Quote from: Dabs on October 20, 2016, 03:59:23 PM

What arrogance? I don't see any.

He was just stating facts.

OP doesn't know what he's talking about. That's all.

I try to be a bit more tolerant in the "Beginners & Help" and "Bitcoin Discussion" sub-forums. Those are filled with newbies that just want to talk about bitcoin related stuff. I have no expectation that they have any particular level of knowledge about any technical details.

I'm much more critical of threads in the "Development & Technical Discussion" and "Technical Support" sub-forums. These sub-forums are intended for discussion at a technical level about how bitcoin works and realistic improvements. If someone wants to post in either of these sub-forums with questions trying to actually learn and understand, then I'm happy to take the time to explain what I know and discuss their ideas.

But when someone comes in with the equivalent of "Lets put windmills on our electric cars so that they can generate electricity and power themselves while we're driving! Then we can drive thousands of miles without needing to plug in!" They are wasting their own time, and the time of every person that accidentally reads their post. I'm not going to waste time explaining wind resistance, conversion losses, and thermodynamics to someone that clearly is more interested in announcing their amazing discovery than trying to learn.

Equivalently, cryptocurrencies are something that has been studied and investigated for several decades. There are many ideas that have been clearly proven to not work, and many issues that had to be overcome. Bitcoin was the first decentralized trustless cryptocurrency system that manages to address some of the biggest issues. If someone doesn't understand why mining and ECDSA signatures are part of that solution (or even what makes something a "public key" or "private key", and comes in with "Lets get rid of ECDSA and use SHA256 to prove authorized access to bitcoins!", they are wasting their own time, and the time of every person that accidentally reads their post. I'm not going to waste time explaining all the many technical details to someone that is clearly more interested in announcing their amazing discovery than trying to learn.