[vinniejames]

A good number of these negative arguments appear to have a similar line of thinking. "I don't know much about Bitcoin, or finance in general, but I can adamantly tell you Bitcoin has no benefit, something something money laundering"

[wpietri]

Oh? If you're so confident Bitcoin has demonstrated utility for other categories, It should be pretty easy for you to demonstrate it. The original goal was peer-to-peer electronic cash: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Real cash usage is gradually declining, but approximately zero of that difference has been taken up by Bitcoin: https://www.frbsf.org/cash/publications/fed-notes/2018/novem...

Merchant adoption is not just stagnating, it's in reverse: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-12/bitcoin-a...

If you contrast this with the speedy rise of M-Pesa, it's obviously a failure as digital cash. It's also a failure as compared with things like Venmo, which are all popular with people doing cash-like things: https://money.com/venmo-cash-app-zelle-better/

So if it's not good for the stated purpose, what's it now good for? No speculation about the future please. Just name a specific, significant group of users, state their problem, explain how Bitcoin solves it better than alternatives (better on their terms, not yours), and link to statistics showing sustained, rising adoption.

[hnews_account_1]

As a finance professional, I can tell you without shame that much of my industry doesn't understand finance either. The mask of online anonymity simply emboldens people with no knowledge to come forth and spout. I keep moving platforms trying to get away from that shit. Reddit is horrible in this regard, so I only use it for memes. HN has full credibility professionals in programming, but its finance base is really not upto snuff.

[vinniejames]

Does a hacker newsish platform exist for the finance world?

[hnews_account_1]

I'm yet to find it. For a meme-ish sub /r/wallstreetbets is pretty good. Go there and have a laugh. But places like /r/economics and /r/finance are utter shit.

The best resource is financial twitter (fintwit). The news breaks there, the discussion happens there, and loads of meme-ing also takes place (which is always a nice to-have in a serious place). The only drawback is that most of them lean exactly the way I do. So I can bear the place, but I miss out on a bunch of opposing opinions and it's always a challenge finding someone on the opposite side of the fence.

[NotASithLord]

Have a short list of worthy follows to start breaking into it?

[hnews_account_1]

Yes. Start with our lord and savious @zerohedge and go from there. He has a bunch of twitter accounts in his follow list. If zerohedge follows someone, they're generally either important to the news, or they're tweeting about the market every day. You can cull his list and find the gems pretty easily. From there, the list will grow as your interest in the markets grows. Twitter is pretty good about exposing you to the people followed by the people you follow. Easy to expand the network.

[imcoconut]

the forum section of wallstreetoasis is actually pretty good as sort of hn for finance. not as much good content/discussion as here but still enough.