[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.