
Wired Deliberately Misleads on Bitcoin: Yellow Journalism? - sidko
http://btcgeek.com/wired-misleads-everyone-on-bitcoin/
======
anigbrowl
Oh no, someone is wrong on the internet. It must be a big conspiracy to bring
down Bitcoin by overstating the miniscule amount of money that's paid for
clickvertising, because there's no way a math error could creep into a fluff
article. Obviously the foes of Bitcoin will never rest until they have made us
associate it with homelessness. Or something.

This exemplifies what's wrong with the cult mentality surrounding Bitcoin;
what was probably a simple error is recast (absent evidence) as a deliberate
untruth, despite the fact that the story was basically positive reporting
about Bitcoin.

~~~
tikhonj
The article never talked about "a big conspiracy to bring down
Bitcoin"\--those are entirely _your_ words. Instead, the article talked about
a journalist compromising accuracy to gain more pageviews: much more
plausible.

If anything, _you 're_ the one twisting facts to discredit the BitCoin
community and trying to recast an article about somewhat shoddy journalism as
a cultish conspiracy theory.

The fact that the criticized article is pro-BitCoin just further shows how
unreasonable your claims are: the community is willing to critically examine
press that's _in_ its favor, not just anti-BitCoin articles.

~~~
Steko
"those are entirely your words"

Did he put them in quotes? Well then it's not much of a revelation that those
are his words.

 _I emailed her back, with clarification, at 7:21am, telling her that this was
wrong. Yes, she knew, for certain, that the facts in her story were wrong,
within an hour of it being published._

Isn't it good to know that email of random enthusiast on the internet = TRUTH.

~~~
sidko
Those are verifyable facts, no one needs to rely on me. The article was
modified to change the Bitcoin earnings from 0.0004 to 0.00004. The facts were
known by everyone, they weren't a secret and you certainly don't need to rely
on anyone's testimony for the same - you can do the math yourself as to what
40 micro Bitcoins evaluate to.

~~~
anigbrowl
But how is this misleading on Bitcoin, as you claimed in your headline? If I
say that a person earned $6 when they earned $0.60, does that mean I'm making
misleading statements about the US dollar? Of course not.

To the extent that the article was misleading (ie trivially) it was misleading
about the amount paid out for clicking on videos. The fact that payment was
made in BTC rather than USD is wholly incidental to that.

------
ChuckMcM
I take it that 'BitCoinTapper' is really just a way of collecting human click
entropy to feed into a click fraud engine?

~~~
Steko
It's sometimes said that bitcoin is mainly used for money laundering and drug
deals. How sad is it that bitcointapper click fraud might improve the median
use case?

