[UncleMeat]

> 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.

[kdragon]

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?