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681 points Anon84 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.198s | source
1. rkagerer ◴[] No.46221815[source]
I'm amazed by the degree of hate and bitterness around here the last few years toward Bitcoin and the like.

Regardless of anything else, it's money I can email. Without having to rely on almighty permission from whatever country or company controls the currency or platform (and all the corresponding bullshit that often entails, like user-hostile terms of service which nobody in their right mind would agree to if they actually read, overreaching indemnities, arbitrary limits, and in some places risks arising from which way the political winds happen to be blowing).

I've used it to buy real things (that aren't drugs or contraband) where it offered less friction than competing forms of payment, and still feel the magic of that.

Have the finance leeches clawed their fangs into it? Yes of course!

But they did the same thing to regular currency and stocks decades ago (eg. with tangled webs of Nth order derivatives eventually crashing entire economies). Does that mean you don't use cash or credit cards or stocks?

I share the tweeter's frustration with the accretion of scams and other illegal actors, but not their surprise. Technology can't fix human nature.

(Although personally I see regulation catching up - for better or worse - and over time I expect feature improvements will mitigate more of the toxicity, eg. baked-in decentralized dispute resolution mechanisms that are less costly than the traditional judicial system but fairer and more efficient than arbitration alternatives you see today).