Why not spend your time reading the piece and pushing the discussion forward based on merit?
best j
Firstly, there's really no need to sign things with your name. Your name is at the top, it doesn't need to be at the bottom too.
2. Sorry. Many letters. Small font. Light grey text. Calacanis. Got it now.
But (1) is a good question. I'm not angry, but this "bitcoin" meme does annoy me. Why? Because it's one of those viruses that can be really dangerous to social news ecosystem. Much like those parasites that burrow into the brain and take over the host's motor functions to spread itself more easily, everybody who gets bitten by the meme (ie winds up with a few bitcoins of their own) suddenly has an incentive to start spreading the bitcoin meme as far and as wide as possible to drive up the value in the (imho extremely forlorn) hope that someday it will become truly widespread. Since it only takes a few well-timed votes to push something to the front page of HN, this makes HN fertile ground for being manipulated by this kind of thing.
So I approach bitcoin advocates the same way I approach folks selling Amway or religious missionaries.
So you agree with the article, but you don't want people to talk too much about it on HN? I think it is a very weird position to hold. Imagine there was a very dangerous disease, should it be discussed openly in physician congresses? Yes? Same here (HN is the hackers congress, right?), so let us discuss the topic freely.
Why is Bitcoin so dangerous:
- Could break the current economy.
Ok, and so? Is the current economy that perfect a thing that we do not want any replacement? Just have a look in countries where all the wealth created is sucked by a very few corrupted nababs lying down in sofas, and meanwhile people starve silently in the streets. I don't say Bitcoin will fix this, I just say that changing the current economically rules is still a possibility, and Bitcoin-like currency could be a part of the picture. The current economy applied to the world is in fact a very specific and recent invention. In Imperial China (only 200 years ago), the inflation was artificially set to a very high level, so the price of money would go down very fast, and nobody would think of "keeping money aside", so everyone was just spending. That's another model, it did work not so bad for a big part of humanity for some centuries. I am no technotarians, I respect the law, but I think it is quite possible that our economical model is not the best possible.
- Bitcoin could ease the work for wrong-doers (drug traffic, etc.)
This argument is very weak. The same has been said for cell phones, Internet, etc. If this powerful tool is kept secret and hidden in a kind of black market, it will help mostly people in these places. If we discuss it openly, and make it accessible, it may help more "normal" people.
- Tax
Tax is the biggest issue, but let's not be in fear: Governments are very imaginative when it comes to getting money from their administrates. For example, they could easily ask for Bitcoins in exchange of the right to use information vectors (cables, wireless).
Every great innovation have been seen as extremely dangerous by the people in place. Do you take the plane? Yes. Did you heard about this guy a 100 years ago who tried to fly like a bird: he held tight a set of man-made "wings", jumped from the top of the Eiffel tower, and flatly crashed on the floor. One of my good friend's father did refuse to take a plane to see his newborn grand'son.
No, he doesn't (necessarily) agree with the article - what he's saying here is that bitcoin early-adopters have an incentive to spread the gospel of bitcoin by whatever means possible, which means that social news could get subjected to a tide of bitcoin-related spam. Different form of danger altogether.
Seriously, let's break this down:
a) I hear about a trend
b) I read everything I can find about it
c) I have two full-time analysts read everything on it and talk to 10 people.
d) I have 30+ producers of my show do research
e) I host a podcast with the lead developers
f) I read a ton of comments and listen to the feedback on the show
g) I write a piece two weeks later after taking it all in.
Yep, I just did 100+ hours of research on the top and put out a link-baiting piece. :-)
Also not to mention the comment stacking with "bradpineau". Whatevs, I guess I'm just feeding the shark. Please flag this submission to anyone who get here - it's obvious social media spam.
Now here's a note to the other bitcoin article-spammers. Watch Calcianis and learn. He's done everything right for memetically engineering the kind of article that gets upvoted.
1. He's asked a provocative question, the kind which makes people want to argue with it ("Why no, I'd say that such-and-such is the most dangerous open source project ever").
2. He's used attention-grabbing words like "dangerous" and geek-friendly terms like "open source".
3. And almost the entire article is made up of point-form lists. Everybody loves point-form lists.