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I've never understood Hacker New's (majority) vitriol towards Bitcoin. It's literally programmable money.

seiji 11y ago
Well, if money were defined by thousands of lines of poorly written C++ code and you had to run the same (bug-for-bug compatible) C++ code to use your money, then sure, programmable. Also, when the monetary policy needs to change, you need to take all the money offline for a stop-the-world updated coordinated over IRC or even Reddit. And it's "money" only in the sense it's an artificially scarce resource/reward created for wasting electricity to find magic numbers. Not entirely stable in the long term (as we've seen with 2-5 recent proposals to "fix it" in the past few months).
- brighton36 11y ago
  Man, you wouldn't have believed what maintaining sendmail was like. You're new to the Internet. :) Though I agree that Bitcoin isn't money. If it were money, Michel Espinoza would have to go to jail. It's more like beaver pelts - a commodity
  - yc1010 11y ago
    He must not have been around the internet in the 90s, kids nowadays have it easy, powerful+cheap hardware, great+highly diverse ecosystem of languages and tools, years and years of progressive improvement to everything from email to web to networks. Many of the arguments made against bitcoin remind me of shit I heard in 90s against the web But yeh the parent post is correct, the vitrol against bitcoin on HN is misplaced and downright strange, bitcoin is not perfect (neither was HTTP once upon a time) but as per article its evolving and improving and it sure as hell is interesting and innovative. Anyways I probably will be downvoted, any time i get involved in Bitcoin threads its a if there is an army of paid downvoters whose boat and job bitcoin threatens, digital Luddites if you wish.
    - caf 11y ago
      I have serious concerns about the economics of Bitcoin, but I do agree that it's interesting and innovative.
brighton36 11y ago
Money is a religion. Bitcoin offends some people's gods.
mpyne 11y ago
Money is "programmable money". It's like saying that a magic new protocol that inefficiently creates an emergent behavior that resembles the behavior of email is somehow better than just building a web service that does the job directly and efficiently. It's not better, even if it is a nifty hack.
- timbowhite 11y ago
  I suppose I wasn't clear - I meant programmable in the sense that permission from someone else is not required.
  - mpyne 11y ago
    But "permission" from other people is required, even on Bitcoin. Try spending more from an UXTO than the UXTO is actually worth and see how fast your suggested transaction is rejected by the rest of the nodes and miners in the Bitcoin network...
    - timbowhite 11y ago
      Can't tell if trolling... but I'll bite: Permission required to participate in Bitcoin = none Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho
      - mpyne 11y ago
        > Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay". "But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :(" But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle. "Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'". Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too. As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system.
bdcravens 11y ago
I think it's vitriol more towards Bitcoiners than Bitcoin.
digi_owl 11y ago
More like digital gold. This in that it has a arbitrary fixed amount, and if the storage unit holding the "coins" gets lost that amount is forever reduced. All in all, it is the perfect fuel for speculation and hoarding. Neither is something you want with a day to day main street trading currency.
Frondo 11y ago
It's an anti-democratic currency. Its proponents push it as a currency without a government to rule it, and that's fair, but it does have its economic assumptions baked into the code itself. And if it became widespread, there'd be no way for people to vote on making changes to those economic assumptions. They're baked into the code, and into the network. Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? I'm not comfortable with that; the general arc of history has been to give people more power in the political and economic realms, and this is definitely a step back from that.
- wizeman 11y ago
  > Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? Aren't you talking about the USD here? How do you have any say at all in what the Federal Reserve decides? Bitcoin, on the other hand, is open source. If it doesn't work for you, at least you can fork it and change it, or use another cryptocurrency just as easily (and many people have). Do you think Venezuelans like that their currency inflation will be more than 200% this year? But hey, their currency is democratic so by definition it must be good and everybody should use it, right? And yes, it is indeed possible to directly vote on Bitcoin policy changes (not that it's necessarily a good idea). Just take a look at some of the proposals about the on-going block size increase discussion.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    Of course you say in how it's run. The people who run the fed get swapped out every so often, and we get to vote on the person who decides on their replacements. Do you, personally, get to say who's in and who's out? No, of course not, your vote gets weighed up against all the millions of other voters in picking these people. People often say "oh you have no power" and then, I guess, abstain from voting in order to make it absolutely true. But that's not it at all--we have lots of power, we have the power to persuade, talk amongst our friends and relations, convert others to our ideas, and voting's just the final test of how successful we were. Politics doesn't start at the voting booth--nor does it end there. That's just one milestone along the democratic highway. But compared to bitcoin? Where the average person could never plausibly voice an opinion at all? That's not democracy, and the only reason you like it at all, I'm guessing, is because you fancy yourself one of the people that could submit patches. As for your last remark, let me know when bitcoin policy decisions show up in the voter's pamphlet. Then we'll have a democratic currency with it.
vectorpush 11y ago
> I've never understood Hacker New's (majority) vitriol towards Bitcoin. Perhaps it's because a forum full of software programmers who aren't mesmerized by the technical merits of the insanely overhyped bitcoin software are exhausted from being told that they just don't understand why this software is the future of money that will disrupt finance and liberate the masses from the tyranny of banking. I think every programmer can agree that bitcoin is a unique and interesting technical feat and even a pretty impressive demonstration of what software can achieve, but any concessions to bitcoin's technical merit seems to invite absurd levels of over-the-top evangelism that grates against any patience for bitcoin is a technical topic. With all that stated, I still think the GP's comment is unnecessarily condescending and doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.

seiji 11y ago

Well, if money were defined by thousands of lines of poorly written C++ code and you had to run the same (bug-for-bug compatible) C++ code to use your money, then sure, programmable. Also, when the monetary policy needs to change, you need to take all the money offline for a stop-the-world updated coordinated over IRC or even Reddit. And it's "money" only in the sense it's an artificially scarce resource/reward created for wasting electricity to find magic numbers. Not entirely stable in the long term (as we've seen with 2-5 recent proposals to "fix it" in the past few months).

brighton36 11y ago
Man, you wouldn't have believed what maintaining sendmail was like. You're new to the Internet. :) Though I agree that Bitcoin isn't money. If it were money, Michel Espinoza would have to go to jail. It's more like beaver pelts - a commodity
- yc1010 11y ago
  He must not have been around the internet in the 90s, kids nowadays have it easy, powerful+cheap hardware, great+highly diverse ecosystem of languages and tools, years and years of progressive improvement to everything from email to web to networks. Many of the arguments made against bitcoin remind me of shit I heard in 90s against the web But yeh the parent post is correct, the vitrol against bitcoin on HN is misplaced and downright strange, bitcoin is not perfect (neither was HTTP once upon a time) but as per article its evolving and improving and it sure as hell is interesting and innovative. Anyways I probably will be downvoted, any time i get involved in Bitcoin threads its a if there is an army of paid downvoters whose boat and job bitcoin threatens, digital Luddites if you wish.
  - caf 11y ago
    I have serious concerns about the economics of Bitcoin, but I do agree that it's interesting and innovative.

brighton36 11y ago

Money is a religion. Bitcoin offends some people's gods.

mpyne 11y ago

Money is "programmable money". It's like saying that a magic new protocol that inefficiently creates an emergent behavior that resembles the behavior of email is somehow better than just building a web service that does the job directly and efficiently. It's not better, even if it is a nifty hack.

timbowhite 11y ago
I suppose I wasn't clear - I meant programmable in the sense that permission from someone else is not required.
- mpyne 11y ago
  But "permission" from other people is required, even on Bitcoin. Try spending more from an UXTO than the UXTO is actually worth and see how fast your suggested transaction is rejected by the rest of the nodes and miners in the Bitcoin network...
  - timbowhite 11y ago
    Can't tell if trolling... but I'll bite: Permission required to participate in Bitcoin = none Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho
    - mpyne 11y ago
      > Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay". "But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :(" But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle. "Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'". Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too. As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system.

bdcravens 11y ago

I think it's vitriol more towards Bitcoiners than Bitcoin.

digi_owl 11y ago

More like digital gold. This in that it has a arbitrary fixed amount, and if the storage unit holding the "coins" gets lost that amount is forever reduced. All in all, it is the perfect fuel for speculation and hoarding. Neither is something you want with a day to day main street trading currency.

Frondo 11y ago

It's an anti-democratic currency. Its proponents push it as a currency without a government to rule it, and that's fair, but it does have its economic assumptions baked into the code itself. And if it became widespread, there'd be no way for people to vote on making changes to those economic assumptions. They're baked into the code, and into the network. Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? I'm not comfortable with that; the general arc of history has been to give people more power in the political and economic realms, and this is definitely a step back from that.

wizeman 11y ago
> Something that could potentially govern people's lives (i.e. a new kind of currency) that they have no say at all in operating? Aren't you talking about the USD here? How do you have any say at all in what the Federal Reserve decides? Bitcoin, on the other hand, is open source. If it doesn't work for you, at least you can fork it and change it, or use another cryptocurrency just as easily (and many people have). Do you think Venezuelans like that their currency inflation will be more than 200% this year? But hey, their currency is democratic so by definition it must be good and everybody should use it, right? And yes, it is indeed possible to directly vote on Bitcoin policy changes (not that it's necessarily a good idea). Just take a look at some of the proposals about the on-going block size increase discussion.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Of course you say in how it's run. The people who run the fed get swapped out every so often, and we get to vote on the person who decides on their replacements. Do you, personally, get to say who's in and who's out? No, of course not, your vote gets weighed up against all the millions of other voters in picking these people. People often say "oh you have no power" and then, I guess, abstain from voting in order to make it absolutely true. But that's not it at all--we have lots of power, we have the power to persuade, talk amongst our friends and relations, convert others to our ideas, and voting's just the final test of how successful we were. Politics doesn't start at the voting booth--nor does it end there. That's just one milestone along the democratic highway. But compared to bitcoin? Where the average person could never plausibly voice an opinion at all? That's not democracy, and the only reason you like it at all, I'm guessing, is because you fancy yourself one of the people that could submit patches. As for your last remark, let me know when bitcoin policy decisions show up in the voter's pamphlet. Then we'll have a democratic currency with it.

vectorpush 11y ago

> I've never understood Hacker New's (majority) vitriol towards Bitcoin. Perhaps it's because a forum full of software programmers who aren't mesmerized by the technical merits of the insanely overhyped bitcoin software are exhausted from being told that they just don't understand why this software is the future of money that will disrupt finance and liberate the masses from the tyranny of banking. I think every programmer can agree that bitcoin is a unique and interesting technical feat and even a pretty impressive demonstration of what software can achieve, but any concessions to bitcoin's technical merit seems to invite absurd levels of over-the-top evangelism that grates against any patience for bitcoin is a technical topic. With all that stated, I still think the GP's comment is unnecessarily condescending and doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.