I think it's easy. Tech people like to think they're very smart, and yet most of them have missed bitcoin, being arrogant (though many of them heard about it and could have it since the beginning)

So it's more of an act of self-defense.

People who think they're smart then spend 5 minutes to think about a problem and then think they've got it all figured out.

And it's not just about Bitcoin, it happens again and again. It would be amusing, but I'm painfully aware that I fall into the trap myself from time to time.

Of course most people missed BTC. Just like most people missed ETH, AMD, META, NVDA... the list goes on. Hell, I'm sure there are a few boats leaving right now that you & I are in the process of missing. I don't know why crypto people think that everyone else obsesses about missing BTC in particular.

Googlers hate it. NIH! But there are some valid criticisms from people who really understand it.

What billion dollar industry did it create?

I think they’re looking at the total amount of money stored/flowing through crypto (or Bitcoin) by taking the strike price and multiplying it by all the coins on the blockchain. Of course that’s not a great measure of value but it is a measure.

So does any of that activity actually generate value for regular people or does it just redistribute wealth from investors and speculators

Care to embody the spirit of what HN tries to put forth by expanding on those points in a constructive, educational manner that may actually help us to better understand, or do you just want to flippantly say that everyone's stupid and you're the only person who gets it?

Well, my brother joined a fintech startup in Europe that started with blockchain but pivoted back to boring software building. That particular niche they're in is seeing all the blockchain startups failing because they're not actually solving the use-case. So sure, there's maybe been a lot of research value created in terms of ideas explored and protocols built, but it's not clear any of that actually has practical value outside of building more blockchains.

Merkle trees are probably the main cryptocurrency tech I've seen outside of cryptocurrency (& even then in limited use), and that's not even from cryptocurrency but a pretty old data structure concept from 1979. If you're familiar with R&D ideas generated by the blockchain researches that have been applied successfully outside of the blockchain, please enlighten me as I'm eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge and go down a reading rabbit hole.

Look, I'm not discounting out of hand that there's maybe been some research and market value created. What I tried to communicate is I'm not convinced it's been a net positive vs all the costs that came with it (investments lost, pollution, opportunity cost lost). That's why I said market value is a measure, but humans in general struggle to figure out holistic ways of computing value, especially when looking at it as a hypothetical opportunity cost vs what else we could be spending our time on.

If you're wondering why you got downvoted, I suspect it's because you wrote an emotional response attacking me and calling me ignorant without actually engaging in a thoughtful discussion.

The rugpull industry

When the world wide web was new, everyone could see that the idea of it was appealing, the skepticism came from the fact that people weren't at all certain that online commerce would be financially viable... and it wasn't! At the time of the dot com crash huge numbers of companies collapsed. Sure companies like Amazon seems to have been around since time immemorial but its just one of the ones that survived, it could just as easily have disappeared.

For crypto, the criticisms are well founded. Crypto generates enormous amounts of pollution, facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods and all manner of scams and for what? The shittiest database you could imagine.

> facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods

Some illegal goods should perhaps be legal. The cost in time and money of certain diagnoses and drug prescriptions is too high at the moment, and some of us can't put our lives on hold.

> They hand wave away the fact that it created a billion dollar scam industry

FTFY

It's a currency barely, it has value mostly, as long as people keep believing. But the only "industry" there is is Bitcoin exchanges, and we've seen time and time again how they're run by what kind of people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that too, there are so many code proposals and votes and pull requests happening which - if held to the same standard as the rest of the open source community here - would be interesting front page discussions on HN all the time

there are two things that could help fix that:

1. dang and the moderators should heavily flag "unsubstantial" comments on crypto-related posts. many HN users use any post about crypto assets to talk about an irrelevant philosophical view on the entire sector's existence, many of those users of course work for a democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerate and don't see the irony in their focus on "no utility, scams, money laundering" when there are other things going on but even then those users just want to move the goalpost about why those other things aren't useful instead of how it could be. those comments should all be flagged and users should be requested to talk about the article in question.

2. HN users interested in particular discussions can post them more, and ensure engagement occurs on those posts. For example, deep discussions about Taproot and the organizations building on that should have been here, and should be. Code based solutions should be born here and carried back to repositories and other forums. A network's "improvement proposal" should be discussed here, and the implementation details, or updates on network consensus. Libraries that developers use should be talked about here ad nauseam.

Do you have an example of what would be an interesting technical discussion for people not interested in tokens/coins/whatever?

example could be in the form of software libraries that allow people to connect to applications are an active area of development

ethers.js for EVM based platforms and you can find competitors for that here https://www.alchemy.com/alternatives/ethers-js

they all have deficiencies and there are active pull requests and things to improve in all of them

an additional part of the stack would be the node software itself, how do you run a client that connects to any particular blockchain. the node software is all pretty pathetic and there is often a project in a programming language of choice, as well as for each blockchain

additionally there are improvement proposals on each blockchain, and many times each DAO (projects on a blockchain). think about the blockchain networks as states and each improvement proposal is a referendum. while a DAO would be like any corporation or trust or non profit within that state, having its own community board altering things

you can propose an improvement proposal in any, or get involved in a certain one

You can find them by using the acronym, current bitcoin improvement proposals are called BIPs, ethereum’s EIP, solana SIP… at one project level you have Helium which is very active and uses HIP and so on

basically you have a bifurcation of the population here: there is a group of people that see something wrong with blockchains and dismiss it for that reason, while there is another group that see something wrong with blockchains and go to improve it. most of the confidence in blockchains comes from its ratification process and ability to change. one long necessary and outstanding change gets ratified and opens up a new market, a new sector for the crypto concept to touch, then irrational exuberance comes, then it fades, an additional ratification finishes, the same thing occurs from people too excited about it. Ultimately each advance adds to the resilience and more people find the development and proposals as a meaningful way to contribute.

Yeah but the WWW saw widespread adoption, like retail, social networking, ads, etc. The same cannot be said for crypto even 15 years later. Crypto is still a niche or mostly gambling.

Until I can buy groceries at the corner store with it, it's niche.

That isn't Bitcoin, that's still using bank accounts and legal tender.

Unless they use it to buy something, that’s just “investment”.