The fact that there are adults who get upset that children like Justin Beiber probably suggests that irrational negative reactions do not necessarily suggest that there is an element of feeling as though your political ideology is being threatened (as others and myself have already suggested in this discussion).
baddox 13y ago
It's interesting that you point to music, one of the most subjective and deeply personal areas of human culture, as your analogy for supposed objective qualities of Bitcoin.

hack_edu 13y ago

Hand-waving is easy, dialog is hard.

kordless 13y ago
Us technobabblers need to unite on why Bitcoin is valuable. I've been hammering on the part where the Bitcoin network is doing 7 quadrillion hashes a second right now. All of that work/energy is going into securing the coin for current and future transactions. It is, simply put, a platform of trust powered by the most massive compute engine humanity has ever built.
- ashray 13y ago
  It doesn't matter. There are plenty of good things about Bitcoin which folks need to do <5mins of research to find out about. The vitriol on HN shocks me though. I would've thought this community would love something like bitcoin. But instead of good quality discussions most bitcoin threads here turn into haters vs 'fanboys'. You are a 'fanboy'. It's pretty hard to get taken seriously once that happens.... :(

jwesley 13y ago

It's because Bitcoin is truly a massive political issue, with the potential to completely overhaul existing power dynamics. It is Establishment Leftism vs everyone else, and the battle lines are being drawn.

thecoffman 13y ago

Freedom is a terrifying thing to people who have a naturally authoritarian mindset. I don't personally believe that Bitcoin is the road to some techno-utopia. Frankly, I expect that ultimately it will just be a blip on the radar; but there's no reason to get so angry about it unless its fundamentally a scary idea. Its a direct challenge to the authoritarian worldview and that's frightening.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
msandford 13y ago
That's really insightful. Well put.
kevingadd 13y ago
I don't think it's accurate to characterize the OP as criticizing (or being terrified by, for that matter) the freedom offered by Bitcoin as if freedom is a bad thing. Rather, he argues (somewhat convincingly) that the freedom offered by Bitcoin is of most value to the people who are already rich enough (either in time, resources, or USD) to profit from speculation, asic mining, and other aspects of the Bitcoin market. The freedom provided by this new financial system does nothing to enrich the people who are imperiled by the existing financial system; quite the opposite, the lack of regulations endangers them because they are not highly educated, rational financiers so they have increased exposure to risk/fraud.
- nostromo 13y ago
  I don't find it convincing at all. When I was in college, I hated banks. Once I bought a cup of coffee for $2 only to find I had racked up $40 worth of NSF fees accidentally. I'm sure this happens to poor folks all the time. Poor people often don't use banks because banks prey on the poor and often make them poorer. Why didn't I just use cash? Because I wanted to buy things online, accept payments from others, and didn't want to carry cash around all the time. If Bitcoin was less volatile, it would actually do a good job of solving some of the issues faced by poorer "underbanked" people.

Crito 13y ago

Most people who are not interested or excited about bitcoin are also not threatened or offended by it. They don't write articles about it because they just think it is a silly fad. Only people who really care one way or the other are going to be bothered to write about their feelings towards it. (I own no bitcoin, but am not threatened by it either. It is fun to watch and read about, and I'm not getting hurt so I don't see any reason to be angry at it.)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

altoz 13y ago

I've noticed this, too. There's often a violent rejection of bitcoin at an intensity that doesn't correlate to how much it's hurt them. In fact, the nastiest remarks about bitcoin come from people that own zero bitcoins. My theory is that the more something challenges your world view, the more violently against something you will be.

javert 13y ago

The blogger has an incredibly malicious attitude towards individual people. Everyone is ruining everything, everybody is bad, and we ought to regulate everything to fix it. Because somehow bureaucrats are immune from whatever ails people that are seeking the pursuit of happiness. The blog post is disconnected from reality in so many places that I couldn't even begin to respond. Somebody who kept their thinking connected to reality would have a pretty hard time getting to those kinds of views in the first place.

kevingadd 13y ago
I don't understand why you think a person with experience in the banking and software industries who wrote a detailed post sharing thoughts on Bitcoin and surrounding culture, with links to reference material that he believes supports his argument, is 'disconnected from reality'. All I see in your post is a really weak generalization of the themes of his post in an attempt to undermine them.
- javert 13y ago
  Because he is disconnected from reality. The post is absolutely chock full of mistaken and fantastic premises. It's just an observation I've made. People will have to agree or disagree based on their own judgement. I acknowledge that I am not providing any evidence for this. It wouldn't be worth the effort to me of deconstructing his post sentence by sentence.
  - logjam 13y ago
    ~sigh~ Enough. Save your unsupported observations and your fucking breath. Your contributions and the contributions of other libertarians in this thread amount to little more than endlessly bleating that (in the opinion of the greedy), greed couldn't possibly have led to financial calamities, and that impediments to greed like democratically elected governments and legislated, popular laws are to blame for financial calamities....the disasters that history has shown repeatedly arise only when those same laws are weakened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economic_disasters_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economic_disasters_in_...

saraid216 13y ago

> There are interesting conversations to have around bitcoins but I can't quite put my finger on why they tend to get so intense. It's because it's more a religious discussion than a rational debate. You see the exact same pattern of phrasing used by proponents of Bitcoin, by American fundamentalists and spinoffs, and by atheists who are actively pushing for the complete removal of religion. I've given up learning anything useful about Bitcoin since I don't find any of the people talking about it trustworthy.

kordless 13y ago
So it's a chicken and the egg problem...Bitcoin provides a platform of trust, but you don't trust anyone enough to explain it to you. Edit: I hear you below! :) I should have clarified that Bitcoin will GIVE WAY to a way to trust people through their monetary transactions. Think credit agencies and lobbyists.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't provide a platform of trust for explaining concepts. It provides a platform of trust for monetary transactions. It's like a preacher once told me. God is good because the Bible says so. The Bible is right because God says so. At no point is there anyone qualified to say, "Look. This is God and this is what he's doing. Come to your own conclusion." Edited to add: > I should have clarified that Bitcoin will GIVE WAY to a way to trust people through their monetary transactions. Think credit agencies and lobbyists. That's still a different problem. If I give someone a million dollars, that doesn't make me trust them to teach me truthful information; it makes me trust them to teach me the truth as they know it. A preacher will tell me God is good whether or not I've given them a million dollars. That doesn't actually verify that God is, in fact, good.
baddox 13y ago
Why not just read about Bitcoin itself, on a technical level? All politics and economics aside, it's a remarkable technical achievement, even if you just phrase the problem it solves as "how can we coordinate and agree upon a list of arbitrary transactions without a central authority that we have to agree to trust?" Obviously, anyone who realized that Bitcoin provides a solution to this problem will immediately theorize that it could potentially replace things in the world they don't like (and thus really like Bitcoin), and anyone who likes those things which could be replaced will really dislike Bitcoin, and maybe most of them will be so passionate that they become untrustworthy. But still, the technical marvel of Bitcoin is still there and can still be enjoyed.

gelutu 13y ago

The author is working for Simple which is "Worry free alternative for traditional banking". :)

kevingadd 13y ago
The author is no longer involved with Simple, and he notes this in the article, so you would have known that if you had read the article.
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  Does he own any stock of Simple?
- gelutu 13y ago
  "am now an advisor to the company as well as a happy customer" From the about page.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  And I'm sure he's severed all his ties to the payment space, right? No more friends or stocks at Simple? No future ventures planned? If not, he's got a very good reason to talk down Bitcoin, since it's catching on and he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking. Add to that his political biases, and there's no way he could ever form a positive opinion of Bitcoin, no matter how innovative or positive a force in society.
  - Helianthus 13y ago
    >he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking. ... for Christ's sake. Give it a rest, he's not a mustache-twiddling dastardly capitalist and the banking system is not trying to keep Bitcoin down. The banking system is ignoring you. I'm not talking about Winklevii clowns or a few comments from a few figures or a Senate hearing. I'm talking about the corporations for whom 8 billion ('market cap' for Bitcoin) is pennies. Chase has 2.5 trillion in assets. It does not care about Bitcoin. More importantly, no one in Bitcoinland seems to realize that Bitcoin is re-implementing our financial system, and doing it badly--perhaps because when they do, they realize how silly it all is.

baddox 13y ago

If there's anyone more irrational and emotional that a Bitcoin fan, it's someone who dislikes Bitcoin. I'm not sure where all the vitriol comes from, and I'm not sure where the straw man arguments come from.

badman_ting 13y ago

I suppose the intensity is interesting, but I'm not crazy about focusing fully on the tone of an argument. You didn't set aside the contents of the article for a moment, you completely set them aside to make a point about tone.

alphonse23 13y ago

I felt it was a little hard to follow honestly. To me it felt more like a piece of creative writing than really trying to get at anything, politically/economically/philosophically/whatever. Nice writing, but it hasn't change how I think or feel about bitcoins. Though, even the recent events that have caused the price to crash hasn't changed my views. I still think bitcoins show a huge amount of potential and 2014 is going to be a big year for crytocurrencies.