The prevailing sentiment on HN has been wrong about cryptocurrency from Day 1.

Source: Day 1 HN post -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

If you have a truly revolutionary idea, expect the conventional wisdom on this website to be extremely negative.

That's not an accurate description. I think you might be falling prey to the sample bias where people heavily weight the comments they dislike and don't so much notice the others [1]. In fact that 3-comment thread covered the spectrum: enthusiasm, skepticism, bewilderment. I'd say it set the stage nicely for the next 12 years.

That thread wasn't the Day 1 post about cryptocurrency either. That would be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253963, which is even more interesting. If HN had a hall of fame, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999 would surely belong in it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Perhaps you're right, maybe this illustrates my own cognitive bias.

Of course that Day 1 post doesn't reflect the HN discussion since then, and current comments don't either.

But more small-sample-size anecdata would be to look at recent comments:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Of the 20 most recent comments, I'd say 12 are negative, 4 are positive and 4 are neutral. (Your comment showed up in my search and I counted it as neutral.)

Oh yes, but that's a much different question and is strongly conditioned by where Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are in the hype cycle (I'm using that term empirically, not normatively). You'll find at least that much negativity about other technologies and startups that have gotten to similar stages of (let's call it) ultrasuccess. Just look at the threads on Airbnb or Uber, for example. They're so vitriolic and repetitive that thoughtful discussion is almost impossible. We can speculate about the reasons for this but it definitely doesn't have to do with sentiment against new tech; it's a later-stage phenomenon.

There tends to be ethical concerns as things get this big that apply to all of: Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber.

Try Dropbox or even Digital Ocean for a more loved company/idea.

'Ethical concerns' only covers a subset of these cases and the phenomenon is noticeably similar across the entire set, so I don't think ethics is a convincing explanation.

People reach for the handiest hammer, but it doesn't follow that the hammer is driving the hammering. Ethical concerns are the best hammer, of course, because then one's own motives are unimpeachable; but failing that, you'll see comments about the business being shitty for other reasons—"it used to be good but they've been declining for years and I can't even use it anymore" is one, and "how is this a viable business, look at those financials, doesn't anybody care about profit anymore god this world is insane" is another.

I don't believe Dropbox threads are generally friendly to Dropbox anymore, and I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean has been on the rack here too. Today's thread was a noticeable exception. Most S-1 threads are pretty cranky in general.

The original description may not be correct, but HN is almost certainly iconoclastic, and ever since cyrptocurrencies became mainstream HN has responded in kind by attacking them.

Any popular technology that's controversial has this problem on hacker news. Every discussion becomes a debate on the same old topics. It's like Go generics or Rails scalability.

Engineers and technical people are cynical generally, but I agree. It comes out especially for crypto. Some of it could be jealousy. Watching “normies” make millions doing nothing more than buying early.

> Engineers and technical people are cynical generally, but I agree. It comes out especially for crypto. Some of it could be jealousy. Watching “normies” make millions doing nothing more than buying early.

Except we aren't normies, a lot of us may have non CS backgrounds, but we have the World's best cryptographers, and some of us with some relevant tech backgrounds, particularly found in the Anarcho-Capitalist/Crypto-Anarchy/Cypherpunk crowds from the early days, also grew up n the internet. I learned how to solder from hacking and modding playstation, gamecube, and Dreamcast consoles and sold ripped copies of those games to fund my first startup in HS in fact. My friends online hacked DirecTV for fun on their time off and introduced me to what zero days were when I was in the 8th grade!

I was browsing newsgroups and IRC since the early 2000s and spoke to software engineers at many mega corps, and even met a few who worked in the auto industry in my early teens at meetups or drifting events.

I honestly think it's because we ushered in a paradigm shift that makes them question if they wasted their time/life entirely and we are incredibly vocal about that, not because we want to brag (most times) but because we want you to apply your Human capital and skill set to this movement as we need so much more infrastructure to make it become what we all think it can become as its still possible to be incredibly rewarded for doing so.

But many, especially here, have these delusions think they were meant to be Musk, Chamath, or Dorsey if they kept pluging away as a lowly foot soldier on a H1 visa at a FAANG: it was just a matter of time until their unicorn idea let them get to that table. It's really just sad to me, but I saw it with my own eyes so many times I cannot deny it. Hell, Chamath has even said in his recent podcast what he did is entirely unobtainable anymore, which is why he works in the spaces he does.

It's really sad, Bitcoiners as a whole are generally collaborative, and super generous people with their time and crypto (we gave so much away!) but all we ever get from the FAANG types is jealousy, scorn and resentfulness; we may be brash in our demeanor and are often very anti-Silicon Valley (even for those of us with roots there) but that is just our culture. A lot of us were channers, too. I heard it several times before I joined and posted on BTF in fact.

It's like a tax on confirmation bias.

It's easy to imagine having early awareness of cryptoassets but dismissing them as tulips when the total market value was $1m.

It's also easy to imagine not admitting the mistake after the next 10x to $10m. In fact, that explosive growth helped confirm the skeptics' thesis that it's a Ponzi about to implode.

So now that we've 10x'd five more times since then, it would be a tremendous psychological blow to capitulate now.

Those who preferred the comfort of confirmation bias to the discomfort of admitting they've been wrong all these years have paid an enormous price for that comfort.

> So those who preferred the comfort of confirmation bias to the discomfort of admitting they've been wrong all these years have paid an enormous price for that comfort.

Suppose I bought $10,000 of BTC 8 years ago. The only reason I would have done so would have been for speculation, because I don't need to buy drugs on the internet, I don't need to send remittances to, (to use a shorthand) some 'other' country[1], and just like how I don't want to churn my own butter, I don't want to be my own bank.

Had I done so, I can safely predict, knowing everything I know about my psychology and temperament, I would not be a Bitcoin millionaire today. I would have closed my position at any one of a million points in between then and now.

It's a pretty easy temper on FOMO.

[1] To use a long-hand, that country would have to be legal for me to send money to, have a functioning and nearly-always-on internet system, and have a robust network of local bitcoin-for-cash money lenders, while also being almost entirely disconnected from traditional international banking.

If you had bought 8 years ago and sold after the first double or triple, you'd have the same confirmation bias problem as if you'd never bought at all.

Most people would find reasons why they were right to sell and forgo all the 10x's after they sold. They'd be on HN talking about speculation, tulips, buying drugs on the internet, terrorist financing, and wasteful energy usage.

I'm not immune from this. I bought Tesla and Netflix early, and sold after the first triple. Then I spent a lot of time finding fault with Tesla and Netflix as they continued to rise without limit while I watched from the sidelines.

I was wrong about Tesla and Netflix. I made tremendous errors in judgment by selling far too soon.

At least for me, it's much easier to pretend I've been right all along and the entire market is wrong, than to admit my own judgment and decisions were faulty.

You've got a good point but can you please make your substantive points without being snarky? This is in the site guidelines and is an important condition for curious conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

true, as a 20+ year sec guy, I didn't get interested in crypto till I started buying it in 2017. I might be able to retire in under 5 years if crypto keeps growing at the rate.

Perhaps you're being intentionally tongue in cheek. But the implication of your comment is that you like Bitcoin because it has made you wealthy.

We all worship the thing that feeds us.

And you retire by selling crypto into plain old fiat, of course...

> For a community of hackers, there really seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to crypto specifically.

The lack of vision panned out. Bitcoin is not a good currency, it is not bringing us into a decentralized land of milk and honey, it is environmentally ruinous, and all that it has accomplished is creating yet another financial gambling market. Broadly speaking, we already have enough of those. And I guess you can still use it to buy drugs. (Although, with $10 transaction fees, probably not. The drug folks would kindly prefer it if this whole bitcoin mania could blow over, and people could go back to gambling in Vegas, or on out-of-the-money GME calls, or whatever, so they could do their business in peace.)

Of the bright predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, the only relevant one that came to fruition by 2021 is 'Many people speculating on bitcoin made a lot of money.'

Of the dour predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, only the ones I listed came true.

Bitcoin, imho, is a clever way to redirect excess energy production into a trustless payments system. The fact that individuals have used personal gpus is an abveration. It will be governments running btc network on excess energy from nuclear plants, they will sign treaties to use only so much energy on btc to prevent the race to the bottom (similar to icbm treaties) and they will use btc for massive gov-to-gov transactions. Individuals in most countries will be barred from touching btc.

I predict eventually a chain that doesn't require PoW will gain popularity.

Also, the chain won't have to be a store of value. Instead the value will be real assets represented as "tokens".

The asset can be anything. Stock, royalty rights, water rights, futures, commodities, etc.

The ledger would then act as an exchange/settlement layer that can match trades. Merchant denominates prices in shares of GOOG, customer pays with AAPL.

It seems like currency is largely helpful for providing liquidity for trades. It's hard to trade goats for camels if the other person doesn't want goats. The ledger I believe can help get around that.

That's pretty much describing Ethereum (once it finishes switching to PoS in the next year or so). Popularity wise it's already doing way more than others in txn or $ volume.

It's NFT market for asset ownership (mainly artwork right now) is huge, there was literally a Christie's auction for an NFT token (and the art it represents) this week.

There aren't official stocks/commodities yet (I think) but a bunch of sythetic derivatives already. A couple of banks have even done test runs of bond issuance.

ETH itself is does have "store of value" qualities in background, but a trick was developed of using it as collateral to back on-chain stablecoins like DAI. That allows on-chain token markets/contracts to rely on USD-valuations for liquidity and baseline reference, independent of general "crypto" speculative fluctuations.

There's also Earnst & Young's "Nightfall" project that trying to bring b2b accounting on-chain using Eth's zero knowledge tools to retain privacy.

> Bitcoin, imho, is a clever way to redirect excess energy production into a trustless payments system.

It's utterly failed at that, because nobody actually cares about it as a payments system. People care about it as a speculative investment.

The more people care about it as a speculative investment, the worse it gets at being a payments system. We're seeing this today, as the costs of using bitcoin skyrocket, and the overwhelming majority of bitcoin transactions are sending it to and from fiat-to-bitcoin exchanges.

> For a community of hackers, there really seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to crypto specifically.

To be fair as a Bitcoiner, Coinbase represents THE WORST most toxic aspects of our ecosystem since MTGOX, and that may be stretching it because at least Mark didn't try to behave like a bank, he just kept messing up and was way over his head in a nascent economy. Coinbvase is a YC and VC backed compnay, eith all the trimining a predatory survielence based business from the valley has on top of MTGOX's unreliability.

Honestly,and used to want to work for them in the early days: screw coinbase, I hope they get wiped out before they sell to a institutional bank and hand over their large BTC reserves. I'd welcome the large price drop if they did, too!

Vulture capitalism is what they did before, so...

What sort of engineer ignores inefficiency on the order of six to eight orders of magnitude? Being a hacker is about creativity and innovation, sure, but it's also about knowing when something is total junk and should be discarded. If you heard people lambasting COBOL or CORBA or Windows 95 when they were new, would you criticize them for their "lack of vision"?

Even if I were optimistic about cryptocurrency, I would be opposed to places like Coinbase. The whole point is supposedly to get rid of banks and replace them with cryptography. Coinbase is building the same old banking system all over again, but with slower databases and regulation set back to the 1930s.

Being an engineer does not exclusively mean you are focused on efficiency. It means determining the balance of reliability, functionality, efficiency, and a wealth of other factors as applied to the specific use case.

Bitcoin is not made to be efficient, it's made to be a self-sufficient decentralized monetary system. Decentralization isn't efficient compared to centralization, but it offers other benefits that are powerful.

The whole point is not to get rid of banks and replace them with crypto. It's about building a system that's more democratized, robust, and resistant to loss of purchasing power over time. Bitcoin has done that well, and it's the cornerstone of the new decentralized financial infrastructure.

I don't know if you're considering what Coinbase is when in alignment with cryptocurrency. It is exactly what cryptocurrency was supposed to not be. It's centralization, it's a bank. I personally have no emotion towards it, but I definitely understand those who do as the cryptocurrency project was quickly taken over by the same old financial interests.

False. The objective of crypto isn't to force everyone out of the banking system, it's to provide an ability to opt-out and be your own bank for those who need or want it. If you want to use a traditional bank or custodian instead, go for it. And indeed, for many people who cannot and should not be managing their own keys, it's the preferable option.

You need fiat on ramps for crypto to work. Contrary to what other commenters have suggested you can't legally help other individuals convert their dollars to BTC. That's acting as a money transmitter.