[wbobeirne]

The whataboutism you mentioned in your article was around the energy discussion, and I agree that's a really weak argument for Bitcoin's energy usage, especially when there are many other better arguments. But I don't think it's fair to apply that to what I said about USD. I'm not saying that because the USD is used for / the US government does bad things, that we should excuse both it and Bitcoin and that it's a wash. I'm saying that making a choice about what to put your value in based on who else uses it, or who works on it isn't the best way to judge the usefulness of it.

On the smartest engineer front, I'll grant you that it's an overused platitude, but I'd consider any engineer I know who's in the 80th percentile to be "one of the smartest engineers I know", which to be fair is going to be quite a few people. But my point there wasn't to give Bitcoin credit by association, but more to demonstrate that I have no doubt that those people are smart enough to land lucrative jobs at big tech companies. So if they're just in it for the money, why haven't they?

[pdimitar]

To answer your last, people working on something out of passion and/or belief in its future carries zero correlation about how exciting (or good) the thing is.

I've known my fair share of programmers that make me look like a blabbering cretin. I still don't think what they worked on was something special though.

So this line of argumentation IMO leads to nowhere [productive]. Sure there are extremely smart people working on BTC. But the same could be said in literally any area, right?