[craigc]

Bitcoin is not marketed as anything. There is no company and there are no marketing or sales people. That is part of the beauty of it.

The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.

Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.

[hudon]

Hi Craig, I'm sure you know that it only takes 1 or 2 Chinese Bitcoin mining pool CEOs to get more than 51% of the network's hash rate [0]. Mining hasn't been decentralized since 2013 unless your definition of "decentralized" is just "not 1 entity" and so "2 entities" qualifies as decentralized... how is that useful?

[0] https://www.ccn.com/bitmains-mining-pools-now-control-nearly...

[neffy]

I would really beg to differ on that, based on the sheer number of ads I´ve seen over the years on reddit for people to write blogs praising bitcoin, to say nothing of the blatant pump and dump schemes you can find on the dark net.

At least some of the people who got in early, seem to know how to spend money on advertising.

[craigc]

Interesting, I would be curious to see some of these ads. Are you referring specifically to Bitcoin or other crypto currencies (many of which are flat out scams)?

That said, my point was that any “marketing” was not done by a dedicated team or company. It was done by individuals who got interested in the technology and wanted to share it with other people.

[rboyd]

Nah, it was just idiots that were marketing "let me show you how to get rich with bitcoin" courses, etc. I always wonder how much HN hates crypto just because it's important to have a good story for sleeping on crypto.

[craigc]

I do not really understand it. Posts about other technologies on here lead to civilized, intelligent conversations, but for whatever reason, any post about crypto or Bitcoin just leads to attacks and arguments.

The reason I find it more inexplicable is that when you think about just the idea of peer to peer programmable finances/money without requiring any trusted intermediary that is a huge idea. In my opinion, it is almost as revolutionary as the internet itself.

I guess we will see how things progress over the next 10-20 years.

[rspeer]

Why is it revolutionary? Who really cares that much about not requiring a trusted intermediary, besides anarchists? Our civilized world is built on trust.

It was a Bitcoin advocate who said "nothing is cheaper than proof of work", given the precondition that you don't trust anyone. Curiously, they saw that as an argument in favor of proof of work. Bitcoin detractors see that as an argument in favor of trusting someone, because proof of work is insanely expensive and an ecological disaster.

[craigc]

Based on your reply, I am fairly convinced you have already made up your mind so it is somewhat pointless to spend my time trying to convince you otherwise, but I will say a couple things.

For one, while our civilized world is built on trust and you may trust Banks, Governments, Tech companies etc, the majority of millennials do not trust Banks or Governments. Numbers outside the US are even lower. For more information about this I would recommend watching this presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGberGnxiJk

I believe money is something that you should be able to have full control and ownership of. Governments and banks can lock or seize accounts/funds for any reason. Banks can limit deposit/withdrawal/transfer amounts. I don’t think that right now this is a big problem, but in the future, imagine banks getting hacked and funds stolen or even a bank run. There are a lot of scenarios where I can see our financial system failing. If inflation rates increase then it will drive more people towards things like Gold and Bitcoin. Look at what has been going on in Venezuela.

As far as the electricity use, please consider taking a look at this article:

https://medium.com/@dergigi/bitcoins-energy-consumption-6dd7...

It also links to a couple of other sources that show how gold mining, paper currency/minting, and electricity used from the banking system all use orders of magnitude more electricity than Bitcoin mining does. If ultimately Bitcoin can replace banks or even gold, then it will have done the world a favor. Most miners also use renewable energy such as hydro and solar which would otherwise just go to waste.

Andreas Antonopoulos makes the argument that it will actually help the world come up with cheaper and more efficient power by allowing people to subsidize the costs by mining Bitcoin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0OUIW89II

[DonHopkins]

In the cast of Bitcoin, I think they should call it "proof of waste".

[pilmihilmipilmi]

It would be revolutionary to get rid of all anonymity. I think the term revolutionary applies to the cyber realm only.

[drdeca]

By "marketed as" people just mean "described as by people promoting it"? Or possibly "described as by people promoting it who have a financial incentive to do so".

This seems obvious to me? Saying "bitcoin isn't marketed because it isn't run by any particular company" in response to people saying it is "marketed" in certain ways seems like missing what was clearly meant to be communicated.

[dnomad]

This is not true.

Bitcoin was heavily marketed as a currency. It failed at this.

Bitcoin was heavily marketed as decentralized where no single entity owns 51% of the network. In fact Bitmain likely already does or soon will control 51% of the network [1].

The remarkable thing here is that despite these clear, observable failures... Bitcoin will go on. The true believers will continue to HODL and while shorts may pile on in the absence of fundamental economic data there's little reason to buy or sell. The price now is purely a popularity contest.

[1] https://bitcoinist.com/bitmain-51-percent-bitcoin-hashrate/

[craigc]

I think you are missing my point. If Bitcoin is “marketed” as anything, it is by people who got interested in the technology, learned about it, and started to spread the word to other people.

You could say the same thing about many open source software programs or apps.

What I was saying is that there is no company behind Bitcoin that represents it or speaks for it. When you say “Bitcoin was heavily marketed” you mean that people explained it that way to others.

[dnomad]

You might read the Bitcoin paper written by the inventor of Bitcoin. There is absolutely no doubt that Bitcoin was originally and has always been marketed as a currency. I can see why you might want to deny this but, please, it's insulting to try and rewrite history when the facts are widely known.

[craigc]

I have read it multiple times, in fact. I am not denying that it was originally intended as a peer to peer currency, but saying it was marketed as that when the creator was publishing an academic paper of sorts and releasing it for free into the world is a bit of a stretch. Marketing implies that there is a customer you are trying to sell a product or service to.

He or she did not care about getting rich since the original coins have never actually been touched. The creator did not even know that people would start to exchange existing currencies for Bitcoin at the time the paper was published or that it would catch on at all.

I am not trying to rewrite history. I was only stating that Bitcoin is not a company. There are no big corporations controlling it. There is no sales team. There is no marketing team. Anyone who promotes it is doing it out of their own free will.

[DonHopkins]

Let me point out that you're accusing other people of glossing over what you wrote, when they're actually saying they've already heard all the stock fallacious arguments and tired marketing slogans you're regurgitating, while you're glossing over what they are writing.

So let me repeat an important point that you just now glossed over yourself: Your attempt at rewriting well known history is insulting. Hacker News is not the proper audience for your Bitcoin marketing, not the proper venue to insult people's intelligence. Please stop insulting us by acting like it is.

YOU by your own free will and greed and behavior are an integral part of the decentralized marketing team whose existence you deny, and it's insulting that you keep repeating the same things while glossing over what other people keep telling you.

[joering2]

Correction: doing it out of greed, more than free will.