The pretty strong anti-establishment streak held by goldbugs and cypherpunks is largely shared by HN though. I think much of the sneering comes because there's a third type of person that influences discourse around Bitcoin to some extent: shills.
Obviously a lot of Bitcoin evangelists have large BTC holdings because it's entirely in keeping with their belief that it's a brilliant idea, and many if not most exchanges, altcoins and even blockchain based trading schemes weren't conceived as ways of persuading fools to part with their money. But many Bitcoiners are speculators and some of the schemes dreamed up around Bitcoin were scams or might as well have been, which hasn't really been the case for flavours of Linux. FOSS evangelists might have made similarly grandiose claims about their project and the philosophy behind it, but they weren't trying to pump the price of their commodity holdings at the time or running get rich quick schemes - they usually weren't even expecting to get paid!
Something of a tangent I know. I largely agree with you on the virtues of some inflation in an economy as a whole, but I think it's pretty evident now that Bitcoin is neither replacing currency as a whole nor representing a sufficiently stable store of value to encourage hoarding on any scale. Frankly Steam accepting BTC is no more economically destabilising than Steam deciding to accept inflationary-by-design Linden Dollars.
I believe you are probably correct, and it is a tendency I really do not understand. People seem to be so profoundly invested emotionally in the specific success of bitcoin (as opposed to the broader technology of blockchain cryptocurrency) that they're out on the prowl to shout down anybody who threatens to pop their perceptive bubble. It's as if they're making a concerted effort to exclude any dissident opinion in the implicit belief that removing the dissenters will somehow ensure the success of the whole enterprise. I myself am hoping (as a macroeconomist and as somebody that preserves his objectivity by having no long or short position whatsoever in any cryptocurrency) that bitcoin will soon fail not because I have anything against those who designed it or who adopted it early but because as a fixed-quantity asset it is inherently noxious as a currency (which is why the world moved off the gold standard and bimetallism and representative currency progressively to begin with) and that it will be revealed to be what it is: an effective implementation of a new idea (blockchain) that solves a major computer science problem (the Byzantine Generals Problem) but was macroeconomically naive. Successors will be more pliant for the criteria of modern money.
The only people I personally know in the former group were ideologically pre-aligned towards any currency that promises anti-government or anti-inflation capabilities. The people I’m thinking of were either libertarians, gold bugs, or both.
I don’t actually know anyone who was persuaded by the merits of bitcoin or similar.
Many people on HN who talk down against Bitcoin are indoctrinated into the current ideology. Anything that goes against the current ideology is refuted, ignored, dismissed as fads, bubbles, scams..etc Ideology is a powerful thing and it's hard to break out of it.
If you want to learn more about this concept, you should research about Slavoj Zizek's work on ideology. Bitcoin is not just technology, but a multi-faceted ideology founded around cypherpunks ideas, liberty, sovereignty, austrian economic system, free markets.
Even the way Bitcoin is developed (slow, methodical) and Bitcoin apps are built is different to SV way which is move fast, break things, iterate.
Agreed. Surprised there are so many Bitcoin lovers on HN and in the startup scene, which is supposed to consist of smarter-than-average people. Bitcoin is basically shitty gold, because unlike gold, it has no intrinsic value and can go to zero, it's all based on fragile sentiment.
Yes the Bitcoin community, more so than most others because it's built on a deflationary model which heavily favors early adopters. One of the major reasons it's failed on its goals to be a currency is that the deflationary model encourages passive speculation holding it rather than using it, but that only works as long as new money is being pumped into the system. Even cursorily following the topic will show many examples of advocates making unrealistic promises which make little sense from the perspective of building a healthy community but are entirely understandable when you realize that they are hoping to see a personal windfall from everyone they convince to use it.
Note: I think Bitcoin is a cool idea, and a cool implementation, but I've recently noticed it tends to create zealots who spew crazy whenever there is an article that questions its suitability for specific purposes (gold alternative, replace the US dollar, etc.)
From what I can tell, its the same type of people I used to associate with libertarian+goldbugs+ronpaul, for whom 'fiat' is the worst four-letter word in the English language.
I've seen some of the worst biases manifest themselves around bitcoin.
My theory is that in the shadow of the bubble collapse, the desire for bitcoin to succeed has driven wishful thinking to the extreme, where some vocal bitcoin evangelists ignore or spin reality to reconcile it with their desire.
It's more akin to the old XBox vs Playstation flame wars, where a console fan could just admit the cons along with the pros, but then that wouldn't fully validate their decision to invest.
But many (not all of course, and probably a minority of people who do bitcoin) of its proponents seem as crazy as krokodil users with their snappy judgements, saying it's government propaganda that there is crime done using bitcoin, that bitcoin will replace all currencies, that 'revolution is coming', 'banksters are afraid', and other weird 'freedom' slogans, etc.
At the same time, in some weird massive cognitive dissonance, anytime one of these evil governments they hate so much decides to legitimize bitcoin in some way by recognizing it as some financial instrument or when USD/BTC rises (and let's remember - dollars are a fiat currency a.k.a. useless pieces of paper that bankers print and force people to use) they are giddy as hell.
I even seen comments saying that Satoshi becoming instant billionaire (richest in the world by far, in pure currency, not 'net worth' that's hard to liquidate and spend) if bitcoin really became global currency is deserved for his contribution to humanity. Can you imagine someone saying Dennis Ritchie should own 5% to 10% for his contributions to Unix, C, etc. (that largely went unrewarded and he died the same time Jesus of electronics Steve Jobs did so no one even cared). Or RMS for the FSF? I just can't imagine how much you have to like a thing (FOSS, Unix, C, Bitcoin, ..) to say its creator should be rewarded that heavily and become the richest person in Earth's history.
I'd like to see some of the many bitcoin evangalists about the place convert their life savings, serious cash, into BitCoins and keep it that way. Talk is cheap, particularly when it's abstract economic theory.
Then I might think it's got something in it rather that looking like a volatile ponzi scheme that geeks are keen because they think they're in early and going to make mint.
For me the largest put off with Bitcoin is the community. They seem to be very intolerant of criticism, to the appearance of a cult or ideology.[1] The problem lies in that unlike most open source projects, a sizeable portion of the community stands to make huge profits, giving rise to a permanent conflict of interest. Time and time again, the financial interest of the early adopters continue to stifle actual development of the technology.[2]
I'm not saying that anybody who had money in Bitcoin is a hypocrite. But anybody who had money in MtGox, lost it, and now wants help getting it back is hypocritical if they were also singing the praises of Bitcoin in those ways. And that presuming that people with money in MtGox were Bitcoin proponents is not a giant stretch.
When it comes to Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies HN community seems to become the church of central bankers, where the same old (debunked millions of times) BSs are repeated over and over as a mantra.
You may not agree with a sound money economy, and you may like the idea of a central bank that manipulate the market to encourage spending and discourage savings.
But thankfully nobody is forcing you to use Bitcoin, and that's alone one of the main interesting point of it, it's completely and absolutely an open and voluntary economy.
The vast, vast majority of "bitcoin evangelists" couldn't care less about the actual mechanics of Bitcoin. They don't care that it was created as a digital F-You to fiat currency, and they don't care that it enables you to be your own bank. Just look at /r/bitcoin. It's 99% price/hodl memes, and 1% posts about the protocol & enhancements to the protocol itself.
Straw man army. Which bitcoin enthusiast said that "winning" requires "replacing our means of commerce" or "changing the world" or even "never having insane volatility"?
I consider myself a bitcoin enthusiast, and I have never made any of those arguments, and I don't consider myself to have "lost." If the value of bitcoin goes to zero and stays there, I don't consider myself to have "lost." It's still an awesome idea that interests me from computer science and economic/political perspectives, and everything we've seen happen in the bitcoin economy is to me a cool proof of concept.
I don't understand why the "anti-bitcoin fanatics" are so vehement in their criticism of bitcoin enthusiasts. You seem to deriving much more excitement from the recent bitcoin price drops than I ever did from its price increases. Honestly, I just think the decentralized transaction log based on proof-of-work is a really cool idea, and the hypothesis that there could be a trustworthy means of making and verifying transactions without a government or central authority controlling the thing being transacted is compelling. I would think that even if I just read the white paper and there had never been a single bitcoin transaction in real life. The fact that there is a high-profile bitcoin economy is just icing on the cake.
The anti-bitcoin fanatics have carefully constructed their position to ensure that they can interpret literally any event as evidence that bitcoin is stupid or doomed or a scam. Is the price rising? That's obviously market irrationality and pure speculation. Is the price falling? That's clearly the market correcting itself. Is a certain exchange doing well and gaining a good reputation? That's an evil monopoly that goes against the decentralized goal of bitcoin. Is a certain exchange experience technical difficulties? Then that's just a bunch of incompetent amateurs, or worse, malicious scammers trying to distort the market. Is there a lack of people actually buying useful things with bitcoin? That's clear evidence that there is no real bitcoin economy. Is a business supporting bitcoin payments? Well that's still crap, since they're tying the price to the USD exchange price, or using credit cards, or the business owner is just some bitcoin shill, etc.
Obviously a lot of Bitcoin evangelists have large BTC holdings because it's entirely in keeping with their belief that it's a brilliant idea, and many if not most exchanges, altcoins and even blockchain based trading schemes weren't conceived as ways of persuading fools to part with their money. But many Bitcoiners are speculators and some of the schemes dreamed up around Bitcoin were scams or might as well have been, which hasn't really been the case for flavours of Linux. FOSS evangelists might have made similarly grandiose claims about their project and the philosophy behind it, but they weren't trying to pump the price of their commodity holdings at the time or running get rich quick schemes - they usually weren't even expecting to get paid!
Something of a tangent I know. I largely agree with you on the virtues of some inflation in an economy as a whole, but I think it's pretty evident now that Bitcoin is neither replacing currency as a whole nor representing a sufficiently stable store of value to encourage hoarding on any scale. Frankly Steam accepting BTC is no more economically destabilising than Steam deciding to accept inflationary-by-design Linden Dollars.
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