[davidgerard]

> IMO the only people who knew anything about BTC in the early days were exactly the kinds of people who knew a lot about about economics, cryptography, finance, business, government, politics, and philosophy.

No, it was founded by, and primarily attracted, weird conspiracy theory spouting goldbugs whose motivation was that (a) they thought a gold standard was still workable (b) they had a pathological aversion to the concept of credit in a banking system. Literally, conspiracy theory. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-conspiracist-gold-b...

The scammers didn't come along just this year with ICOs. Scammers have been endemic in Bitcoin as soon as they were tradeable for anything else at all. Bitcoin was founded by starry eyed naifs and this always attracts predators. Sometimes, e.g. pirateat40, the naifs are also the predators.

[wildsatchmo]

If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin. The hard core gold bugs in the Libertarian forums circa 2008 STILL don't trust bitcoin because they can't hold it in their hand. You think these are the folks that invented it? They're typically not computer savvy in the least and would rather invest in canned food with a 90 year shelf life. In that diverse group there were a small subset of cryptography nerds who had worked on several digital money theories and iterations before actually inventing bitcoin. Those people knew a lot about finance, economics, politics, etc. People like to flatten groups into one personality and call them weird or fringe to auto-win an argument when the reality is a bit more complicated than that. I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too. Doesn't mean they were wrong to be excited, and it doesn't mean the people who actually invented it wore spiked collars and combat boots either.

[davidgerard]

> If you think the desire for sound money is weird you'll never understand why we need bitcoin.

If you assume your conclusion, then your conclusion follows. I understand the desire, but a wider need doesn't follow, because a pure gold standard hasn't been adequate to the economy we actually have since the late 1600s. One of the big problems bitcoin has always had is that wishing doesn't make it so.

> I'll remind you that the early days of the internet attracted some weird characters too

Often literally the same characters, the cypherpunks.