[codehalo]

I don't know what "discourse" you are talking about. I've been reading about crypto on hacker news before bitcoin hit one dollar. Other than r/buttcoin and yahoo groups, this site has been one of the most anti crypto places you can visit, to the point of being an absolute embarrassment.

It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time.

Still love the place though, but I learned never to let comments be the source of the things I need to investigate.

[bostonsre]

Could it be that a tech savvy community like hn largely understands the implications of, the actual utility of and can see through the hype of crypto currency? I would put my money on hn understanding crypto currency over any other community. It should probably be a red flag to true believers that hn is generally suspicious of it.

[j0hnyl]

Imo, it's the opposite. I just think HN's anti-crypto sentiment just hows how "normie" this community is.

[JeremyNT]

I can't understand this sentiment at all. I feel like HN was absolutely part of the hype cycle.

It wasn't as bad as some forums, since some skeptical voices were present too, but there absolutely was a ton of breathless hype over the years.

Here's just one example, when stripe added bitcoin support [0]

I personally feel like HN sentiment finally "turned" on crypto only after some of the more egregious scams started going really mainstream - in the months leading up to and during the pandemic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9075945

[sillyfluke]

I distinctly remember the opposite to be the case -- that there was a positive eariy adopter hype cycle on this site for crypto in the early years.

I went back a decade and randomly clicked on a discussion and found most of the comments constructive and matter of fact. Perhaps I got lucky, but it lines up with my memory of the period.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322752

[BLKNSLVR]

Human nature is a funny thing, and the kind of intelligence that attracts someone to the quality of discussion on HN doesn't appear to exclude them from some of the baser, competitively animalistic instincts still present down there in the basement of human DNA.

Personally, I think I can reason through a great number of things. But I still get depressed, angry, jealous, happy, enthused, etc. in ways that reason has to catch up to, before the instinctive emotion makes itself public - and sometimes reason does not or cannot catch up.

(Generally the positive ones I leave to run wild, but sometimes they need to be suppressed too).

Almost on the actual topic, I think cryptocurrency has proven it's use case in the global transfer of value without a centralised third party. And that, in itself, is pretty amazing. All the rest is the application of this technology having to work itself out.

The whole argument about criminal activity or porn or whatever is just proof of the use-case. The internet itself was accused of just being a conduit for porn not really that long ago.

Because it's related to "value (transfer)" means it should have been considered inevitable that it would attract, well, the kinds of people it has obviously and very publicly attracted. And that nicely ties off the loop of human nature...

[shermanyo]

I'm convinced if the internet was created today, most of HN would be faxing each other, decrying it as a scammers wasteland and useless technology..

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, if we had the previous Internet to go on.

It's a sobering moment when you realize that a lot of tech is actually net negative to you - not the least because it outsourced to you the work that previously was done, much more efficiently, by specialized labor.