The #1 reason other people IRL give me for not wanting Bitcoin is that they think it's money for gamblers and a pyramid scheme to benefit the wealthy.
Which it arguably is.
Discussion
Oddly enough, people I knew though it was a "scam" about 6 years ago. Something they didn't understand and felt was "ruining" peoples lives. Those same people were curious a few years prior (when I started mining in 2013) and are now interested again in the form of ETFs. They have no interested in the coin other than to diversify their investment portfolio with another "stock". They don't understand currencies.
It's a currency designed to disproportionally benefit those already wealthy, connected, and financially/technically savvy. That is simply the reality of it. Most other people still don't even understand what it even is or have even heard of it.
It is like all other currencies, in that way. First come, first serve.
There is the idea that it will eventually spread around, but since the people "closest" to the mining are using strong fiat currencies, they just amass more and more and more...
but that leaves out the important point that it's extremely hard to change it's issuance schedule, or that its ledger is the most impervious to manipulation by even the biggest players
everything that is new has a "first come first served" property about it, whether that actually leads to wealth or not, to talk trash on it for this feature is quite envy driven
Why would that be envy, when I benefit from it? And I could be much wealthier than I am, you know. I clearly do not love money.
Envy is not the answer to every criticism, as if it were the Number 42.
I think the situation is fundamentally unfair, is all, and I think anyone sacrificing effort and/or money to further Nostr is doing a good work by helping to right this wrong. The haters be damned.
if you think that someone should do something else with their wealth than what they are doing, that is envy
ignore those idiots, they are just wasting your time
bemoaning the bias of material reality towards the debased is pointless stating of the obvious
i think that envy is not just "wanting what other people have" but "wanting them to want the same things as you, including giving you things"
it is where you are preoccupied with other people's business and acting as though any failure you have can be put on someone else's judgement and not a flaw in your thinking
I was perfectly happy to ignore them and avoid them, but they feel the need to lecture me and I am absolutely sick of it.
But whatever. This only became such a long thread because the criticism until now has only ever been on those using Bitcoin as a currency, so everyone is shocked when someone turns the question around.
Try Monero then. It's reputation as crypto cash is second to none.
I would rather simply deal with the new dynamic in a healthy manner.
So you can’t spend it with them. That was one of my points.
I’m not massively interested in spending bitcoin today (though I occasionally do), but I’m glad people are building out payment infrastructure because we’ll need it when the other party is *asking to be paid in bitcoin*, not the other way round.
In the meantime, it’s perfectly fun for us to obtain wealth by holding a scarce digital asset that will rise massively in value over the next decade *and* be altruistic in ways other than trying to spend it everywhere today.