[randrews]

This is hard to write.

In 2015 I joined a local club for electronics hobbyists. It was great, we met every other week, had show-and-tell presentations of the things we were learning and building, I made a lot of friends and learned a whole lot. But, in 2020, it started getting taken over by crypto bros: where before we'd have presentations about a new IoT platform or how to generate some signal, now we'd have presentations about yet another bitcoin-trading thing, usually not even run by people who were regulars in the group.

At each one of these, I and a couple others did try to explain, politely, that crypto wasn't what was being claimed (overnight guaranteed millions!) and that these people didn't seem to understand basic things about economics (bitcoin is not a "store of value"). And we got laughed out of the room for it.

After a few times of that I just stopped going to the club, and I wasn't the only one because the whole thing disbanded a couple weeks after that.

So, when you say that the crypto people lied about this and people got suckered in, well, no sympathy. Because you're ignoring all of us who tried to point out the lies and caught shit for it.

Maybe you all shouldn't have invested more than you could afford to lose.

[majormajor]

It's asymmetrical.

You can feel smug and vindicated for being treated unfairly in the past, I won't take that away from you, it sucks that it happens.

But the amount of airtime paid for by people saying "be careful" or even a nuanced "I like bitcoin long-term but be careful with some of these risky new schemes" was basically zero compared to the amount of resources relatively rich people spent trying to convince suckers to make them even richer by buying into their bullshit.

I say, don't blame the victim without trying to fix that as well. Why do we shrug when millions are spent to try to outright lie?

[randrews]

I'm not shrugging. I think you shouldn't be allowed to do fraudulent ads for investments, and that the loophole of "it's not USD so it's not a real, regulated investment" is wrong. I would like to see most of that industry thrown in prison.

But I have zero sympathy for the people who dumped their life savings into something that sounded too good to be true, and were jerks toward anyone telling them about the risks / misunderstandings. I know someone in his 60s who put his life savings into it, and (until I explained it) didn't know that bitcoins were mined. Did not know where they came from, just understood that the line was going up. (I do have some sympathy for him because he wasn't a jerk about the whole thing, but, the others... nah).

[boffinism]

Right, but now imagine you weren't one of the people who had someone knowledgeable and sceptical pointing out the flaws. Imagine all you ever came across was crypto bros and people who believed, repeated and amplified their bullshit. Imagine the received wisdom all around you, from your family, peers, role models, was: this is the thing to do.

Yeah, a bunch of people ignored you and ostracised you. But not everyone. Not most people. Most people never even got the chance to ignore you.

[randrews]

I have a hard time believing that anyone actually falls in that category. No living grandparents who remember the great depression? No memories of 2008? And even if they were in a total vacuum, why wouldn't it occur to them, as it did me, to ask "what makes the line go up?"

If people put X USD into buying Bitcoin, and then can sell that Bitcoin for Y USD, and Y is greater than X, then the extra money has to come from somewhere. Where? Without knowing that answer, even before I knew the first thing about blockchain or crypto, I was unwilling to buy any.

I don't care who in your life was lying to you or pressuring you to invest, anyone who got suckered in without asking that basic question should have done more due diligence.

[throwaway5959]

“Have fun staying poor” has really come back to bite them eh?

[ArrayBoundCheck]

> And we got laughed out of the room for it

I get this every time I talk to programmers about a concept that isn't completely obvious. And some that are completely obvious

[bagacrap]

if only the cryptobros had shown up in 2015!

[yucky]

>bitcoin is not a "store of value"

Agreed on much of what you wrote, but this isn't accurate. Anything is a store of value if people say it is. Baseball cards, art, books etc. all fall under the same definition.

[randrews]

A store of value allows you to get the value back out: if I spend a bunch of money and effort mining iron ore, or growing wheat, or building a house, I have the ore or wheat or house which has intrinsic value. Maybe now I don't need to grow as much wheat next year.

Bitcoins take value to create, and creating it consumes that energy / compute, but all you get out of it is a receipt that proves you spent the resources. You can't use the bitcoin for anything; you can only sell it to someone else who thinks it's a store of value.

[yucky]

I think you may be conflating commodities (and real estate) with the concept of "store of value". Those can be stores of value as well, of course. But using your explanation, doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc., yet we accept they can be a store of value.

And with most stores of value, there is no guarantee you will get out more or equal to what you put in.

[randrews]

> doesn't it also take resources to create baseball cards, art, books etc.

Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.

I would argue that those things are also not in any way a store of value: the only thing you can do with them is sell them to someone else. If no one else wants them, they're worthless. By your logic a big pile of beanie babies is a store of value, since someone spent a lot of money in the 90s to get them, and they took cloth and plastic pellets to make.

The way I've usually heard it explained is that doing some sort of productive work (growing wheat, clearing land, mining things, whatever) can store the value of that work because you create something useful with it. The resources it took to grow the wheat are stored in the wheat, and can be retrieved by not having to grow wheat next year.

My point, whether we agree on the terminology or not, is that Bitcoins are not anything useful: they take massive amounts of resources to create, just like farming or mining, but all you get out is a proof-of-work receipt that says "yes, he lit that pile of money on fire to create this."

[yucky]

>Baseball cards are generally valued more than an equivalent-size rectangle of cardstock. Books are priced higher than a ream of paper; saying the value of a piece of art comes from its frame is usually an insult.

Not necessarily. There is more use for blank card stock than card stock damaged by some obscure overprinted card from the 1990's. You can't use it for anything, it's been "consumed" with the design. Same goes for shitty overprinted books or "art". An artist will pay for blank canvas, but not a painting my niece did of dogs playing poker.

So it goes back to the idea that a store of value is anything people agree stores value.

[randrews]

I think we're arguing over terminology. But "it takes resources to create" is not the same thing as "it stores those resources." That's the whole misconception with Bitcoin. It takes a lot of resources to make one and that value is lost forever, instead of being used on something productive.