Ask HN: Why does HN not like Bitcoin?

3 points by rcconf 5 years ago | 7 comments

It's interesting that HN does not like Bitcoin, yet HN is one of the most technical places on the internet. 13 years ago I was working on MapleStory Emulators in C/C++ at the age of 16 and was extremely overconfident in my abilities. Around the same time Bitcoin came out and I brushed it off since I was too cool for Bitcoin. I could reverse engineer the encryption on MapleStory and make the server from scratch, so Bitcoin as money sounded stupid. Why would I download this? This overconfidence/dismissal probably stayed with more for 10 years

The reality was that Bitcoin was actually super cool just on a technical level, ignoring the economic utility. I should have spinned up a miner, played with it because of the technology. HN and my 16 year old self, was probably in the best position to play with technology that would probably have been the best financial decision of my entire life including this entire community.

To me, if anything, missing out on Bitcoin is a good example of how overconfidence, arrogance and dismal of new ideas in the technical space leads to missing out. What could we name this concept?

- Dismissal by Confidence

- Overconfidence Bias

- Arrogance because of Technical Ability

- Blindsided by Contrarian Rashness

The fact that Bitcoins market cap is 2.2T makes it one of the most successful open source projects in the history of humanity.

If anything, missing out on Bitcoin for me has nothing to do with Bitcoin, but a subtle reminder that being open, accepting and playful with ideas is important and who knows where that idea will take you.

What other ideas will HN dismiss and miss out on?

ev1 5 years ago |

From a technical perspective I haven't seen people dislike Bitcoin.

It's mostly around the godawful ecosystem of scammers, idiots, shills, and more likely than not if you see someone promoting it they're probably trying to scam or defraud you into doing something rather than an objective technical interest in it.

More often than not I've just seen it start as either affiliate link spam, undisclosed financial conflict of interest, some kind of editor-flame-war-equivalent of whether BCH/BTC/whatever is the true chawin, all sorts of petty bullshit like that instead of anything approaching discussing the technical merits of it.

Personally I wish I could use it a bit more but it's so heavily regulated these days it's an exercise in frustration. I don't want to give a dozen blood samples to an exchange that gets compromised every other day to buy/exchange $20 of BTC, even less so when "meet someone at starbucks localbitcoins" is also demanding equivalent amounts of KYC for $20. My actual-spend would be well under $50/m and I absolutely do not need or want idiotic levels of KYC for playing around with it, seeing if a small company accepts it, etc.

verdverm 5 years ago |

> The fact that Bitcoins market cap is 2.2T makes it one of the most successful open source projects in the history of humanity.

First off, your figure is wrong, that is the "market cap" for all cryptos, BTC is closer to 1T. These figures are even misleading considering how many coins are lost or locked up, and how inflated the market currently is.

Dave Chappelle has great quote to the effect that "when the focus is on money, you miss the bigger picture"

The relentless focus on money (or profits) is resented by HN and applies to more than bitcoin. HN talks about this same idea w.r.t. big tech. Money tends to corrupt.

The crypto ecosystem has some interesting technical pieces, some only needed because of the desire for a public and permissionless system. It remains to be seen if society actually wants this after the gold rush is over... but I don't find it overly interesting once you realize bitcoin is essentially git+raft with waste for financial incentives.

PaulHoule 5 years ago |

It was a good idea, in hindsight, to buy Bitcoin 10 years ago. Would buying bitcoin today be an equally good move 10 years from now?

We'll know in 10 years.

Some people have a concern that if the government prints too much money it will cause inflation. Circa 1980 we got 'globalization', 'Reaganism', 'Thatcherism' because people were sick and tired of inflation under the 'New Deal' regime. (e.g. in 1932 people saw deflation as a 'Raw Deal'.)

This will change (everything changes) but in this regime excess money flows into financial investments (stocks, bonds, ...) as opposed to physical investments (e.g. spend your $ to build housing, warehouses or internet infrastructure) and makes mischief like the 1999 internet bubble, 2008 financial crisis, crazy high housing prices in British Vancouver, crazy high Alpaca prices on the "stock" market.

Bitcoin attracts that kind of money and moves it around in a way that concentrates it and that is dangerous in that the world system already concentrates wealth and power dangerously.

Bitcoin competes with gold for those who don't trust government, there is something appealing about gold. Romans liked gold (people got paid a few pounds a year so we know gold was worth about the same then!), ancient Chinese liked gold, hobbits like gold, it will be sad if space colonists don't like gold.

People in India use gold as a store of value so the price of gold is anchored to some extent by what they (and maybe an equal number of people who think similarly elsewhere) think it is worth, being willing to liquidate it, etc. It promises stability not explosive future growth.

alpaca128 5 years ago |

Maybe because this whole blockchain/cryptocurrency area is probably the only topic that's even more overhyped than Machine Learning.

> Bitcoin was actually super cool just on a technical level

How so? It's a fundamentally flawed design where the whole system has to be inefficient to be safe from attacks(51%). And the underlying blockchain is praised as immutable storage, which also means it can be abused by malicious actors to upload questionable data that would be very hard to get rid of again(e.g. it's already being abused as FBI-safe decentralized control instance for botnets).

Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding something, but so far I don't get why I should be ecstatic about a currency that's rather unstable and is mostly famous for emptying the GPU market. It had nice ideas and good intentions, but I don't think it turned out to be a good solution for anything.

api 5 years ago |

I think the technology is interesting. I think someday we will be using some kind of digital currency every day, but major innovation needs to happen. Either we need an alternative to PoW (and PoS is problematic) or we need to have vastly more transaction volume to justify PoW expenses. If Bitcoin could handle a few hundred thousand transactions per second its PoW costs would seem less ridiculous.

One thing I dislike is the ecosystem. It's almost all scams, crackpot projects (unconscious scams?), and pump and dump get-rich-quick shit. There are some people who use it for legitimate commerce or black/grey market commerce (which at least is still commerce), but that's a tiny fraction of it. Most cryptocurrency use is "buy, shill so number go up, then sell."

That's why I tend to downvote crypto posts. If it's related to crypto then it's almost always a shill for a pump and dump. The only ones I upvote are ones with deep technical content that might be of interest beyond cryptocurrency, and that don't seem related to obvious pump and dumps.

The ecosystem is also full of toxic people. Lots of alt-right types, get-rich-quick idiots, and trolls, and I get the sense that serious organized crime has been involved for a while too. It's probably one of the few tech ecosystems where you have a small but nevertheless non-zero chance of being targeted by a mafia hit-man if you manage to get in the way of a big scam.

Lastly, I think the economics are questionable to say the least. Cryptocurrencies almost all implement pop-Austrian ultra-deflationary monetary policies that don't really work in a modern economy and that play a huge role in their attractiveness as gambling and pump and dump vehicles. This isn't a technical requirement though. You could implement other monetary models if they can be coded.

Edit: I get the sense from observing both traditional finance and cryptocurrency that it's really hard to get money to do anything useful at all. It's hard to create a financial system that isn't mostly scams and bubbles. The problem is human behavior as much as conscious crime. If you took the conscious criminals out of the equation you'd still get a ton of bubbles, pump and dumps, and similar nonsense because gambling creates a tighter dopamine loop than useful investment.

Traditional finance is probably like 50% bubbles, gambling, and scams, while cryptocurrency seems more like 99%. Getting to a financial system that's only like half bullshit requires constant vigilance and a byzantine system of regulation and oversight.

al2o3cr 5 years ago |

Shill harder, those bags aren't gonna pump themselves.

This kind of pseudo-religious "how can we reach the nonbelievers" bullshit is EXACTLY why people don't like Bitcoin.

ksaj 5 years ago |

The fact that it has nullified any advances made in solar electricity. The required complexity uses so much electricity it is an environmental disaster to come.