Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering if anyone has followed the last few threads containing discussions about BTC and commentary in general with regards to BTC on ZeroHedge?  What do you think about the outright rejection of the entire concept and function as well as ridicule of it by the majority of posters.  Granted we know it's far from perfect or being a monetary panacea but I cannot understand this type of reaction and some of the paranoid assumptions made.  Some of these people seem to imply that Bitcoin is the only market/currency/"investment class" with risk and is reckless to use for any purpose.  An essentially free market finally comes along in otherwise controlled and manipulated global markets and ZeroHedge comment sections taunt it and beat it like a red-headed stepchild?

I find it fascinating personally but hope that others here can comment.  Thanks.

You have to keep in mind that the crowd browsing Zerohedge is mostly older (<40 years old), mostly white, and mostly american. The combination of these three things makes them not entirely open to new ideas. I say this as a person who usually enjoys reading the articles and commentary posted at Zerohedge.

That describes me.

The problem with the folks at ZH is the same problem all "practical" businessmen will have with Bitcoin, no matter where they live. It's an unproven medium and it goes against hundreds of generations of conditioning about storing value. Bitcoin causes serious cognitive dissonance for people heavily vested in the old economy.

Give them time. When they figure out Bitcoin, they'll come running and will drive the price up.

the cool thing about bitcoin is that there is no need to get into arguments about its legitimacy. Time will tell who was wiser. And if bitcoin fails due to outside forces trying to kill it (such as government) I still wouldn't consider those who support it unwise... just possibly "too optimistic". If bitcoin is "too powerful for it's own good"... that's not really the fault of bitcoin.

90% of the contempt towards bitcoin come from the precious metal stackers on zerohedge.

This. Mass adoption will came with internet kids playing video games and doing online trades. To them, bitcoin will be real and better money than gold.

Their heads are too far up their asses to care about stuff like that :P  Gold's worked since it was blasted out of a sun and into Earth, so why use anything else?  My iRock can't make calls, either, but I can still chuck it at a guy's head--they'll get my message :)  Nah but really, they're dinosaurs wearing blinders.  They got their formula--no thinking required.

One self-assured genius went so far as to suggest jugs of Tide were a better form of "currency" than BTC.  Some of the comments are outright laughable.  Some of these doomers and skipping records are convinced they're going to be standing over their gold and food preps with semi-auto rifles, trading cigarettes and pieces of silver for more ammo and food on a black market, fighting the "government" stormtroopers when their imminent fantasy Mad Max collapse happens any day now.  Maybe they will be proven to be correct, who's to know?  However, some of the shit people are saying is downright absurd.  It really is laughable and sad concurrently and is representative of how far the quality of the comments sections have degenerated for a place that was full of intelligence and open minds not too long ago.  

That's utterly ridiculous.  Everyone knows we're going to be trading bottle caps by the time that happens.

My theory is that there are a few things going on that combined cause that kind of a response.

1) as mentioned most people went through an education that taught them what to think and not how to think so they lack critical thinking skills and instead reason through emotions and religious beliefs

2) as mentioned most people have vested interested in some other system, whether it be the current status quo or even precious metals, Bitcoin can be perceived to threaten either

3) combined, instead of approaching this subject rationally with logic and empirical evidence, the beliefs that most of those people have come to believe when faced with something so new so foreign and so almost unbelievably intelligent causes them cognitive dissonance and as a consequence they react extremely forcefully and defensively


From my experience there's nothing that can be done against this. Well nothing except to ignore them. Eventually it will be the results of Bitcoin and it's necessity that will drive them to overcame this cognitive dissonance and change their beliefs and start supporting this technology. But until then those kind of almost religious rejections and attacks is all we're going to get.

The zerohedge articles are well worth reading but unfortunately the comments aren't.

Even the gold and silver bugs have left: there is a great site http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/ (http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/) that was basically set up by one guy after getting tired of the zerohedge nonsense. Gets tens of thousands of hits.  

Exactly. Like many gold-bugs, they have a nasty mental block on "tangibility". I recall some interview with James Turk where he just couldn't get beyond it.....but you could tell that the rest of his mind was pushing him towards accepting bitcoin. Just that one insurmountable mental wall. I think that wall is generally bigger for the over 40yrs-old crowd....simply not able to readily accept digital things like the subsequent generation.

It takes time.

I was involved there for a while during the blogspot days and then the start of the new site.  The TFMR following and the mentality of quite a few followers is bordering on a cult and is worse than ZeroHedge in this regard.   Many of the sharpest minds have left that place also during periods of piss poor moderation and censorship by the idiots once assigned (Stephanie anyone) and Turd's own "moderation" on many occasions.  

I still read Turd's stuff but let's face it, he's been wrong a large percentage of the time for well over a year.  He bases much of his personal analysis on a manipulated CoT structure and dynamics of futures trading.   All that being said I think he does a good job in trying his best and has started to post great interviews with very knowledgeable and connected people in the metals space like Andy McGuire, Jim Willie and Jim Sinclair.

Hey, me too.

Looks like that site has a following of 'doomsday preppers', spilled over from various peak oil forums. They are basically a religious cult and one of their dogmas is that all technology invented after 1800 is BAD and must be avoided.   Arguing with these people is as pointless as arguing with a concrete wall.

this
When i think of my overall bitcoin experience i realise how poeple that i would have considered smart totally failed to embrace this  novative concept.
They get stuck on illogic reasoning keeping asking what is backing bitcoin for instance. Totally failing to understand that as a new system bitcoin have to start at some point and that it will never have 5000 years of faith like gold have... that doesn't mean bitcoin is a scam.
This apply both to young and old people.


I feel also quite pretentious thinking it so i just shut my mouth and enjoy my bitcoins.

I never meant to imply that people matching that description are bad. Just that people matching that description are generally mistrustful of computers in general, to say nothing of bitcoin.

Me three but that's no excuse for being an ignorant doomtard with the cognitive elasticity of a slab of granite.  Man as individuals and as a species has never accomplished anything of lasting value through pessimism and resistance to inevitable change.

Is it hard explaining Bitcoin to some of your peers also? : )

No worries, bud. No offense taken. There's a reason for the saying, "There's no fool like an old fool."

Aw man, why ya wanna diss granite like that? : )

I'm in my 50's. My late grandfather once told me a story about his father, who had a chance to buy AT&T stock around 1900, near the beginning of the company. My great-grandfather's response to the offer was, "who the hell wants to talk into a wire?".  ZH is full of my great-grandfathers.

Nah, but I don't really try very hard unless I'm talking to someone who is expressing a sincere interest.  Basically, I just make sure that those around me are aware that I'm involved with bitcoin and find it very interesting, and just leave it at that.  If they want information on bitcoin I let them come to me to get it instead of trying to push that knowledge on them.  Those who are sincerely interested will push for answers and keep asking questions.  They can usually keep up with my explanations when they come looking for information.  Those who aren't sincerely interested are content to hear "it's a new decentralized digital currency. There are currency exchanges online that can be used to exchange USD for bitcoin, and it can be used to make purchases" if they ask "what's bitcoin". They say something along the lines of "Oh. Ok", and drop the subject.

The poster was probably alluding to an article like this one: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/03/14/pilfered-tide-detergent-new-drug-currency

Authorities say a bottle of Tide detergent is relatively easy to steal, hard to track, and can fetch anywhere between $5 to $10 on the black market. Normal retail prices range from $10 to $20.

also "vested interest".

Here also.

I happen to also to be a Socialist, a precious metal stacker, and a tech industry engineer (when I feel like it.)  Somehow I always manage to be an outsider it seems.  I like it that way.  Whether in a fox/grapes sort of way I'm not sure :)

Yeah the podcasts are the best part of that site.

ZeroHedge is indeed a very good and informative website, you can learn a lot of finanical jargons there that is not present anywhere else, just the general audiance and zerohedge authors somehow have very bias mentality that even though their "prediction" is almost always on the wrong side, they do not even care, they have their own version of reality and make it very strong by the the plethora of information they provide.
I found it maybe impossible to change their mentality, so get used to it and still enjoy the website.

Has he expressed any opinon about bitcoin ? What about people in the comments ?

I sent him a mail months ago asking for a way to donate bitcoin, never got an answer. Pretty much stop reading because of his track record.

The odd person has mentioned it recently in the comments but haven't seen anyone so much as entertain the subject to any extent.  Turd doesn't talk about it.  It's basically ignored there from what I've seen.

Tyler Durden is really warming to Bitcoin now...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-10/demographics-bitcoin

And even his hard-case commenters seem to be reducing their flak level.

LOL. The comments at this point are classic!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-10/demographics-bitcoin#comment-3317614

The world is slowly learning.

Peter Schiff inc = Tyler Durden - ZH inc?

The negativity seems to stem from an inner conflict struggling with issues surrounding the foreign concept of monetary freedom.

It is like you open the cage door on a chimp that has been locked up for decades, basically they go nuts ... they look at the door and their eyes tell them it is open but their brain cannot comprehend it because it has never seen the cage door open. Soon the will poke their noses out of the cage (buy a saotshi or two), run around a little and them run back inside the cage (USD) ...  observing it makes for great lolz, the big, bold freedom campaigners confronting a possible freedom they never really believed in, just like to talk about.

Made my day! Thank you for this!
Fuckin' chimps... ::)

ZeroHedge isn't averse to freedom.  They've just been scammed a few too many times.

I JUST CANNOT WAIT UNTIL ALL THE STOCK SAVVY ZEROHEDGE INVESTORS GET INTO BITCOIN AND HOARD MASSIVE SUMS OF COIN IN THEIR DIGITAL WALLETS THIS WILL HELP THE PRICE DRAMATICALLY, BRING IT ON !!!!!

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Wallstreet-Bull-700x325.jpg

not to mention the wealth of banking investment knowledge they will bring, including how to roll out coin to the mainstream market, and convince consumers to take it up en masse because its not if bitcoin will make it big its how soon, and whoever does including the governments that act first will become the richest

http://aphs.worldnomads.com/safetyhub/12392/fireworks_malta.jpg

Bitcoin's biggest problem is that it is near perfect money and from our earliest ages we're taught that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The connection with anarcho-capitalism stereotype came from the support from Stefan Molyneux, the "anarcho-capitalist philosopher".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcchQs2YDZ0

I think the anti-BTC ZH posters are quietly stocking up BTC while dismissing it as a Ponzi or "nerd-coins".  Get in while the price is low...

While we're on the ZH topic,  is there some kind of private joke about losing PMs in a "boating accident"?  Seems like every article has that phrase in there somewhere.  Urban legend? 

I believe that phrase started out in the gun owner community, as in what someone would say if the federal government banned guns and started tracking down firearm owners based on purchase records.

"I don't have those guns any more. They all fell overboard in a tragic boating accident."