
Ask HN: Why is HN uninterested in Bitcoin? - savelastdance
Hardly any posts about bitcoin get upvoted. Is bitcoin not interesting anymore?
======
lsiebert
I think that most discussions of bitcoin aren't technical/development in
nature, or startup oriented and bitcoin is pretty stable, tech wise. I think
an innovative startup using bitcoin could get up on the front page for a
while. But stories like how bitcoin is being taxed were up for a while,
because that was a significant change for US people.

------
TimSchumann
I think HN has actually had a fair amount of interest in the bitty coin. Heck,
Coinbase is a YC company.

If people here seem disinterested, I believe it stems from a simple but subtle
misunderstanding. The mindset of HN is something along the lines of 'Advances
in science, technology, and our collective knowledge as a species are worthy
endeavors that should be pursued regardless of personal gain'. Call it an
'open source' mindset. Bitcoin is making people money, a lot of whom are the
same people posting about it on HN. For some, that's enough to ignore the
technological advances and discount the whole thing.

In short...

Technology that monetizes via incorporation, series rounds, and a big fat
valuation tacked on the end is socially acceptable.

Technology that monetizes itself is not.

------
mcv
There was tons of Bitcoin stuff a year ago, but the bitcoin hype is pretty
much over now.

------
Avalaxy
I still see Bitcoin articles almost daily on Hacker News so I don't see the
problem.

~~~
Privatoria
I also see post about btc. There is no problem on HN:)

------
atmosx
I believe interesting BTC news, hits HN front-page rather often and from my
experience most readers/users are fairly familiar with BTC and understand the
technical side (protocol) very well.

Most HNers, being programmers, don't understand the socio-economic aspects of
BTC but that's because they don't understand currencies (generally speaking)
or the reason of existence of some institutions (e.g. the FED isn't a scheme
of the rich for domination of the world's population, which bitcoin will
finally set free, to use a free currency, with no fees, hurray!!!).

~~~
jamesbrewer
Being logicians by necessity, I'd argue that most developers could debate the
socio-economic implications of bitcoin or any other currency better than you
would expect.

In fact, it is my experience that most good engineers can accurately debate
many concepts with which they are unfamiliar.

~~~
atmosx
Not, what I've seen here in previous BTC discussions. But that's just my
opinion, I might very well be wrong.

------
wellboy
There just hasn't been much happening in the past 9 months with Bitcoin, it
will probably take some time until the price will start to rise/fall
significantly.

~~~
Avalaxy
Excuse me? In the past 9 months we've seen:

\- Mt Gox, one of the biggest Bitcoin exchanges, closing it's doors, running
away with around $500M of their client's money

\- Dell, overstock, tigerdirect, paypal, braintree, balanced payments, newegg,
and others started taking bitcoin

\- We've had the Bitlicense proposal, we've had the canadian senate hearing

\- We've seen the introduction of side-chains

\- VC investments in Bitcoin companies are at more than $300M. The amount of
money flowing into Bitcoin companies is almost as big as the amount of money
flowing into all the internet companies in total back in the days

\- We've seen the launch of professional companies like Circle, Coinbase and
Blockchain had some big announcements of their own

\- The FBI coins have been sold by the government to a single buyer

I could go on and on. We've seen MASSIVE amounts of huge Bitcoin news in 2014,
whether you'd like to see it or not. You could not be more wrong stating that
"not much has happened" during the past 9 months.

------
arisAlexis
I suppose you are new here, last year there was a post titled: "today is the
first day without a bitcoin article on the first page".

------
bernardlunn
I note interest on subjects such as Ethereum, Counterparty, Sidechains ie
where something new is going on.

