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by bogs_carut 4465 days ago
That's lovely for you, but not terribly relevant to anything I've stated.

An appeal to personal experience does not constitute a refutation of the assertion that a technology cannot possess sensibilities. Nor does it provide evidence that the majority of the present Bitcoin community shares such beliefs -- asserting otherwise constitutes a fallacy of improper generalization.

It's quite possible that the views most frequently articulated on Bitcoin Talk, etc. are those of a vocal minority.

1 comments

Unless you have a statistical survey of the bitcoin community, all we have is the anecdotal evidence. And the anecdotal evidence, both from my personal experience, as well as _objective sampling of the celebrities of the community_ is that libertarianism is disproportionately represented compared to the populace in general.

And since the early adopters and pioneers of a community often mirror the philosophy of their founders, it is highly probable that the bitcoin community is overrepresented with libertarians.

That this seems surprising to you or you're so defensive over it seems strange. It seems pretty self evident. As if you found a community of gun owners producing crypto-guns, and were shocked to find they were NRA members too.

> Unless you have a statistical survey of the bitcoin community

I don't, and I don't think it's appropriate to make generalizations unless one has access to a sufficient body of empirical evidence. So I'm not making generalizations.

With that in mind, none of your opinions strike me as self-evident in an objective/empirical sense. Perhaps they're self-evident to you, but that doesn't make them the basis for sound argumentation.

It's unclear to me how I might have come across as defensive with respect to your comments; I merely don't find what you're saying to be convincing.