This is it exactly. People are naturally suspicious of anything that is widely promoted for the profit of the promoters.

Yes, "charlatans and scammers" are definitely part of the demographic that would benefit from crypto. But you're really going to ignore every other use case I've mentioned?

From where some people stand, it looks more like Tor exists for pedophiles to draw other pedophiles in. They're not wrong, but they're also not acknowledging the full picture of what Tor and privacy in general enables.

> Also, why do cryptocurrency fanatics so frequently accuse anyone critical of them as being hateful?

Because the critics, as you can see over and over again in this very thread, are being completely dismissive to the actual use cases and benefits that crypto brings. Never acknowledging the minority of people for whom it actually brings real value to (granted, they've become a minority now that there's a lot of speculative dumb money in the market), never acknowledging the points that are being made, and also calling crypto advocates MLM schemers who just want to draw more people in to make money off of them.

It's one thing if the critics take a look at it and say "Oh that's not really for me" or "Oh I don't know if censorship resistance is an attractive enough incentive for people to keep running Ethereum nodes long-term." Then we could really have a conversation. But they don't say it like that. They say everything with disdain and a sneer. So I respond in kind.

What would you call that other than "hate"? If you kept criticizing something your friend likes despite them telling you all the reasons they like it, and you only ever saying how much it sucks and how nobody should like it, doesn't it make sense for them to ask you "Dude, why do you hate it so much? What do you have against it?"

Such a strawman right in the leading hypothesis. What makes it so hard for you to face the actual criticism directed at crypto? Do you find it so indefensible that you prefer to avoid it altogether?

To me, it’s strange that you can agree that most cryptos are scams but don’t understand why there is so much hate for them.

This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?

I don't personally know any people who became rich on cryptocurrencies and also don't feel any particular envy towards the people who I know of, via the internet, but am pretty vehemently against cryptocurrencies, so I'm a sample-size one counter-example to your thesis.

I obviously don't think that my ire against cryptocurrencies is disproportionate, since if I did, I'd scale it down until I thought it was proportionate, so I think that it's justified by the object-level issues.

If I were to speculate on why classes of people like me are more strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies than other people:

1. We are (or feel we are) more qualified to see many of its technical deficiencies, some of which have been patched over the years, others of which seem fundamental.

2. We agree with the "crypto people" on many topics, such as decentralisation or privacy, but think that their solutions are broken, and worse we feel that their philosophy and approach is a bit of a dark mirror universe of ours (to exaggerate _immensely_ imagine that both groups were religious people who agreed completely on matters of scripture, but they inexplicably decided to worship Ahriman instead of Ahura Mazda). See also "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

I've been a victim of this. People in crypto hate you for trying to do things the right way (connecting crypto to real economic value instead of engaging in tribal maximalism and hypemongering popular projects) and people outside of crypto hate you for being involved in crypto which they think is all scams.

The irony is that only the scammers on both sides win.

Actually, as someone who was very interested in Bitcoin in the early days of 2011-2012, I disagree. If anything, the hate on HN was even greater back then, way before Bitcoin became hyped. So many people were convinced it was a pyramid scheme. It was clear to anyone familiar with the Bitcoin community back then that there were a lot of highly technical, talented people, and very few scammers. But most of HN reflexively despised Bitcoin.

In fact, Bitcoin on HN is actually a lot less hated now, which tells me it has little to do with the hype, and that something else was going on.

Bear in mind that I disassociated myself from Bitcoin once the scammers, con-men, and get-rich-quick types infiltrated the community around 2013 and 2014. But even back in 2011, there was a very high number of HNers who seemed personally affronted by the very idea that money was a social agreement. They seemed to believe that money was some kind of official, government activity, end of story. And that anyone who believed otherwise was an evil heretic, to be ridiculed.

> I have very little sympathy for people who profited from the hype, delivered approximately nothing of use to the rest of the world, and now have a sad that there are consequences.

This I agree with 100%.

It's not bad faith. It's reality. It's also spotting logical and technological holes the size of Jupiter in any of the proposals from clueless[1] crypto maximalists.

[1] Many of them are not clueless, just grifters

I’m somebody that spends a good deal of time thinking deeply on cryptocurrencies and the implications to society. I believe they a positive, revolutionary step in the right direction of human liberty. And I’ll gladly acknowledge that it’s still speculative until it’s not.

But crypto, like any other movement, attracts total scumbags. It’s unfortunate because people who speak negatively only serve to undermine their group - whether it’s crypto or a social cause group etc. and often they, themselves, are the insecure ignorant one that don’t even deeply understand what they’re fighting for.

Cryptocurrency proponents love parroting that idea. It’s like they are dismayed at the harm caused by cryptocurrencies but don’t want to give them up, so they fabricate scenarios where other people are petty as coping mechanisms to avoid having to admit it.

That certainly is one reason and probably the main one, but I guess there is also the activist types where they feel so strongly against something that they spew vitriol against the great demon that is destroying humanity in some way. They just happened to latch on to crypto.

Why do you feel the need for this type of attack?

Jealousy, obviously.

No, not really. It is the same kind of story as people putting all their money in a bag in a chimney to find out their family decided to finally lighten the mood by making a fire in long unused fireplace. It is an actual story about my neighbour when I was a kid.

People have been doing stupid things with money for thousands of years.

You can store crypto safely. It is essentially the same problem as storing encrypted backups. It has been solved.

As much as I hate cryptocurrency, I would actually be more at peace having lots of crypto than lots of stock on my account (if not for the fact that crypto is just a scam).

Or more specifically, all the endless scams and grift that orbit around cryptocurrencies, the failure of cryptocurrencies to actually solve any problems of the existing financial system (because you need to inevitably bridge the two) as well as the negative externalities that cryptocurrencies have on the environment and hardware availability.

I agree.

The tendency to over-criticize and deride is part of the self-inflicted helplessness. Every attempt to improve things gets a fair deal of scorn and criticism...which is not exactly good.

I don’t know, I am not into crypto. I assume you might have to ask one of the many thousands of people that have lost untold quantities of money to a nearly infinite number of scams why they might question the practical value of the crypto ecosystem.

No, the hatred is for the next sentence, which is "Buy my cryptocurrency".