And claiming that bitcoin's success would be bankers loss indicates that you don't quite get what is the utility finance sector creates. One of the main things banks do is they convert short term deposits to long term loans. There is nothing in bitcoin that reduces the need for that service in our economy. There were banks at gold standard times and there will be banks in the extremely unlikely world where bitcoin is main currency in a society.
There is no mechanism in bitcoin that would manage the volatility of the currency (against the price of bread and butter, not other currencies) That in itself makes it DOA as a proper currency. Further, even if that was sorted out and a society would want to have bitcoin as their currency, why the f*ck (pardon my french) the society would want to give the seignorage to bunch of cryptonerds? It is not like it is difficult to make a fork.
I am not mad about missing one more tulip bubble/ponzi scheme. I am mad that people never seem to learn.
Modern money is debt. It is a marker who in the society is owed and how much. Thinking that those markers should have fixed supply is just not smart.
Give me a cryptocurrency whose supply is adjusted based on the needs of their users and I am interested. Give me a cryptocurrency that allows heavily negative interest rates for savings to embrace current consumption in the economy over hoarding of "money" and I am interested. But these are complete anathema for the current cryptocurrency folks.
I'm not going to mention it by name lest someone thinks I'm here to "shill" it (which btw I'm not, I only hold BTC and ETH currently).
Points at Facebook/Twitter and Trump+Russia abuse of this tech
We're quite used by this point to new frameworks, technologies, and scientific developments promising to "CHANGE THE WORLD!!!!!11!1~~". From this perspective, Bitcoin looks no different: we have people claiming decentralized proof-of-work consensus-finding will solve all our social / societal ills. Currency isn't as internationally portable as it should be? Use the blockchain! Voting systems are broken / poorly designed? Use the blockchain! The NSA is spying on all of us? Use the blockchain!
In this hype cycle atmosphere, I think a good measure of skepticism is healthy: it reminds us that Bitcoin, like other technologies, has limitations, and that those hyping the technology have a vested interest in downplaying those limitations while promising the moon.
While the underlying technology might in fact be part of a reasonable solution to each of these problems, it's easy to forget that the technology is only part of the puzzle. Technology is always embedded in a human context: modifying the habits, social pressures, incentives, laws, etc. that support a broken system is as important, if not more so, than changing the technical implementation. (In fact, I'd argue changing the technical implementation is impossible without addressing some of these social / psychological factors.)
Yes.
> Are they mad because they feel like they missed out?
Eh, I doubt it.
> Does Bitcoin's success mean their loss (like the banking folks and the government establishment)?
I don't think so. It's not a zero sum game.
> Did people hate the internet this much in its early days?
Some parts of it, yes.
In the end, Bitcoin is still a wildly insane proposition and technology. It forces people to question longly held assumptions (on a millenium scale) of what money is. HNers are probably more likely to question, critique, and debate new things, and Bitcoin doesn't get a free pass simply because it's cool and exciting.
> Eh, I doubt it.
I think there is something to this. If you've been on HN for 5+ years and have followed the progress of Bitcoin, but never dived in - but then gone on to watch non-tech people make 10x+ returns while not understanding the currency - there must be something about that which grates some people.
I also think it's easy to dislike the "down with central banks", "fiat money is fake money" faction of bitcoin
Thats the most appealing part. Most people dont like the government, they just want it to do something different.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I think you are a little off base in the original intentions. It was designed to solve a real problem, and its creator was likely someone who had a background in academia although we may never know for certain.
It is true that maybe a lot of the proponents today want to bring down central banks, but I think it's a little unfair to imply that that was the original intention.
I am referring 'Bitcoiners', the social entity, which have a separate life from the original intensions and white papers , and why there is "vitriol towards Bitcoin", as the OP requested.
I really doubt this. I have never seen a convincing argument about how BTC would solve any of its many technical issues, and the political ones are even larger.
I would gain a lot from Bitcoin's success. Really. Just by making it possible to do business without the gov being a bottleneck it would already change the lives of mostly everybody around here.
I just don't see it happening, for obvious and important reasons, that a bunch of people insist on ignoring. It's hard enough not to pass judgment on the people making an effort to ignore the obvious, now those same people trying to paint the others in a bad way is a bit too much.
All the fantasies and benefits it was originally promoted for have fallen by the wayside and only greed remains. It's an inefficient protocol and is now simply a store of speculated value and can't perform any other function by design.
The bitcoin ecosystem is eager to sell out to the very financial establishment they were ranting about throughout its history. News of any bank even thinking about crypto sees thousands of excitable news articles and soaring prices.
For its original purpose as a digital currency, USD value should not matter (as long as it doesn't fluctuate too much)
Bitcoin is the killer app. Similarly, the internet is great not because of TCP, but because of the information (which is what gives it value).
To store wealth in Bitcoin you are committing to the constant burn of energy in perpetuity.
Statements like this are, IHMO, the driver behind the BTC hate. It's the pure hyperbole typical of the tech scene.
It's not world-changing, it's just a payment processing platform. The decentralized aspect is interesting, but doesn't add value for most use cases. Venmo is free, super easy to use and there's little risk of my Mom permanently losing all of her funds from the account.
For the general public, the only thing BTC has changed in the world is it has given hackers the facilities to extort them.
Also, no need to talk that much down on the rest of us with your last paragraph.
We get what Bitcoin is all to well (heck I even have a research paper published for hashing algorithms). some of us are decently well off to not need to gamble for cash. If Bitcoin hit 10m a piece, I don't think I've lost anything (same if tulips or dogs are sold 10m a piece). I did SETI cpu donating time in the olden days, ran a BBS, and brought email to a small mountain village. I loved internet in the early days and now.
Sometimes, people like me, just want to stop the fools being burned on a pyramidal snake oil, because we are older, and have seen the shit in various forms.
On this forum, I assume the rest are similar to me, but perhaps a bit younger, so the anti Bitcoin sentiment is just a sentiment to maybe save you some of your hard earned money. That is my reason. I won't guess the others.
Tldr, we get it all to well. There is no hate. But do ask yourself why we still maintain our stance/advices.
The statists are fundamentally opposed to bitcoin on many levels, so the vitriol runs hot and heavy there.
The Libertarians love bitcoin like their forebears liked gold and distrusted the government.
What is money today but the ultimate manifestation of politics in everyday life?
Then there is the constant use of strawman like you did here with internet question.
This is even more obvious for the disaster that is the DAO: the idea that the nuances of human life and its conflicts currently settled by courts can adequately and unambiguously captured in code is, as has now been shown repeatedly, laughable. Personally, I also consider it somewhat frightening that people would actually subscribe to a philosophy so myopic as to completely deny the value of anything that isn't technology.
Technologically, bitcoin it is certainly fascinating. And a decentralised, electronic competitor to cash does seem more attractive than a future where VISA and PayPal control all that data. Unfortunately, bitcoin has completely failed in that regard. Adoption as an actual means of payment is declining. Even experts frequently lose money to hacks, hardware failures, or inattentiveness. Settlements take longer than many competing technologies, and the one area currently underserved, namely micropayment, is also priced out of bitcoin.
Bitcoin evangelist are also not doing the technology any favours. See, for example:
> Do people fear what they don't understand?
This implies that bitcoin critics are stupid. They're not.
> Are they mad because they feel like they missed out?
This implies that they are jealous. While that's obviously something that happens, I can assure you it is in no way a significant in the opposition. I do own a few dozen bitcoin, for example, because I used mining to get into cuda a few years back.
> Does Bitcoin's success mean their loss (like the banking folks and the government establishment)?
That implies some sort of conspiracy, and also portraits any critic as being a shill, or bot, or similar, whose opinion can then be considered illegitimate.
It's interesting to see how the bitcoin community was, from the start, driving by this antagonism versus government and the financial system. Bitcoin was considered as some sort of grand threat to the established order, and the government was expected to come down hart on it "any day now". In reality, however, regulatory bodies have almost without exception taken a rather relaxed approach. Questions of taxation were clarified, and existing rules such as KYC enforced to discourage the use of bc for illegal activity, yes. But overall, governments' reaction was nowhere near what the community expected, or what would be expected from a corrupt system trying to defend its power against a credible threat.
It is only with the rather obvious overheating, and widespread fraud, of ICOs that scrutiny of this market has somewhat increased.
Why is this? Do people fear what they don't understand? Are they mad because they feel like they missed out? Does Bitcoin's success mean their loss (like the banking folks and the government establishment)?
Did people hate the internet this much in its early days?