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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they keep laughing, then they start choking on their laughter, and then they go and catch their breath. Then they start laughing even more.

As Carl Sagan put it, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Columbus really belongs with Bozo and not Fulton and Wright. His plan was ridiculed because it was ridiculous for reasons which were had been clear since before the rise, much less fall, of Rome, could not reasonably have worked, and did not work.

He happened to stumble into something unrelated in the course of his crazy plan (which is the only reason anyone on the expedition survived), which lots of people who weren't him recognized as something new and valuable independently of the goal Columbus had both insanely set out and, even more insanely, insisted after the fact and to his death that he had succeeded in.

Ok but it's possible he had a Chinese map from an earlier expedition, and while he misinterpreted where he was going, he was pretty sure that he was going somewhere.

I'm sure this quote gets spread around a lot at the lower floors of ponzi/MLM schemes.

Or, in reality:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you lose.

What a meaningless platitude, I'm sure it's the sort of thing was repeated in the 1930s a lot.

This is the reason organizations exist to regulate things around trade, otherwise you can get shady exchanges quoting bogus prices with zero accountability. Lots of people are going to get scammed before this gets better.

> This is the reason organizations exist to regulate things around trade

It's worth noting that every industry suffers from fraud. In the insurance industry, it's estimated that 10% of expenditure is fraud-related. 5% of americans were victims of identity theft last year. Loads of people/businesses have been and will be scammed in well regulated industries, while having no indication that it will ever decrease. I don't really know enough about bitcoin to comment on how prevalent it is (I sincerely doubt most people do), but I do know it isn't special in that regard.

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