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Comment by _zllx | Hacker News Reader

I felt like I was in crazy town, trying to tell people that crypto is actually something that helps many people, always getting shot down with absurd dogma like "crypto has no use cases" or "gordon goner racist NFTs". People believed everything they heard from a blog (you know the one) set up specifically to discredit this entire class of technology by associating every dumb thing with its image as a whole. I've been Bitcoin-literate since I was a pre-teen (I'm early 20s now) and felt trapped. Bitcoin maximalists made me hopeful that at least Bitcoin specifically would be socially acceptable, but honestly they've got it wrong too. I was very delighted today to see Scott stick up for the concrete use cases that are out there. Vitalik Buterin seems fairly respected in the same space as ACX.

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It's the curse of influencers and it's not specific to crypto. Influencers identify a vibe that works with their followers and lean into it, exploiting it for views and shares. Most of the time the vibe is only tangentially related to a much more complicated reality. But complicated reality is boring and vibes are fun, so influencers convince their followers that the vibe is true and the followers become galvanized along the vibe.

I've seen so many people quote a Youtuber as their source for a belief that it's crazy. Even when the primary sources are available. But that's the age we live in.

Realistically I think you're right; I probably have my conspiracy cap on too tight, but it's too perfect to me that the group of people who will soon need crypto the most are being socially incentivized to reject it now. I might have struck a nerve with the anti-crypto vibe enjoyers.

> the group of people who will soon need crypto the most

And who might that be?

People who oppose fascism; then again, they plan to dismantle the Internet too, and I hope we start talking about meshnets as a counter to that.

Yes, there's a lot of propaganda pushing this narrative with the ultimate objetive of completely prohibiting any sort of alternative currency:

- Conflating crypto with exchanges, or Bitcoin in particular with oportunistic scams.

- The complete nonsense about PoW being 'detrimental to the environment'. It's sad that even technical audiences fall for this at all.

- Speculating on its price has nothing to do with the use case, which is to transfer money without an intermediary. You certainly can, but it has nothing to do with the objective so any criticism about this is disingenous.

Bitcoin (and some others such as Ethereum or Monero) just work, and and has worked extremely well for over a decade. I was able to pay for hosting and plenty other services anonymously, to circumvent local restrictions when nothing else worked, transfer money to family abroad, etcetera.

And yes HN is extremely vulnerable to propaganda due to a mixture of lack of common sense, lack of life experience and snobbery.

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