Hn hates crypto so much the top comment just has to compare Tom Brady to Tom cruise and u get all the upvotes. So much salt from a sad community. Can we just ban crypto discussions from hn so the circus can finally close?
Some evidence for this is that the environmental argument is easily dispatched with: Cryptocurrency is on the demand side and the climate change problem is on the supply side. We need to switch from fossil fuels to non-fossil fuels, which we need to do independent of whether or not cryptocurrency exists, and then people mining cryptocurrency powered by solar panels is not a real problem. Pass a carbon tax.
There are also cryptocurrencies that use proof of space (e.g. Chia) or proof of stake, which don't have the same energy footprint even on the demand side.
But people who say this are regularly downvoted here by people who presumably dislike cryptocurrency for other reasons and see the alleged environmental impact as a strong lever for getting undecided people against it.
It may be stupid and bad but the only reason we have strong feelings against it is because we missed out. You can convince yourself all you want but deep within we both know it's true.
I'm mad because there are people who lost their money, trusting that many "techies" know better than them, so they invested as well.
I had some bitcoins before it became a thing, I donated all of them to charity the moment I started suspecting it became (or always has been) a pyramid scheme (when it was like 10K each, yeah I'm a bit slow sometimes). I did once believe that it could be a gold replacement, but it wasn't becoming that too. Zero regrets.
"Oh I couldn't get into a scheme early enough which made many rich", may be what some feel, but there are also some who feel otherwise. If you are a bit smarter and/or technologically more savvy than the average person, there are many borderline legal ways to scam people. The faceless-victim aspect of bitcoin doesn't make it not a scam for me.
Also, I'm not judging you, I'm defending a position I believe in, which is important to me because there's not many things I actually believe.
I wonder if it is because I am used to dealing with the fragility of digital systems (not to unfairly discount their strengths either) -- so then paper money almost feels like a relief to hold in my hand and just slap on the counter and smell that fresh legal tender.
Basically it is a way to make people turn off their sanity checker "Oh yeah, I don't see the value, I guess I just don't understand, but I still want in on this opportunity!".
Facebook make billions on ads, you don't have to make people believe when you are making wads of cash. And even when Facebook was new the business model was proven to be valuable by Myspace and the many other similar sites making lots of money on ads.
So your post here just strengthens my argument, the fact that you don't see the difference between the two just proves that you have turned off your own sanity checker.
Edit: What we are seeing now is similar to the investment craze in IT before the dotcom bubble. No sanity there, people just invested without thinking. I'll believe in crypto when people starts to think before investing in it.