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Comment by rockyleal | Hacker News Reader

Every single Bitcoin news thread here at Hacker News is hijacked by some for of another of negativity. Every single one, top comment is always negative. The day Paypal announced its first approaches to Bitcoin, the top comment was about how someone was resented with Bitpay for some unrelated reason.

Although especially noticeable with Bitcoin, it is in general a prominent flaw of HN, the top comment is always something negative. Maybe its because users here feel thay are smarter by trashing stuff and dont want to be caught liking the wrong stuff, so they upvote whatever negative comment is gaining momentum.

Parent in this case, by the way, is wrong. Blockchain.info is a remarkably well designed and implemented site, if not fully consistent with Bitcoin's spirit, pretty close to it.

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> Every single Bitcoin news thread here at Hacker News is hijacked by some for of another of negativity.

Pointing out the reality that investors have likely valued Bitcoin-related startups at a not insignificant percentage of the total value of Bitcoin in circulation, and that the combined valuations given to Bitcoin startups could conceivably exceed the total value of Bitcoin in circulation if Bitcoin's slide continues, is not in and of itself negative.

Obviously, you perceived it as negative because you logically considered the implications of this observation.

> Blockchain.info is a remarkably well designed and implemented site...

I did not comment on the Blockchain website design. I assume you're referring to my comment ("From a technical perspective, the current Bitcoin chart[4] doesn't look good..."). "Technical perspective" refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis.

Perhaps, where's there's smoke there's fire. Did it every occur to you that their might be something inherently wrong with Bitcoin given there is no transparency around who exactly created it and why?

> Did it every occur to you that their might be something inherently wrong with Bitcoin given there is no transparency around who exactly created it

That's not really relevant, is it? It's open-source code that does not depend on any central entity. Either it's useful or it isn't - there isn't anything hidden.

> and why?

We do have some hints as to why - Satoshi posted a fair amount in the Bitcoin Talk forums before disappearing, as well as some mailing lists. Here's a reason posted to a mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099...

Today, it's developed by a number of people who are all reasonably open as to why they're developing it.

It's like an unstoppable force in online discussion communities. They/we get old and grouchy.

I'm quite happy to trash Bitcoin because it's userbase is intolerable, the sooner it goes to zero the better. Their idiocy have caused genuine harm to people who are new to asset trading/speculation: people who bet on Bitcoin with their retirement, their kids college fund, etc.

Underscoring every positive Bitcoin related news is the implicit solicitation to `invest` in Bitcoin.

People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early adopters were idiots, a lot of the internet's early adopters were seedy criminals and pests too.

Bitcoin's community will evolve in the same way every online community does. It's found some early traction in the form of speculation which has encouraged people to buy and own Bitcoin. Now that a lot of people know what it is and own some, it's easier to test services built with BTC.

I have never seen the Bitcoin reddit community advise or even imply that people should put more than they can afford to lose in Bitcoin, no matter how much they believe in it. Outside the BTC-e trollbox, I really doubt anywhere has. These people who bet their retirement on Bitcoin are probably just as likely to lose it on anything else they might get excited about.

Personally, I find the userbase intolerable because it's logically inconsistent. The entire point of the properties of the currency is to drive decentralisation and the end of our dependency on the financial industry and its monopolies... and yet the community cheers every time there's a new bank, or centralised exchange, or processing network, any time a major company starts accepting bitcoin so they don't have to deal with the little shops, or any other proprietary, monopoly-forming system built on top of Bitcoin.

>community cheers every time there's a new bank, or centralised exchange, or processing network, etc

More exposure = more publicity = more people buying in. If there is one thing about the community is consistent about, it's about getting rich off Bitcoin.

> If there is one thing about the community is consistent about, it's about getting rich off Bitcoin.

Recently there have been plenty of "I'm out" threats on /r/Bitcoin from people who bought lots of coins at $1000 and they can't take it anymore.

I think there are plenty of people who consistently lose money when they try to time any market, let alone the Bitcoin market.

I meant the goal of getting rich, whether it happens or not.

It may not seem that way from the outside, but there are tons of reasonable people among Bitcoin users. I would say there is a very vocal minority who despises anything that is remotely related to regulation, for example, but you shouldn't judge the technology on that alone.

There are some obvious exciting things that can be built with it, and if it would take off it has the potential to level the playing field for payments processors. That can only be good.

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