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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

If people don't see the point of BTC (etc) then they should just... not use it. I don't understand why people get so angry about it. To me, living my life, in my country, with my income etc, it has no use. If some Venezuelan or drug dealer needs it, good for them. Yet everyone seems to want to insist it's either "the future of money and you will all be on it in 5 years" or basically the devil and should be banned. Why?

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>I don't understand why people get so angry about it.

Because not everything is about you. Or me. People get angry because BTC has (or they view that it has) wider bad influence in society (for shady stuff it's often used for, for its energy use, for the way it's promoted as a pyramid scheme/cult with people who don't know better losing their savings doing BTC speculation, and so on), which don't stop being problems when someone personally doesn't use it.

In short: externalities

Novel concept for many still, it appears.

> I don't understand why people get so angry about it.

Because it won't stop at my front door in case it goes bust. Like any mass mania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest

I agree with you. Here is my guess.

Part of it is invested interests. These parties want it to succeed so they profit and many have show themselves to be bad actors. The other part is it got partially entangled with the US culture war, which bleeds into other countries, so support or rejection of cryptocurrencies shows which side you are on (it's not 100% true but I think there are trends).

or some people object to the amount of energy expended on it, which contributes to worsening climate change, from which they derive no benefit.

That would be fine if they also objected to computer games or reddit or TV for the same reason. But wasting energy is only an issue when it's crypto?! That is where I get confused.

Equally I don't actually think Crypto will cure cancer any time soon...

>That would be fine if they also objected to computer games or reddit or TV for the same reason

Many do. But those don't even come close to BTC for the benefit/energy waste ratio...

A lot of people lost a lot of money to scammers because of Bitcoin.

It's secondary (to scamming) use case appears to be enabling criminal behavior. While personally I am grateful to be able to buy weed over the internets I am cognizant of the harm it causes.

Plus the environmental issues.

There's lots of reasons to dislike Bitcoin. And pretty objectively the harm thus far outweighs the benefits.

Pfff. The environment!!! Do you know just how much power a modern datacenter consumes?

Also, if we start dictating what acceptable and what's not acceptable, where do we stop? U okay with me banning something you use?

> I don't understand why people get so angry about it.

I wouldn’t say I’m “punching people” angry, more like I’m “shaking my head in disgust and regret” angry.

I would like to use a digital currency with micro transactions that is decentralized and censorship resistant. But speculators are ruining bitcoin, and others, making it not useful for these purposes.

And I’ve been waiting almost 15 years for it to die down and be useful as a currency. So I’m frustrated that idiots are stopping me from having a nice thing.

This is one of the few situations where stopping the bad people from “just let people enjoy things” is the only way to make it actually useful.

> I would like to use a digital currency with micro transactions that is decentralized and censorship resistant...

You just described Nano.

People get angry about it because they subconsciously hate that they didn't get in on the gravy train. Their points for hate aren't wrong, but the degree is irrational and due to that regret.

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