Lunncal said:
As an aside, why exactly do people hate Bitcoins so much? A possible collapse would waste the money of lots of perfectly innocent people and it wouldn't help anyone as far as I can tell either. Wishing for it just seems petty, and kind of cruel. Is there some reasoning I'm not understanding here, besides "Argh! This is different so I hate it!"?
Lately, I've been getting my hate on about shitty business practices, the act of the short-sighted who want huge and glorious amounts of cash at the expense of too much of the economy, which must be somewhat served for future business and commerce. This is the way business is suppose to work. You make a profit and you put in a little to 'seed' things and get business rolling for many happy returns.
Well, the whole thing about this is that Bitcoin trying to be real money when it was obviously not seemed to me like a way of taking advantage of people, to indeed by screwing with their real money and passing onto them the equivalent of...Pogs, Monopoly money, and so on. It looked more than different. It looked criminal. The drug-dealing and money-laundering allegations didn't help. The theory that it was a form of money marketing scheme (Pyramid and Ponzi were thrown about) didn't either. The ease by which things were hacked and the fact that it was unregulated made it far worse than real money too.
But I suppose the biggest issue here is that people are so gullible. Why DIDN'T anyone view this as a bad knock-off of stocks and bonds? Why DIDN'T they see it was more likely to fritter away their cash faster than a Las Vegas gambling chip? It seemed perfectly obvious to me that something that's barely manageable by the people in charge of it - not even a government or reputable credit source - should not be handled by the general public when its their cashflow on the line.
Some days, I can take how badly people screw up with a shrug, but - as you say - this one's fairly-serious. Yes, alot of people are going to suffer. That's not a wish. That's inevitable. If it could be avoided and everyone refunded when this goes down properly, that would be nice. But chances are, you can expect certain people in charge of handling the real money to get stubborn as hell, fight like hell in court, and cause more trouble than there is already. The lesser evil here is that you stop it before it causes more damage. The stock market has crashed before, causing a great deal of financial damage. D'you want to have to worry about this one too?
