I'm not seeing a single BTC enthusiast who's out for the utility of it. They are, quite literally, all of them into it for the speculatory potential.
EOS alone raised over $1 billion in its year-long ICO. A startup that spent this much money and delivered so little actual utility would be out of business long ago. But these coins just keep going because end-user value was never the point, they're all about siphoning money from new suckers whenever there's a "crypto boom". The endless refrain of "maybe it's like the early Internet, you never know!" is an important part of this scam.
And just like clockwork, whenever there are big price swings, these kind of articles attacking cryptocurrency show up on HN.
Isn't that the point of BTC. If you could see them, it would not be `pseudoanonymous` right?
I cannot reasonably believe that there's people actually trading on BTC out of its utility if they don't talk about it. Unless of course all that activity is fundamentally illegal, which is a definitely something I'm willing to entertain.
Other than "easier to buy drugs than with cash", what problem does bitcoin actually solve?
The Internet is full of fraudulent websites. It's full of porn. Email isn't as warm as a hand-written letter. Communicating online isn't professional. Etc.
Guess what, all those things were true but they turned out not to matter. You can do whatever else you want in a network that also carries porn. You learn to dodge fraud. Email is freaking convenient once everybody is using it, standards of behavior change, etc.
Cryptocurrency may be something or it may not. It's in very early stages. Even those who are interested have trouble following everything that is happening. But it's not even Internet-in-the-90s. It's Internet-in-the-70s. You can be skeptical about it, you can ignore it, but I don't see why someone would spend so much of their time being opposed to it.