
Ask HN: Why is HN so aggressively anti-Bitcoin? - crypticlizard
Two articles on the front page right now, both littered with negative comments. Google invested in Chainlink recently, is HN anti Chainlink&#x2F;Blockchain? In other words, are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a positive opinion of?
======
JoshTriplett
I don't think HN is anti-blockchain. HN is anti-hype. Bitcoin and blockchain
are not the solutions for every problem; HN can sometimes respect the hustle
of "say blockchain so that you get more VC money", but that _doesn 't_ mean HN
won't criticize the actual technology if it's "X but with Blockchain!!". And
HN can go either way on "technical solutions for social/legal problems", so
it's at least _controversial_ to suggest that a blockchain will solve a
social/legal problem without doing anything but writing code.

~~~
panarky
_> HN is anti-hype_

This is part of it, but that's faulty reasoning. Just because there's a lot of
hype and fraud surrounding the technology and network does not mean that the
technology and network is hype or fraud.

Another factor is that we're very talented at finding all the reasons
something new won't work, and not so good at understanding how something
flawed can still be useful.

Exhibit A is the infamous Dropbox comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

But fundamentally, most of us, like most people generally, fail to understand
what money is. We use it every day, so we all think we understand it. Money
seems tangible and valuable, but it's all just a very powerful social
construct that's backed by nothing more than collective belief and utility.

The mind rebels at such a flimsy foundation, so many of the criticisms aimed
at cryptocurrency are equally valid when aimed at dollars or yen.

Maybe we're doomed to an Eternal September of repeating the same arguments in
an endless loop for decades more. Please, let's hear the story of Dutch tulips
again, or how dollars are actually backed by taxes or the military or buying
cups of coffee.

If we listened to the nattering nabobs of negativism, we'd never invent
anything truly novel.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I never suggested that Bitcoin or Blockchain were entirely hype. I'm
suggesting that many _uses_ of them, and many _articles_ about them, are, and
HN treats them accordingly. I'm talking about the 23rd article on "let's do
medical records but On The Blockchain, which will solve every problem with
medical records". I'm talking about people who seriously suggest that Bitcoin
will make existing currency and governments obsolete. I'm talking about
comments that decry the slightest criticism or moderation as "the nattering
nabobs of negativism".

------
vorpalhex
All blockchains have fundamental problems including the majority problem[1].
They don't really solve any problems, because all blockchain problems are just
restating other problems with the words "but on the blockchain" added.
Tracking your fruit to make sure it's fresh by making trucks have sensors that
post to the blockchain? Yeah, you're just shifting the burden of trust from
whoever fills out the paperwork to whoever made and installed the sensor - you
haven't done anything.

It's a buzzword that's used blindly in the hopes of attracting capital [2]
that has no real meaning. Out of a dozen blockchain related job offers I was
approached with, not a SINGLE founder could answer simple questions about how
to assure verification or prevent blockchain manipulation.

Blockchain is up there with fad diets, crazy health claims for boring foods,
and nonsense cancer treatments. Does it have a potential role? Sure, it'd
probably be kind of a cute feature in a game.

[1]
[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp)
[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/bringing-blockchain-to-the-
coff...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/bringing-blockchain-to-the-coffee-
cup-1523797205)

------
codegeek
Can't speak for others but my thoughts are:

1\. It has become more of a speculative instrument than an actual currency.
People are more concerned about making money buying/selling/holding BTC.
Defeats the original purpose of a "decentralized currency"

2\. Not sure that decentralized currency is a good thing. Some things need to
be regulated unfortunately. Yes, we all hate the central banks etc but I would
trust a regular currency anyday over BTC. Not to mention that you are at the
mercy of these "wallets" or even worse "centralized wallets" like coinbase etc
which again defeats the purpose in my opinion.

3\. It wastes electricity. A lot of it just to mine. Why do we need to mine it
again ? Oh it is because there is only so much of it ? Is that a good thing ?
I don't know.

4\. Most importantly: adoption. My mother has no idea what BTC is and will
ever know. It is far too away from being a currency that can be used by
regular people. Perhaps that day will come but not yet.

5\. Too many scams due to the gold rush of BTC. Again, that is a bad thing.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about BTC but still have these thoughts about
it.

------
carapace
I can't speak for all of HN...

My $0.02: it wastes electricity to solve a non-problem.

~~~
burkaman
Same for me, but "wastes" is an understatement.

> From 1 January 2016 to 30 June 2018, we estimate that mining Bitcoin,
> Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero consumed an average of 17, 7, 7 and 14 MJ to
> generate one US$, respectively. Comparatively, conventional mining of
> aluminium, copper, gold, platinum and rare earth oxides consumed 122, 4, 5,
> 7 and 9 MJ to generate one US$, respectively, indicating that (with the
> exception of aluminium) cryptomining consumed more energy than mineral
> mining to produce an equivalent market value.

> During this period, we estimate mining for all 4 cryptocurrencies was
> responsible for 3–15 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7)

------
slang800
I obviously can't speak for all of HN, but I'm annoyed by the number of
projects that include blockchain technology for no good reason.

~~~
grumpy-cowboy
HDD (Hype Driven Development). Like projects using Microservices, Serverless,
NoSQL, CQRS, Hadoop, [add your preferred hype here]... technologies for no
good reason.

------
bdcravens
HN in general hates hype. The technology behind Bitcoin is interesting; "to
the moon!" isn't. Blockchains have a few use cases when they are better than a
database, but not billions of dollars in VC worth. That money is the result of
FOMO, not innovation.

------
code_chimp
I personally like Hyperledger Fabric
([https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric](https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric))
for a private blockchain technology.

That being said I still have not found the problem that it is the solution for
other than addressing our CTO's case of FOMO.

~~~
verdverm
It works well when you are trying to get several companies to
interoperability. The hype gets them moving, I don't really care that they
aren't using the best tech. What matters is that the supply chain is becoming
more efficient and trustable. (even if the def of trust is not the "holy
Grail" public/permissionless claims to have found.)

Honestly, trust the companies that obey the laws more than those trying to
create a lawless society

------
smt88
My take is that it's several things:

\- Lots of crypto links posted to HN are scams or have no technical merit

\- No one has come up[1] with a use case for blockchain that actually requires
blockchain, outside of cryptocurrency (which is something non-technical people
and speculators don't understand or won't admit)

\- Because of rampant scams and speculation, a lot of online blockchain/crypto
conversations have a high noise-to-signal ratio

1\. [https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-
with-...](https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-
case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100)

~~~
andirk
Vehicle history. Health care history. Or any type of history storage, really.
The fact the data is everywhere means it cant be easily destroyed, and doesnt
have only one gatekeeper.

~~~
smt88
How does blockchain help? Why do I want "consensus" (let alone distributed
consensus) on any of those histories?

It's easy to create data that can't easily be destroyed. Back it up. You don't
need a cryptographic, anonymous data mutation algorithm to do that. Just copy
it to more places.

And as far as not having one gatekeeper... none of those things have one
gatekeeper anyway. Who is lamenting that there's a single gatekeeper for their
health history? If anything, people are lamenting the opposite -- that it's
such a mess where multiple people have to cobble it together from disparate
records formats.

To paraphrase something once said about JavaScript: the useful aspects of
blockchain aren't new, and the new aspects aren't useful. Immutable (aka
append-only), distributed, encrypted databases are useful! They are not
blockchains, though.

~~~
andirk
The point is that you dont have to go to a source owned by someone. For
example, the DMV has your driving record. Blockchain allows the history of a
vehicle to be stored and accessed easily. Mechanics all have their own
records. Why not tie them directly to the object?

------
mstaoru
Many on HN had experiences with investment, or are themselves, investors. We
need to see either enormous traction (beyond speculation) or solving of an
actual customer problem. So far not a single "X but with Blockchain" startup
did not deliver anything of true value.

Personal anecdote: a friend of mine was working on a project to utilize
extremely counterfeit-resistant holographic tags to authenticate organic
produce in China (where anything can be faked). 2-3 years and he still didn't
have any significant customers. Enter Blockchain. They replaced the tag with a
QR code, "blockchain cannot be faked" mantra, and within 6 months got $4
million investment and some customers. So when you scan the QR code, it opens
a web page that shows some fancy data like id, date of packaging, etc. Who
provides this data? The company. Who provides the web page? The company. Who
can alter this data in any way they want? The company. And now the punchline:
there is no blockchain in the code. Zero.

------
conception
For me personally, I think it's the fact that Bitcoin and especially other
cryptos, are far far less secure than people think from attacks. The amount of
money you need to move the market or execute at 51% attack
([https://www.crypto51.app/](https://www.crypto51.app/)) especially if you are
working with other large investors is trivial. For a group that loves
independence from "big banks" and "Fiat" and the democratization of money,
they seem to miss out that they are constantly being manipulated by rich coin
holders.

~~~
verdverm
Go to coinmarketcap and you'll see the daily pump & dumps. Blockchain claims
all this moral superiority, and then you look at what the majority have done
on the space. Feel bad for those trying to do something meaningful...

Look at how the concentration of wealth is more skewed in cryptos than IRL.

------
RandomBacon
> are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a positive
> opinion of?

Other than Bitcoin, three other coins that are sometimes talked about here are
Ethereum, Monero, Zcash.

Ethereum was the first ICO. Many other tokens operate on its blockchain.

Monero is an open source project with lots of development and progress (third
behind Bitcoin and Ethereum). Its transactions are private.

Zcash is open source but mainly developed by a for-profit company and uses
interesting mathematics. Its transactions are public, with the option of being
private.

Disclaimer: I'm only "invested" in one of the three coins I mentioned.

------
thefounder
I believe many people are against using crypto currencies as an investment
opportunity instead of a technology solution.

The primary property of a good currency is stability. The crypto currencies
are exactly the opposite.

I like smart contracts but I don't think public/permission-less blockchains
are feasible/very useful in the real world. Engaging in a tech and electricity
spending race doesn't look like a good way to verify transactions and protect
the blockchain against attacks.

------
PaulHoule
Personally I like Ripple.

I like permissioned blockchains.

Why is it that blockchains weren't invented sooner? I'll contend that you'd be
laughed out of any distributed systems conference if you suggested any
protocol where the workload capacity doesn't increase when you add nodes.

If you have ten traders who trade under a buttonwood tree, then having ten
copies of the database makes the system bulletproof. If you have ten million
traders, there is no additional gain, but there is a huge cost because you
have ten million copies of the database.

Blockchains attract people who know nothing about money or technology the same
way that pot startups attract stoners. It's just a bad scene.

~~~
foobarchu
There's the additional issue that blockchains are almost always the wrong tool
for the job. It turns out that immutability is not really a desirable property
in a system where humans are involved, because humans always introduce
mistakes that need to eventually be undoable.

------
tracker1
As a currency, there's maybe some merit in given scenarios. But all of the "me
too, I have $CURRENCY$, it's different this time" doesn't lead to a lot of
faith.

It's over-hyped in general. Beyond that, often implemented in was suggested
that don't really add much value compared to any number of other less
complicated solutions.

If you are in a situation, where you have competing parties not aligned who
want to ensure a given transaction is applied, and don't mind the
implementation of that transaction being completely public, then blockchain
might be the right solution.

If you are wanting to use cryptocurrency for financial transactions, then
there is some merit, but in many cases suggested it's effectively a
corporatist overload control over currency (such as Facebook's currency
suggestion). If it's actual bitcoin or a handful of other alt-coins, at least
it's decentralized but not as anonymous as many think. It's also, in general
difficult to use without some centralization.

In the end, someone will win in this game. My guess is the banks behind the
winner (MasterCard and Visa are backing FB's Libre venture). Given the actions
against people with unpopular views (even if they are wrong thinking
assholes), it terrifies me. Freedom to exchange property, and currency is a
stand in for property, is a big deal and at least as big a deal as speech.

------
brycehamrick
Reading through the criticisms my main takeaway is that (1) there's a severe
lack of empathy for the segment of the world that doesn't have the luxury of a
stable currency and developed financial infrastructure, and (2) there's some
extreme misconceptions about both the technology and the economics behind
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If your main point of opposition is that
there's too much "hype" you're being contrarian for the sake of being
contrarian.

------
verdverm
Hyperledger can be useful, more in the non-tech sense, but then the
cryptokiddies get all irate, lol, part of the fun.

HN tends to shun Blockchain because it has a non trivial amount of fraud and
amature hour to it... IMHO. Too much focus on the marginally useful tech, and
not enough on the outcomes (i.e. CO2 from mining) and solving real problems.
Too much neolib. Forgetting no one really wants their finances made public to
the world.

------
peteforde
I remain intrigued by Stellar Lumens and the protocol behind it. Ripple gets
the attention but my perception is that Stellar's tech is a superior fork.

------
yongjik
HN usually has lots of negative comments - some of them are even constructive
negative comments. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I come here to read these
intelligent criticism.

Besides, I don't think it's particularly more negative on cryptocurrencies -
go to any other internet forum (that are not specialized in cryptocurrencies)
and I think you'll find a similar mixture of opinions.

Finally, "Google also invested in X" isn't a very good counter-argument here.
Have you seen some HN comments when Google is being discussed?

------
jki275
Chainlink is a scam. Other than that, there's a ton of hype and BS in the
cryptocurrency world, lots of Ponzi schemes and fraud.

That's where a lot of negative opinion comes from.

------
rhapsodyv
A comment off topic of a fashion that police have found in my country, they
have discovered gangs are mining bitcoin with theft of electric power. Almost
a real gold mine

------
Urgo
Coinbase was a YC S12 company for what its worth.

~~~
verdverm
They now track your wallet history and paths, apparently banning you from the
platform if you do something against their rules, even if way off their
platform.

They work with data tracking companies, think Palantir for cryptos

------
dawhizkid
I think it's the same reasons behind the infamous "Show HN" Dropbox post -
technical people have a tendency to be too focused on pointing out technical
flaws and miss the bigger picture.

Or it's psychological and many feel better believing that is a scam because
they missed the run up despite likely being knowledgeable about bitcoin years
ago and decided to ignore it.

~~~
tastroder
I'm still waiting for somebody to come up with that bigger picture after 10
years, all we've gotten instead is a bunch of Ponzi schemes and marketing.
It's a shame so many minds were and are wasted on a solution that's not
solving a problem it didn't invent (or somebody just falsely attributes to
it).

~~~
dawhizkid
Why don't you think there are serious problems with how central banks around
the world control money? Inflation steals from everyday people to varying
degrees around the world...look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela. We're all beholden
to secret monetary policy decisions made a small handful of people, sometimes
just one.

The bigger picture, in my mind, is that in the future you should be allowed to
choose your citizenship, which may be something like a digital country, and
decide for yourself what sort of government you want to live in.
Cryptocurrency enables that future more so than anything else that currently
exists.

~~~
pintxo
Interestingly money (or control thereof) is not named as one of the
fundamental properties of a state [1]. So maybe having an independent currency
won't help you much, as long as the state you currently live in holds the
monopoly on legitimate use of force (for an example see [2]).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_\(polity\))
The most commonly used definition is Max Weber's, which describes the state as
a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that
maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain
territory. General categories of state institutions include administrative
bureaucracies, legal systems, and military or religious organizations.

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border)

------
agentultra
> In other words, are there any blockchains that HN (generally speaking) has a
> positive opinion of?

I can't speak for all of HN but I seriously doubt there was ever a need for
the technology to begin with.

I've read numerous investigative articles on Bitcoin, in particular, that
document the environmental impact and harm it does to workers who live in
remote data centers. The situation is poor. And few, if any, bitcoin
enthusiasts see these as problems. From what I understand the consensus among
bitcoin enthusiasts is that we'll technology our way out of this and somehow
we'll live in their techno-libertarian-utopia once they figure these things
out.

Frankly I don't share their ideology.

------
mabbo
Because bitcoin is solving a problem that isn't a real problem by introducing
a dozen more problems the existing system has solved.

Bitcoin decentralizes currency and leaves no one entity in control. Hurrah,
the government can't stop you from moving money as you see fit. Except that
most of the time, the government is stopping people from doing things that
were made illegal for _very good reasons_. Money laundering of proceeds of
crime, terrorist financing, tax evasion. You can debate all day about whether
taxes are inherently evil, but right now the law says they are legal and
you've gotta pay them. Saying "No worries man, I've got a NEW currency that
the government can't stop" doesn't make it not a crime.

All the while, it's not actually free. We're burning huge amounts of energy to
do mining, and the costs have to be passed on to someone. Miners get free BTC
for mining, but that's a closed system- someone eventually must pay real
currency for that energy being used. And it's getting expensive given the
number of miners. (Plus, a lot of them are China which is using coal as it's
primary energy source, which is killing people from pollution!)

And finally, there's no inflation/deflation controls. A currency's utility is
increased by it's stability. Not knowing if my BTC will double in price or
drop by half in the next 2 weeks means every day is a gamble. If this were my
only currency, I'd be terrified about buying groceries.

Oh, and let's not forget that the huge spike in BTC prices in the last few
years were found likely to have been caused by manipulation.

I love crypto and think bitcoin/blockchains are a really neat technology. But
I just wish they weren't here, in the real world, because they seem to be a
net-loss for the world, and a Ponzi scheme.

Edit after getting a coffee: ... okay, that was a bit of a rant...

~~~
aeternus
Very valid criticisms, but they do not apply in all cases.

In terms of reducing governmental control, sure this isn't much of a problem
if your government is altruistic. Governments do not have a great long-term
track record here. In Venezuela for example, many would say Bitcoin is solving
a very real problem. You're right about its ability to be used for illegal
activities, however the same could be said for most technology: encryption,
the internet.

In terms of energy, this can be a criticism of almost all currencies and
stores of value. This real-world expenditure is much of what gives it value,
especially early on. Gold is valuable because of the difficulty in
mining/acquiring it. Even national currencies are valuable due to the
resources committed by their military, or the military's of that nation's
allies. People might argue it is GDP, but GDP does not mean much if you cannot
defend it.

Manipulation and price swings are a valid concern, but no other currency is
immune to those either. Silver for example has had very widespread
manipulation in the past. Silver and gold have probably still been a net-
positive.

~~~
rishirishi
"Untrustworthy governments manipulating currencies" appears to be the problem
that decentralized digital currencies are supposedly solving. Instead of this
indirection, how about addressing the root problem? Replacing that
untrustworthy government with a trustworthy one, changing incentives, or
identifying new forms of government/control.

~~~
verdverm
We are likely (hopefully) near an inflection point for our current rule
systems and their ability to manage today's complexities.

See: Rules for a Flat World

------
duxup
To many people bitcoin (and similar crypto currency) more than adequately
demonstrates why the protections provided by governments and etc for financal
orgnizations, transactions exist / are needed.

As for blockchain I think we've seen a number of "solutions" to problems that
are adequately solved by a database.

------
KaiserPro
Why? because its not the golden saviour.

Firstly its a panopticon, not anonymous

Secondly, it has a transaction rate of <10 a second Globally.

Thirdly, its chowing down huge amounts of power for no real gain

Fourthly, its snake oil. Its value comes from its mystique. As a store of
wealth its horrifically expensive, as a trading currency, its too slow, you
might as well buy gold.

Yes, its has a neat idea behind it, but blockchains are inherently niche. They
have very few applications outside exceptionally high value, low transaction,
zero trust systems.

Etherium and its smart contracts are inherently flawed, because they are not
smart, or contracts. Unless your "contract" has a binary outcome, that is
faultlessly measurable, then they aren't for you. The entire point of a
contract is that there is a third party capable of issuing binding
resolutions, using all available evidence. Etherium gives you none of that,
despite the hype.

The only thing that might be worthy of a blockchain is something like the
changelog of wikipedia, but then its not worth the spectacular cost. Just keep
a couple of mirrors.

------
cipherpro
In general people are critical of ideas that are new. HN has an especially
critical user-base with technical skills, so attacks can be made on a larger
surface area.

~~~
smt88
1) Blockchain is not "new". It's 10 years old. We went through the hype cycle
for it. The thousands of software engineers and mathematicians on HN have had
time to assess.

2) HN is for more accepting and enthusiastic about new ideas than the general
population.

~~~
majewsky
> Blockchain is not "new". It's 10 years old.

More like 40 years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree)

The only thing that's new about blockchain is that on top of being a Merkle
tree, it wastes a ton of energy.

------
lostmsu
Bitcoin, for being the original.

Ethereum, for providing smart contracts, that enabled many ICOs.

Monero/ZCash for being private.

All other currencies are mostly just clones of the 3 (meaning they can suffer
from 50%+1 attacks), or remove the main feature: trustless transactions.

In general, unless a currency provides a novel consensus algorithm, that
brings something new to the table, it would actually be better off as a token
on one of the above. If it is not, likely it is a scam/money grab.

All other projects do not really need blockchain, with a rare exception.

Disclosure: I own ETH and BTC.

~~~
jki275
There are _many_ cryptocurrencies that are not clones of those three. Monero
and ZCash aren't even related to each other. Cardano is not a clone. Tezos is
not a clone. Stellar is not a clone. Qtum is not a clone. NEO is not a clone.
I could go on all day with cryptocurrencies that are not clones of any of the
three you mentioned.

ETH enabled a vast amount of scammers and BS artists. Monero isn't actually
private, it's been broken. Bitcoin is the original, but even it has changed
many times over the years.

~~~
lostmsu
I am still very skeptical of PoS. To my knowledge, no PoS system provided an
adequate proof of correctness as of today.

Stellar is not trustless.

> ETH enabled a vast amount of scammers and BS artists.

I believe this is not relevant to a technical discussion.

You are probably right about Monero's limits in comparison to ZCash. But, TBH,
I am not following their development, because I prefer lack of anonymity.

~~~
jki275
I didn't say anything about POS, but if you want to discuss it IOHK has done a
significant amount of academic work in the field, which has been deployed with
Cardano. Tezos is in operation now and has been for over a year doing
delegated POS, and they're at the same level of academic rigor as the IOHK
team.

My comment about ETH is an explanation of why it causes people to be anti-
cryptocurrency. Its only actual working purpose is to enable scams. That's
certainly relevant in a technical discussion. BTW, ETH didn't do smart
contracts first. They were in bitcoin back at the very beginning, then were
removed as a security problem. ETH proved Satoshi right, they've showed the
world exactly how not to implement smart contracts.

~~~
lostmsu
The academic part would be interesting. The time of operation matters less, as
if there is a fundamental flaw, it would go in flames over night. Anecdotally
that point was demonstrated by a 50%+1 attack on one of PoW clones, which
worked fine until someone actually bothered to make it happen.

I still don't think your comment on ETH and scams is either objective, or
relevant to a technical discussion.

As for smart contracts - Turing completeness is a substantial difference from
the development point of view. The idea of gas seems to be novel. The fact,
that people made mistakes in the contracts themselves only shows their
incompetence in developing serious contracts. It has nothing to do with the
platform.

~~~
jki275
ETH has _objectively_ enabled the entire scam ICO market. right, wrong,
indifferent, purposeful or not -- that's its entire usefulness, its entire
value, and the entire usefulness of "smart contracts" at the moment.

Smart contracts in general have not been well thought through or implemented
correctly. It has a lot to do with the platform if the platform enables it.
Gas is nothing new, it's just a transaction fee.

Turing completeness in smart contracts is a bug, not a feature -- which is why
it was taken out of bitcoin in 2010.

------
jamroom
I think a lot of HN users like to think of themselves as early adopters of new
technology and are disappointed for missing out on the crypto highs at the end
of 2017. I think they feel if they could have been in the loop at that time
they could have cashed out. Thus crypto discussions are going to have a lot of
negativity in the comments since the best way to make yourself feel better
about it is to pretend it was a scam all along and you really didn't miss out.
My 2 cents of course :)

~~~
conductr
Or if your like me, you bought at $10 held until $20000 and decided was time
to sell. That’s when I found out the wallet file format was no longer readable
by the bitcoin client. So my coins are in cryptopurgatory. Maybe someday I’ll
hire a dude to come help me. But he will probably steal my coins instead.

~~~
jki275
Just extract the keys. Your wallet is nothing more than a vehicle to hold the
keys. If nothing else, just download an old version of electrum or the bitcoin
client and export your keys that way. That's trivially easy, you don't need
anyone to help you do it.

