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by kdragon 1863 days ago
I feel like the HN community, who are more tech literate, should have a better understanding of Bitcoin and crypto. I don't like all the ignorant comments that focus purely on the financials. Is cryptocurrency space not full of technological marvel?

Bitcoin has always been an application for demonstrating the engineering achievements behind it (solving byzantine faults, fungibility of data), so we can build even greater tools like smart contracts, programmable money, trust-less p2p networks, etc so many things. I think labeling bitcoin as a scam is a huge insult to those engineers involved. Engineers like Hal Finney who dedicated his life trying to make a brighter future for everyone, I don't think it is fair to call his and others work an elaborate ponzi scheme.

The bitcoin space has so much history, a lot of battles have been fought on bitcointalk, over mailing lists and pull requests, etc. I feel that as developers we should focus less on financial markets and more technical discussion. Bitcoin has a lot of new things to talk about with the Taproot activation, like schnorr signatures and private lightning transactions. I'd like to see those discussions more on HN but that's just my opinion.

1 comments

> Bitcoin has always been an application for demonstrating the engineering achievements behind it (solving byzantine faults, fungibility of data), so we can build even greater tools like smart contracts, programmable money, trust-less p2p networks, etc so many things.

If you were to categorize all discussions about BTC between live humans into two buckets: discussions about the price of BTC and discussions about applications build on the bitcoin blockchain, which one do you think would win? I'd wager that >99% of all discussions are about the price. Yet the price is completely irrelevant to the applications built on the blockchain. They work just as well if the price of BTC is 1/10,000th the current price.

So it becomes very hard for people to buy the claim that actually this is all about technology and not about getting rich.

I don't think it's fair to base a topic on the loudest voices in the room. That is a road to madness.

I still wish to see more interest in technical discussion of Bitcoin here. Like the new BIP proposal expanding the scripting capability of the protocol. I don't know what percentage of BTC discussions on HN are in either bucket, but I hope at the very least it would be 50/50. Don't you agree?