[cloakandswagger]

Shitting on emergent tech is completely antithetical to the ethos of the "hacker mindset".

A real hacker would recognize these are the early days of a new technology with incredible potential. Its tech is disruptive enough to already grow a marketcap measured in billions, I don't know what is gained from harping on all the early failures.

[csydas]

Because I don' t take it as harping on the tech - it's not the tech that's the problem, it's the hype and culture around it. There's tons of hype, many outright scams and ponzi schemes within bitcoin to point to, it's fraught with outright criminal activity just within trading, not to mention that it's the payment of choice for Ransomware.

The distributed ledger isn't what people are making fun of - it's the frantic rush and chaos around using it that is ridiculed, and in many cases, rightfully so.

Edited additional thought: Come to think of it, I don't think a lot of the new found SV culture is really as hackerish as it's made out to be - it's the same business stuff that cyberpunks in stories would snub their noses at and work to undermine, except it's masquerading as hacker culture - there's a very cool protocol underneath bit coin that probably will fundamentally change how we do "something" in the future. But what is everyone climbing over themselves about with Bitcoin? Get-rich-quick after get-rich-quick schemes and ridiculous business enterprises.

Silk road I got - buy whatever with crypto-currency, hard to trace, from hard to find sites on TOR, and a package arrives or a service is done. Cool! But that's not what the clamoring is about now, and it hasn't been for ages.

That's not a hackerish interest, that's business people playing with yet another asset to trade.

[Bartweiss]

> I don't know what is gained from harping on all the early failures.

Avoiding them in the future, perhaps? I wouldn't mock a mature technology for historical teething issues, that's pointless. But cryptocurrencies keep replaying the same errors and conflicts without seeming to learn a thing. I like the idea of cryptocurrency, but it's not going to succeed unless we learn from the (myriad, severe) mistakes of the past.