[stegosaurus]

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd.

If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.

What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5?

From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

[vectorpush]

I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion.

The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and blockchain companies making extraordinary claims while consistently under-delivering or outright scamming customers, the warped world-view where communities of impoverished people who can barely meet their daily needs and have markedly poor computer literacy and limited access to computers and internet will be lifted out of poverty by banking with bitcoin, the constant dismissal of bitcoin skeptics as "not understanding" bitcoin, the self-aggrandizing elevation of satoshi and bitcoin programmers as programming prodigies, the condescendingly absurd notion that detractors, the banks and the governments are afraid of bitcoin or afraid of the bitcoin money revolution, the tone-deaf advocacy of bitcoin as a safer method of payment than credit cards, the general refusal to acknowledge bitcoin's practical challenges as real problems (non-technical people being scammed or permanently losing their money due to data-loss, theft, misconfiguration of software, sending bitcoin to the wrong address, downloading a scam wallet), the oversaturation of the underwhelming "x but with bitcoin" formula that pops up every couple weeks... and much more.

As heated, vitriolic and personal as linux discussions can get, its taken for granted that everyone is at least operating in the same objective reality (systemd vs upstart, gnome vs unity, mir vs wayland, even windows vs linux), but a large swath of bitcoin enthusiasts look at bitcoin as something that eclipses every other technical topic in importance to the point where it comes off as quasi-religious.

[digi_owl]

You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people.

Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay.

Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good.

Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak.

That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future.

This because while inflation can be bad when it runs riot (though money printing in itself is rarely if ever the cause) it is better in the long run than deflation, as that allows some entity or other to corner the market.

And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.

[notahacker]

The pretty strong anti-establishment streak held by goldbugs and cypherpunks is largely shared by HN though. I think much of the sneering comes because there's a third type of person that influences discourse around Bitcoin to some extent: shills.

Obviously a lot of Bitcoin evangelists have large BTC holdings because it's entirely in keeping with their belief that it's a brilliant idea, and many if not most exchanges, altcoins and even blockchain based trading schemes weren't conceived as ways of persuading fools to part with their money. But many Bitcoiners are speculators and some of the schemes dreamed up around Bitcoin were scams or might as well have been, which hasn't really been the case for flavours of Linux. FOSS evangelists might have made similarly grandiose claims about their project and the philosophy behind it, but they weren't trying to pump the price of their commodity holdings at the time or running get rich quick schemes - they usually weren't even expecting to get paid!

Something of a tangent I know. I largely agree with you on the virtues of some inflation in an economy as a whole, but I think it's pretty evident now that Bitcoin is neither replacing currency as a whole nor representing a sufficiently stable store of value to encourage hoarding on any scale. Frankly Steam accepting BTC is no more economically destabilising than Steam deciding to accept inflationary-by-design Linden Dollars.

[digi_owl]

Thanks for the reminder. Yes it kinda takes on the form of a Ponzi scheme.

[oppositelock]

The incentive to hoard, also often called the "deflationary spiral", is a theory proposed by neo-Keynesian economists, which doesn't appear to be as bad as they say.

People have finite lifespan, and so, they want to use their hoards to better these finite lives, which leads them to spend. This preference, known as the "time preference", strikes a balance with the tendency to hoard. It is impossible to predict where this balance is, though, because it's subjective to each participant.

Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?

[digi_owl]

> Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper?

Direct practical utility.

> Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month?

I don't eat, i starve, i die.

> Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?

Now there you get into something interesting. Though the five years view is comically long.

[oppositelock]

You just demonstrated the concept to which I'm alluding. There is a balance of time preference versus saving preference for absolutely everything in an economy based on the subjective desires of all participants. For some people, this will be cell phones, or cars, or fancy shoes, or little purse dogs. They won't save forever, living just to get by, for some uncertain future when they can have more stuff. There is no deflationary spiral, there's a balance point where it stops.

This dangerous idea has been used to justify all forms of crazy economic intervention since Keynes formalized it. The notion of a currency having to depreciate is a direct consequence of these policies, all based on a fallacy. No matter how counterproductive these policies are, they're still applied. Look to Japan and Switzerland as recent examples. Japan has massive stimulus, the Yen is dropping, are people spending more, no, they're saving for the future, knowing that their savings will be worth less, so they need more of them to get by - no spending on unnecessary items. Switzerland is paying negative interest rates on savings accounts, so people have to save more to offset that.

There are lots of things to dislike about Bitcoin, but its value increasing over time isn't one.

[digi_owl]

What you are doing is conflating a commodity with a currency.

Anyways, why the Japanese is saving is that even 2 decades later they have a private debt overhang from the 80s boom.

Expect Europe and North America to follow much the same pattern (already a decade in shortly).

[bildung]

>* Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?*

The deflationary spiral is not about consumption of non-durable goods. Thats why all of your examples don't really work as reasoning against this concept. It rather is about investment and consumption of durable goods: Cars, forklifts, the pick and place machines at foxconn.

[Natanael_L]

So, still just the kind of stuff where you get more for your money over time even despite inflation, thanks to technology developments. Why would the impact of messing with the money supply outweigh that of the technology in any other way that forcing a change in scheduling? And how is inflation beneficial for those who need to save money for a long time for large investments?

Inflation would only really make sense in a model where everybody already have access to all the funds they need to purchase what they want, but where they postpone all purchases to see if the can get more, AND where it is these delays that hurt the market by making it hard for the makers of these goods to survive. And this effect has to be the single most dominant one.

[ascorbic]

Well, there is a third, rather significant type of bitcoin user: people who don't particularly care about the cool crypto or sticking it to the Fed, but do like the ability to make anonymous payments. And let's not be coy about who many if not most of these are: criminals.

[Natanael_L]

All ~1% of them. As stated by plenty of lawyers, prosecutors and researchers who know that those groups prefer physical cash.

[Houshalter]

>And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.

Lots of goods tend to increase in value over time. Land, gold, stocks, etc. How is bitcoin any different? If people want to hoard, nothing is stopping them. They will just hoard, nothing has ever been stopping them.

And hoarding isn't a bad thing. If you aren't spending your money, then you aren't taking resources out of the economy. That means more resources for everyone else. Spending money, consumption, is what should be discouraged.

[digi_owl]

Hoarding is a bad thing when we are talking about a currency.

The main function of a currency is exchange, not storage.

Without a currency you are back at the barter stage, or move to IOUs (that may ironically turn into currency if allows to pass from person to person).

[oppositelock]

Hoarding has a price - the marginal utility of each remaining token of value increases, so it becomes much more expensive to hoard. Some amount always circulates.

Hoarding in a mattress represents a lost opportunity cost. Most hoarders put their money into something that yields interest, that gets it circulating, and it is in fact, how our entire banking system works.

Also, let's call hoarding something else, namely "saving". In a healthy economy, you need saving and spending. Saving is a way of deferring spending to the future. When lots of people save, it means it's a good time to borrow money because it's cheap due to the nature of the banking system and lending and because it means that people have money to spend on whatever you're producing with the credit. You really can't have spending without saving and vice versa, otherwise you risk some kind of credit crunch or collapse of the currency. (The USD is in a scary place, BTW).

If you're trying to argue against Bitcoin as a currency because it's used as a store of value, then you have to be against the USD or Euro too. The ratio of saving to spending is different among these, and in Bitcoin-land the ratio is particularly skewed to saving due to the early adopter advantage, but there's still a healthy amount of churn for a currency that's so young, despite profound technical encumberance to its usability.

[digi_owl]

There can always be made more USD or Euro, the bitcoin had a fixed amount from day one. That makes it a commodity like gold, not a currency.

[Houshalter]

I don't see how you get that conclusion. For one thing, it's not even true, people don't actually hoard currency. They put it in a bank, which invests 90% of it back out into the economy. They've done that even since currency was backed by gold.

Second, even if people literally did fill vaults full of cash, it doesn't hurt anyone. It's not like all the currency is going to actually disappear and people will have to go back to bartering. The remaining currency just becomes worth more.

The bitcoin economy doesn't collapse everytime someone loses a wallet. It never will, because the remaining coins can always be divided further, and always increase in value further.

Lastly it's not like people will literally never spend that money again. They of course intend to spend it at some point. At some point the number of people saving vs taking out of savings will stabilize and everything will be normal. And saving for the future isn't a bad thing. In fact it should be encouraged.

[aserafini]

The remaining currency just becomes worth more.

This is the key point that addresses why hoarding makes no difference to Bitcoin's utility as a currency.

[digi_owl]

No people do not hoard currency, but they do hoard commodities. As such, bitcoin is at present more a commodity (its setup pretty much use math to emulate gold) than a currency. And the situation will only get worse with time.

[jacobwcarlson]

> And hoarding isn't a bad thing. If you aren't spending your money, then you aren't taking resources out of the economy. That means more resources for everyone else. Spending money, consumption, is what should be discouraged.

I'm usually pretty good at detecting irony, so I apologize if I've been bested here. But are you honestly suggesting that reductions in consumption and spending are favorable to nation's economy?

If you are being ironic, I don't think I understand your message. Would you mind explaining it to me?

[Houshalter]

>are you honestly suggesting that reductions in consumption and spending are favorable to nation's economy?

Yes absolutely. All the economy does is just allocate resources. If some area of the economy is consuming more, than that is coming at the expense of other areas of the economy. Likewise if spending in one area is cut, that leaves resources available for other things.

That's all supply and demand is. Prices increase or decrease with demand until the supply is stable.

[JumpCrisscross]

Economics, like physics, scales messily. If the whole world decided to save everything for one year starting today, the economy would free fall. Since nobody is consuming, nobody need produce. Factories grind to a halt and deteriorate, social bonds and casual knowledge fade, and the world returns a year later materially worse off.

[Shorel]

> That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future.

Both issues have been resolved in Ethereum, an alternative cryptocurrency with a market cap second only to Bitcoin itself.

So, it can be said that cryptocurrencies indeed solve many problems. What can't be said is which cryptocurrency will be the one that ends being used as cash in the long term.

[EdHominem]

> find some way to speed up the ledger processing

If you want a large, fast, distributed ledger, go ahead and make one. If you want to anchor it in Bitcoin, go ahead. Why would bitcoin itself change heavily just to suit your proposed need?

It's a misconception that bitcoin the software, or the community as developers, are incapable of switching to larger and faster blocks. The system is working well, as designed.

> the one true currency

The only one here saying that, is you. Bitcoin doesn't have to be the one, or all things to everyone.

> if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism

That's like going to a foreign film society and complaining that they're fanatical about foreign films. It says so on the door and you aren't forced to stay. There are inflationary crypto-currencies...

[explorer666]

> And that will drive an economy into the ground

A consumerism-based, Earth-killing economy. But it will give raise to more sustainable economies.

[digi_owl]

Feudalism says hello...

[ssharp]

Let's not forget this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/31xp48/why_di...

[mfoy_]

Interesting... just having a "donate with BitCoin" link visible caused a noticeable drop in donations? Similarly with revenue on a merchant page. That seems bizarre.

[jtbigwoo]

Just speculating, but it could be a couple things:

Providing more choices can often result in consumers simply giving up. At a former job we did an A/B test where we showed some visitors two options to buy our product and added a third option for other visitors. In the three option scenario, the bounce rate was about 10% higher.

Or, it could be that there are folks for whom bitcoin is linked with drugs, gambling, piracy, etc. Maybe seeing a bitcoin option makes the site look less reputable.

[VikingCoder]

Well, it may be that using bitcoin right now is... not easy.

"Bitcoin! I've always wanted to try it. [Click.] 'Wallet address', what's that? Okay, I'll just Google Bitcoin. 'Buy viagra and pot online,' oh uhm... Okay, creating a wallet.. Wow, this isn't easy. Okay, now... Time to convert some cash to bitcoins! What the hell?!? Why does it need all of this info? 'For tax purposes bitcoins are not currency,' what the hell?!? Okay, um... What the hell is 'Magic the Gathering'? 'Fraud.' 'Japan.' 'Apologizes.' Hmmm... Ah, forget it."

[digi_owl]

Choice paralysis is something that economists have known about for some time, but seem reluctant to talk about (because more choice has to be better).

[sliverstorm]

To me bitcoin is trendy and kind of unprofessional. Steam is obviously a pretty reputable service, but for a long time accepting bitcoin screamed "this is a low quality service and we have no other ways to differentiate ourselves than using a buzzword currency"

[bduerst]

I've seen some of the worst biases manifest themselves around bitcoin.

My theory is that in the shadow of the bubble collapse, the desire for bitcoin to succeed has driven wishful thinking to the extreme, where some vocal bitcoin evangelists ignore or spin reality to reconcile it with their desire.

It's more akin to the old XBox vs Playstation flame wars, where a console fan could just admit the cons along with the pros, but then that wouldn't fully validate their decision to invest.

An example of some of the spin that I'm talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10959211

[xkarga00]

I never considered myself as a bitcoin enthusiast but I am enthusiastic about digital cryptocurrencies in general for most of the reasons you mentioned. Bitcoin (and all other cryptocurrencies) is not there yet but most of those are problems that cryptocurrencies target to solve.

An example: you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can. Of course, you need to be a security expert in order to do it but ultimately UX will get there. I wasn't around at the early days of internet but I am pretty sure if my mother could access it back then she would have no idea what to do. And here she is calling me on Skype every other night.

Another example: There are millions of people who cannot afford buying a computer as you already said but possess low-cost mobile phones. There are already a bunch of bitcoin startups targeting that market. Apps and tools will eventually evolve up to the point where they will be accessible, easy-to-use, scam-free, safe. We just need to build them.

[arnarbi]

> you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can.

As obvious as it may seem that is a positive thing, keep in mind that a lot of people will not think so. Even more people can just don't appreciate it and could be convinced either way. If everyone thought anonymity was so good, fake identities wouldn't be illegal.

[xkarga00]

Anonymity is good not per se but because it implies privacy. Let's not argue if privacy is a good thing or not. Anonymity also supersedes fake identities.

[arnarbi]

Sorry, my intention was not to discuss merits of anonymity or privacy. I do agree those are good.

My point was that in discussing things like cryptocurrency (and other technical matters), many of its advocates go to arguments like yours with the silent assumption that certain aspects are obvious benefits. You forget that that's an opinion, and any argument based on it misses it mark with someone who doesn't share that opinion (or hasn't formed one). I think that's part of the reason "the oxygen in the room has been depleted".

[btcprint]

Well, while the hyperbole might be grandiose during the stages of bitcoin's infancy - everything claimed is plausible if it can scale. At least to the point of being a global currency and transfer of value alongside govt and central bank fiat.

Sometimes the economic winds favor different assets both liquid and long term stores of value.

Bitcoin adds a legitimate, scarce, immutable form of ownership of something that can be transferred with the least amount of friction of any other asset (including cash).

Hyperbole or not, where it is now compared to 2009-2012 is extremely impressive. It's an exciting space to watch develop over time, love it or hate it.

I think those that don't understand it but are quick to judge or regurgitate the opinions of their peers (it's a ponzi, tulip mania, etc) are just as hyperbolic and ignorant.

I don't see how anyone can argue that bitcoin and it's blockchain is not an impressive, elegant technological solution to a problem that needed solving.

[zaphar]

Merkle trees are an impressive and elegant solution to an auditable ledger. Bitcoin however has always seemed wasteful to me. It's incredibly energy hungry for a consensus protocol.

[bcook]

Are your counter-claims not hyperbolic ("liberate people from bondage")?

Regardless of the extreme pros or cons, Bitcoin is revolutionary.

PS - Your middle paragraph is painfully hard to read (is it one, huge sentence?). This makes your post feel like it was purely an emotional, unedited response with little filtering...

[fjidodhofjf]

Funny how the anti Bitcoin crowd respond with baseless ad hominem attacks.

Bitcoin solved a problem, whether that problem needed solving or will be extremely fruitful is for the future to determine.

The fact that a 4+ billion dollar stateless currency exists is pretty amazing to me.

Personally I think the anti Bitcoin crowd is also the pro government crowd. You know, the people who support torture of innocents, assassinations, genocide, etc etc, but I'm sure I'm just some nut -- yeah I'm the nut, not the people who talk about laws And justice while shrugging off torure.

Amazingly gross display of hypocracy.

[markeroon]

That's quite a straw man, bud.

[jerf]

Actually, I'd suggest you do sometimes see people saying that about Linux, especially when Linux "on the desktop" comes up. And the reason is that neither project is simply a neutral software development project, but are politically charged. Linux at this point really just has a political "tinge" to it with the free software stuff, but Bitcoin is drenched in politics. So people are responding with their political brains rather than their raw technical brains.

I am not trying to imply this is bad. The politics are intrinsically worthy of thought and discussion. I could wish for a higher level of discourse on political matters, but humans have been doing that for lo these many thousands of years and I doubt this is the year that's going to change. Our "political brains" are complicated, messy things, tied into tribal instincts, personal identity, and all sorts of other messy things that make it difficult.

[stegosaurus]

I think you're spot on with this.

The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.

We seem to be able to leave each other alone when it comes to using vi vs. emacs - the odd joke comes up, but that's about it.

But politics? There seems to be this attitude of conversion, missionaries, convincing, it's kind of frustrating. I think it's healthy to question one's views sometimes, but not to face a constant onslaught.

Looking a bit harder, the language people use here is quite clearly politicized and strange - people use past tense, which I find difficult to interpret as anything other than trolling. No-one would say 'Linux was a good OS', because it currently exists and is used daily...?

[brownbat]

> The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.

Yeah, politics is the mindkiller.[0]

Dan Kahan's research could lead to some interesting suggestions about why this might be.[1] There are many questions we answer dispassionately about facts, but then there's this other series of questions about the world, where we really don't answer with reference to specific knowledge. They seem primarily to serve as litmus tests for measuring group identity.

As it happens, contradicting someone who is really just talking about their identity just makes everyone upset.

Certainly conversations can change some people's minds on some political topics[2]. I've had a few rare 'conversion' experiences when talking with friends. But it's usually in really specific situations with certain approaches to open discussion that are just really hard, sometimes it takes multiple discussions, none of which seem that monumental, but have a cumulative effect. Both conversants have to rely on a lot of care and patience. All of that is made much more difficult by the impersonal and ephemeral nature of conversations on the internet.

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

[1] http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/4/23/what-you-bel...

[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/584/f...

[stegosaurus]

Thank you for this comment. The links are fantastic. On the reading list. :)

[DickingAround]

The debate about Linux desktop or bitcoin need not be political. But I'd like to offer an indicator for when things inevitably become 'political'; when there's no provably correct answer and the use of force is involved.

[exbitcoinuser]

> The debate about Linux desktop or bitcoin need not be political.

I agree, but that doesn't mean we should silence people who bring up political issues.

> But I'd like to offer an indicator for when things inevitably become 'political'; when there's no provably correct answer and the use of force is involved.

That's a good indicator that pretty much everyone would agree.

However, what constitutes "use of force", however, changes from people to people. Some people believe that merely having a state is "use of force". Other people believe that having a billion dollars to bargain is "use of force". It gets crazier: other people believe it's neither. Or both. Etcetera.

[deepnet]

Experimentally it can be informative to refresh one's controversial comments as this can show the total may have received many more up and down votes than the final total suggests.

My inner statistician would be interested to see up & down totals as a metric of controversy.

FUD merchants, social media management, astroturf, superpacs, brigades, vendettas are common enough on Reddit and the Post-Snowden zeitgeist demands we consider Orwell's '84 where the mere possibilty of being observed is enough to bring general opinion & behaviour to heel.

[acbabis]

> The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.

I'm not so sure about that, especially when compared to other forums. People here often cite specific laws, articles, and papers when making political points[citation needed].

[csense]

Maybe the year of the Linux desktop will also be the year of rational political discourse...

[stegosaurus]

That'll be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop, then? ;)

[apo]

I've run into the sentiment you're talking about both online and IRL. It puzzles me as well.

Three factors come to mind:

1. There's a deep-rooted idea today that money comes from the government and that everything else is a scam. Bitcoin challenges that idea.

2. Bitcoin refuses to die despite the predictions of just about everyone who first learns about it.

3. The technical underpinnings of Bitcoin are counterintuitive to say the least. That makes Bitcoin hard to understand even for the technically-oriented.

The combination of longevity, casual disregard for convention, and counterintuitive nature gets annoying after awhile.

Nor are these factors restricted to those who can't stand Bitcoin, its users, or the idea of private money. Many of the most vocal Bitcoin advocates today went through a period of disbelief or outright hostility toward the idea.

[stegosaurus]

As I posted further down - most of the issues here seem to stem from people having this idea that in the extreme long term Bitcoin takes over the world and 'their' (as if this is some sort of holy war?) green bits of paper become firewood or something.

That isn't a realistic model for how the world works and is really just an odd way of thinking.

I can play Quake 3 and have fun with it, and post blogs about it, without thinking it's going to destroy every other video game out there ever, without debating whether it even is a video game, etc. Hey, it has fast inverse square root, that's cool, but it's not going to result in the actual world being deleted and exchanged for CGI VR land.

Fundamentally it seems to be that there's some element of 'faith in the concept', that is turned off when it comes to money, perhaps as a protection mechanism. I don't know.

... Just chill out, you know? I might go out for a run soon. You can still walk, don't worry, it's not banned (I also walk, it's useful, maybe we can be friends?).

[pjc50]

In the pre-Gox days of the Bitcoin subreddit you could find plenty of people advocating exactly that - that Bitcoin would make not just 'fiat' money obsolete but government itself.

Any idea, good or bad, is vulnerable to being discredited by its most annoying public advocates. Bitcoin 'hate' is mostly a reaction by people who encountered this and got fed up with it.

Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist: it's built on vast amounts of wasted electricity.

[clarkmoody]

> anti-environmentalist ... vast amounts of wasted electricity

Ironically uses politically-charged language when discussing how bitcoin gets political.

How about: "I'm concerned with the amount of electricity devoted to mining."

Some of the bitcoin-is-going-to-take-over advocates could counter with, "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money."

[Frondo]

And, of course, the idea that bitcoin changes the world so radically that no one has an army anymore is absurd. But I think you've just touched on another reason why people react so strongly to bitcoin-related articles.

It's like, bitcoin started out with a pretty good-sounding idea: decentralized currency, like the old Gnutella network except for money! hey I like it!

Then people start talking about it and the first next step is "hey and bitcoin takes control over money and puts it into the hands of the PEOPLE" except it doesn't! It doesn't at all! Control over the money supply, there's at least some tenuous link between votes we regularly cast as citizens and the people making those decisions. Decisions over bitcoin's economics? Better start coding, except no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.

Then the conversation turns to pretty goofy new-world-order stuff, like "bitcoin will eliminate the need for nations to have standing armies!!" Except the reality is, look at how the bitcoin people themselves squabble like a bunch of old hens, in the face of what seem to be legitimate critiques. These are the people leading the way to a new world order? I don't think so.

And then we look at the environmental costs, and that's not good. Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either. Or how it seems a lot more like an elaborate ponzi scheme, and that's not good either.

Basically, what bugs me about bitcoin is that legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies. Kinda kills the whole thing for me.

[clarkmoody]

I'm not sure which bitcoin advocates you're talking to, but they seem pretty far out there.

As for monetary policy, I would look to the history of currency devaluations in the wake of wars and emphasize that bitcoin cannot be devalued in the same way. Not that a nation would use bitcoin as its currency, but it begins to look more like the gold that used to back fiat currencies.

Even Rome debased its currency to continue paying soldiers, while throwing the citizens under the bus.

Re environmental costs: a future protocol change could update the proof of work function if this gets out of control.

> deflationary economics of the system itself

Strictly speaking, bitcoin's monetary base is monotonically increasing and never actually shrinks, which would be monetary deflation. I would also challenge the conventional wisdom that says "Deflation bad! Inflation good!" Again, not that a nation's currency will be bitcoin. It exists alongside other systems, behaving more like gold.

Ponzi scheme is almost not worth mentioning as the allegation is obviously ridiculous.

[EdHominem]

> Better start coding, except no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.

That's a horrible change.

But it's a perfect example of the ultimate democracy. Everyone has the freedom to listen to you, they're choosing not to.

[CyberDildonics]

> no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.

Why would anyone willingly dilute their own money?

> legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies

> And then we look at the environmental costs, and that's not good. Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either. Or how it seems a lot more like an elaborate ponzi scheme, and that's not good either.

These are not legitimate critiques without real data to back them up. Without real data they are conjecture based on emotion.

[Forbo]

> "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money."

There are better alternatives to brute-forcing hashes and generating nothing but waste heat in order to mine cryptocurrency. At least those cycles could be put toward something useful, like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Gridcoin uses proof-of-research in BOINC as the basis for compensation.

[AgentME]

Who would decide which BOINC projects work with Bitcoin? What if I made a BOINC project for calculating the number 4 and did it before anyone else noticed it was available? How much bitcoin should that be worth? There have to be ongoing decisions about what BOINC projects are accepted and how much they're worth. Who makes those decisions?

More realistically, what if I privately know a fast algorithm for an obscure type of protein folding, and then I push for a new BOINC project to be accepted that focuses on the specific type of problem? I'll be the only one that can mine it efficiently for a long time. If I calculated my expected profits, I would probably see that it's worth it for me to pay a lot of money to lobby the people in charge of the BOINC-coin decision process to get my project accepted. Unless BOINC-coin only uses a fixed set of projects over all time, or is only worth negligible amounts, then lobbying like this is going to influence what projects it accepts.

Even if BOINC-coin uses a fixed set of projects, then there's a problem of what work units are given out. I imagine many projects work like SETI@Home where some data is given out to users to process. If processing the data is worth money, then it might make sense financially for me to artificially construct datasets that I've already solved, and bribe the SETI@Home administrators to insert my dataset into the worker queue, which I will then quickly "mine" for BOINC-coin.

A BOINC-coin isn't fully decentralized. It requires trusted people to be in control choosing which projects are worth it and to secure the authenticity of the data sets. Bitcoin is about minimizing the need for trust in administrative systems like this.

Even if you solve the above problems, the proof-of-work system needs to be hard to compute but cheap to verify. Many BOINC projects' work units aren't cheap to verify. They just have several users redundantly recalculate the same work units to check that they get the same answers.

[VMG]

If the PoW serves any other purpose than mining bitcoin, it can't be used, since there won't be any opportunity cost in mining on the most recent chain.

[CyberDildonics]

I understand the arguments that people have against proof of work but unfortunately they are extremely short sighted with respect to the whole system. You could say the same thing about all the infrastructure surrounding gold, but crypto-currencies and gold have serve a very valuable purpose that gets lost in the details: they have many of the properties of ideal money.

Gold isn't as valuable as it is today for any other reason. You can dream about a theoretical currency with a proof of work that accomplishes something but it won't have the same properties of ideal money until it is more widely used, mined and attacked.

Also don't forget that space heaters _actually_ do nothing but generate 'waste heat' and no one seems worried about those.

[stegosaurus]

>> In the pre-Gox days of the Bitcoin subreddit

This is true! You don't have to agree with them, though. The network still exists and is cool and useful regardless. You don't even need to use Reddit! I don't hang out on reddit.com/r/visa (does it even exist?)

>> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist

I think it would be fairer to say that it's 'a-environmentalist'. The badness or goodness of energy use for PoW just wasn't really a concern.

When I play Quake 3, my computer uses more energy. I consider that an acceptable compromise. Perhaps there are people out there that don't, so they don't play it.

I would find it quite odd if they criticized my habits, though. We should be trying to get along, not looking for chances to grumble at each other, you know?

[gnaritas]

> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist: it's built on vast amounts of wasted electricity.

That like saying Tesla's are anti-environmentalist, it's built to waste vast amounts electricity.

It's quite literally non-sense. Point at any other nations currency that consumes less energy than Bitcoin; you think printing bills and minting coins doesn't use energy? You think moving giants piles of cash around in big trucks between banks doesn't use energy? You think banks and guards and trucking don't use energy?

Bitcoin is the pro-environmentalist approach, it uses far less energy than a typical currency does.

[CJefferson]

But the whole bitcoin network does a tiny, tiny number of transactions compared to any of those other systems. The cost per transaction (of the system, not to the user) of bitcoin is comparatively huge.

[Natanael_L]

And yet the actual expense each transaction incurs is trivial, a boost in the number of transactions wouldn't increase the expenses of mining.

[Rmilb]

I think the perception that all Bitcoin advocates think that Bitcoin will "Destroy" all fiat money and we will all be worshiping Satoshi for delivering us, is wide spread and mostly false.

[matt4077]

...And I'm sure you thought you're writing a perfectly objective, well-argued post. However, while speculating on bc-distractors' motives, you've characterized them as naive technophobes.

If someone with, let's say a doctorate in cryptography and a preference in 'fiat' reads that, he's going to feel a bit insulted and double down on his position.

He may (and I'm just speculating a hypothetical here) start daydreaming about going around with a metaphorical hammer of wisdom trying to beat some ideas into every bc-daytraders' head. Like the idea that a majority of western societies actually support the general concept of democratically-elected governments wielding some power. Or that having some screws to adjust in regards to monetary policy may be preferable to not having them, some problems notwithstanding.

All this is not new, by the way. This discussion lines up pretty well with the conflict over libertarianism, both demographically as well as philosophical.

[btcprint]

To point 1. Most who don't understand bitcoin think the federal Reserve is a government agency. But these same people got (and still are) angry at the banks for their part in the great recession. If they really understood what happened in 1913 with the creation of the fed their heads would spin.

Those that understand the big picture and the threat central banks pose to a nations sovereignty, and the debt slavery of its citizens, are the ones who truly appreciate bitcoin

[wyck]

This is why many bitcoin proponents comes across as naive, broad political statements bordering on false beliefs come across as juvenile and in many cases fanatic.

Stay with the facts and reality, a.k.a. the technology, statements like the above create a toxic environment in which the bitcoin community currently finds itself deeply mired in.

[fjidodhofjf]

How false is it criticize central bank policy?

They are dragging the world into another great depression, destroying the lives of billions along the way.

At some point it gets tiresome to speak with those who have no understanding of economics nor history.

Can you defend the last 8 years of Central Bank policy, are you even schooled in this area of study? Your criticisms are naïve.

[wyck]

I will be the mature one here in hopes you understand the problem with the "bitcoin" attitude.

If you want bitcoin to succeed talk about the technology and adoption, this is a complex enough topic in of itself with many real issues. The success of bitcoin depends on this 100%.

If you want to talk about economic saviorism cut the bullshit, it has a nagtive effect on bitcoin. Putting people down you don't know is a sure sign of immaturity that will get you no where and you have exemplified what is wrong with the bitcoin community 2x in this very thread.

[bildung]

Inflation for the last decade is at a record low.

http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=cpi+yoy&v=201604202...

[easuter]

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap.

There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke.

IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.

[Natanael_L]

Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments).

You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.

[statoshi]

I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.

[easuter]

I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild.

Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware.

Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.

[EdHominem]

Sidechains are an answer, for you, if you don't feel the current blockchains scale for your needs. For micropayments, or whatever. But they don't solve anything per-se because nothing is broken.

Pay to publish is a feature. It's the rate-limiting mechanism we'd need anyways, but directly tied into PoW and reward.

Make your coin and ask people if they want to use it instead of bitcoin. It's so easy, and you can be proven right.

[wyldfire]

It's really polarizing because it forces us to question what we think of as currency. Is it sufficient for it to be scarce, durable, verifyable and fungible or should it have some independent utility or backing?

Some of the vitriol is backlash against the zealots who feel that Bitcoin can/should enable elements of anarchy.

[stegosaurus]

I think that's only true if you follow this idea that Bitcoin is going to take over the world, become a global reserve currency, we should hold 100% net worth in it, whatever.

Regardless of correctness, that sort of attitude feels really stressful to me (to think about the ultimate endgame of anything that ever happens under some 'ideal' circumstances). I don't think it's healthy.

For the time being, we have a cool technology that lets me use asymmetric crypto to send people a tenner on the other side of the world. If it all fails or drops massively in value tomorrow, I lose the small amount I have in my wallet.

I'm sure some cypherpunks figured that GPG meant we would all plug ourselves into the wall and be anonymous and stateless and stuff. That probably won't happen, but does it make GPG useless, worthy of ranting about?

[chc]

If it were borderline impossible to have a discussion of GPG without getting swamped by those cypherpunks, people would totally rant about it.

[cortesoft]

There is one important property of currency that you are missing in your list: accepted. Currency that is not accepted as payment for things has little use as currency. It is easy enough to create something that meets all of your requirements, but unless people are willing to accept the currency in exchange for goods and services, it is useless.

Of course, currency has a very strong network effect. Its value is tied very closely to the number of people who use it.

[echelon]

I have no stake or interest in Bitcoin, and I wrote it off some years ago. I find it kind of annoying when there are stories about it or altcoins in my news feed (in lieu of other things). It's noise in my signal. This is just my own personal feeling; I wouldn't go as far as to describe my feeling towards Bitcoin as hate.

I can't explain the feelings or motivations of those who actively detract from the technology. It's probably similar to Apple "hate". Or inverse "fanboyism".

[kbenzle]

I saw Bitcoin as another Second Life, great for smart young programmers to have a new sandbox to play in, but not actually useful for working adults. I was similarly "annoyed" by all the Second Life media hype happening after I had written it off.

[dmihal]

The difference is that Bitcoin/Blockchain technology really is a groundbreaking invention from a computer science perspective.

Bitcoin may or may not succeed, but something can't be un-invented.

Furthermore, it's interesting to see companies like Steam, and even Wall Street players, embracing this new technology.

[cloudjacker]

> Bitcoin may or may not succeed

Thats what people were saying in 2012, 2013

The network is working fine. This is success. What is your metric of success in this statement? I find it counterintuitive.

[andypants]

They are waiting for bitcoin to become the number #1 currency. Just like people joke about 'the year of linux'. Guess what, linux is still around. It doesn't need to be #1. There may never be a 'year of linux', but it doesn't mean linux is a failure.

[cloudjacker]

I see, I don't see it being successful at that, in trade. I see it's blockchain and consensus model being used as settlement on a broad and broader scale.

[solotronics]

People made these same comments about the internet when it was young.

[stegosaurus]

I find Apple 'hate' far more understandable because of their market share.

Bitcoin makes up a tiny portion of the market and is completely optional. I mean, it barely even exists.

Apple's activities (notably 'tivoization'), threaten general purpose computing.

Regardless I still try to come to peace with it (i think it's very important to have a positive mindset). As long as I can still buy my ARM SoC boards, x86 machines, etc, I'll be happy. If that starts looking dim, eh. We'll see.

[balls187]

Apple hate existed long before Apple had dominant market share.

[justratsinacoat]

But the elemental composition of Apple hate has changed since.

[balls187]

Yes: Haters gonna Hate.

[lmm]

It's a technology for allowing money to bypass the rule of law. By design it concentrates power in the hands of property owners, and allows them to undercut democratic rules against activities with negative externalities - and since it's more expensive than currency, those are the only use cases that make sense; prime use cases would be things like drugs, smuggling, tax evasion, child porn, terrorism. I think IED control software is a pretty fair comparison actually, except that IEDs are somewhat more democratic.

[LeoPanthera]

Are you talking about Bitcoin, or cash?

[lmm]

Cash isn't quite as bad because it's less practical, but yes both are primarily useful for crime and antisocial activity. I would be suspicious of someone who paid a large bill in cash (or used gold, or bricks of drugs); wouldn't you?

[LeoPanthera]

I'm not answering your question as written because I disagree with the concept of cash and "bricks of drugs" as being equally suspicious.

Being suspicious of cash is very dangerous. Historically, the poor rely on cash far more than the rich, so if we start demonizing it, really you're demonizing the poor. Politicians know this and often exploit it to help their rich friends.

Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. Your fear of it seems unfounded, though the paranoid part of me does wonder if you work for Visa or some other financial institution.

[lmm]

> Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders.

That's backwards. Bitcoin is directly controlled by the owners of property (miners), in proportion to how much they own.

[EdHominem]

That'd be a proof-of-stake coin. They exist. You're thinking of in proportion to their percentage of the network mining power. Which for a pool (cartel?) can be sizable.

But that it is more akin to controlling the post-office than controlling the bank. People can be inconvenienced but not stolen from (except in certain cases with confederates of the post-master) and those can be guarded against more easily than avoiding phishing email from "your bank".

[ebbv]

> If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.

Back in the 90's when there was more of a religious fervor around Linux the way there is around Bitcoin right now, yeah you would have.

The vitriol is no mystery, it's an obvious reaction to the way so many people have rapturously talked about Bitcoin as if it's going to make governments irrelevant.

We're at the beginning of Bitcoin being treated more like the novelty that it is, and possibly finding a niche where it can be useful over the long term. As it enters this phase where the hype around it dies down, the vitriol will as well.

[Kinnard]

HTML actually sucks, technically . . . It was never meant to be used to build modern web apps, just documents with links.

[draw_down]

I dunno about vitriol, it just seems like a really silly and pointless thing to me.

[brighton36]

Money is a religion

[exbitcoinuser]

I believe most people don't realize that to support Bitcoin you either have to adhere to extremely polarizing political beliefs or be completely neutral about it (because you don't care or you don't know). (IMO, of course)

People who are neutral might fail to realize the political implications of Bitcoin and immediately jump to "those people are mental, why do they hate us?"

That applies pretty much to any political discussion ever.