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rloomba | 8 years ago

These are the types of comments I'm referring to, why all the hate and assuming proponents of blockchain are full of shit? Were people this skeptical in the late 90's when the internet was coming to fruition?

>Proponents can't distinguish different roles of money I'm pretty naive to this stuff, but you just listed a bunch of terms I easily googled in 2 minutes and now have a rudimentary understanding of. Sure there are tons of things to study in the field of finance, but I think the main idea is just a more decentralized setup and native "internet money".

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Someone|8 years ago

I think/guess he means that many vocal blockchain proponents are naive w.r.t. the 'decentralized' part, implying it would mean 'no government intervention'.

Gold is extremely decentralized. You can't know how much I own of it. Yet, governments started taxing it, so they had to track ownership (however crudely).

Paper money started out decentralized as bank notes (basically IOUs stating 'this piece of paper can be exchanged for G grams of gold at bank B'). Yet, governments started taxing it, so they had to track ownership, in the end making centralized institutions that govern how much paper money is made.

I don't see any reason why blockchain wouldn't go the same way (income in bitcoin already is taxed in quite a few countries, AFAIK; it just is hard to track)

Quite a few vocal proponents advocated the idea that bitcoin could solve (¿perceived or real?) social problems with technology. That's naive.

wu-ikkyu|8 years ago

Perhaps it is the anti-authoritarian ideological foundations of Bitcoin that triggers much of the animosity, as GP evidences:

>its proponents are full of shit, political and naive to the extreme and they are against government by default.

It is the "faith" or confidence that many people have in their government which gives psychological stability to their respective fiat currency, and Bitcoin threatens that faith

rloomba|8 years ago

>It is the "faith" or confidence that many people have in their government which gives psychological stability to their respective fiat currency, and Bitcoin threatens that faith

Appreciate that comment, I think a lot of this crypto does threaten the status quo, which makes people a bit uncomfortable.