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Comment by pistle | Hacker News Reader

Because a not-insignificant-enough number of "smart" hacker news folks got very burned by a get rich quick scheme and they won't let it go.

Snake oil and charlatans? There's an app for that.

The cognitive dissonance is maddening. Something so esoteric and technical, which required great intelligence to even use, let alone build the cottage industry around... continues to make these intelligent young, white, libertarians look like simple con targets.

The shovel and panning sellers made loads (mining rigs and exchanges). Everyone else who hasn't exited is holding the bag.

If you lived through the dotcom bubble, this is a repeat in slowreck motion. People will lose 95-100% of their investments until the rest freak out and bolt.

Very smart, young, white guys built up expensive trading stations and lost their shirt daytrading on dotcoms. It's like buying a mining... nevermind - nobody's listening.

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This is an excessively cynical, misanthropic view of events. I know a lot of people who could be described as "long bitcoin" and while there's no doubt a few opportunistic types, most are genuinely excited and actively involved in something they truly believe in.

Your bitter prognostications about "young white libertarians" says more about you than anything else, IMO. And invoking the dot com bubble doesn't help your point - the internet was, indeed, the next big thing, but the bubble was misinformed and 10 years too early. Long term, though, "dot com" was and is real, and many are hoping and working towards cryptocurrencies travelling the same path.

Sometimes I still can't get my head around how something that isn't real is worth anything... Argh, I must be too old to understand now :) I was closely involved in a startup in the first bubble, I remember the hopes and dreams and hype and VCs throwing tons of money to invest into ludicrous stuff,and coffee machines so big and expensive... It looks all the same now, the rich want to get richer and call it "innovation" (I saw a prototype of something huge that was "invented in the 90's by some young fellows, unfortunately it was too early, way too early...and saw it again "invented" by someone else many years later and called "Facebook") and the young programmers (they're called hackers now I believe) were just happy to code and get their pat on the back, feeling special,with stock option promises (I was one of them, I must be an old hacker now :) ... So many smart people working super hard( although pizza and wine at midnight was cool)...

Do you feel special and useful guys? Or does it take $19B to be real special?

But still, HN kicks ass no matter what :)

You do realise that the current value of bitcoin is 5x what it was a year ago? "Burned" is not the correct word for that.

But that's not why bitcoin is important. bitcoin uses cryptography and peer to peer technologies in a very clever way to create the first internet transferrable, widely accepted currency where you don't need to trust someone else like a government or a bank. It's a true peer to peer currency.

And the mining difficulty is nearly 10000x what it was a year ago.

So you have to have maddening cognitive dissonance in order to be interested in something YOU are not interested. The arrogance and ignorance is strong in you.

Why are you sure that it is only the folks who got burned and not those who made money?

I enjoyed reading to the bitter end.

Have you seen the movie Dot-Con by Frontline?

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