Quote from: solid12345 on April 03, 2014, 02:16:50 PM

Quote from: Ibian on April 03, 2014, 01:43:48 PM

That's because those who actually understand what bitcoin is, how it works, the technological as well as the financial side, the implications for society on the longer term and maybe even an understanding of the exponential function and network effects, are elite. Most people simply do not have the mental capacity to understand all of that at once. So when someone like the op comes along, who only takes a months long look at things and fails to take into account even the past years price history, there is a reaction. It's a toddler telling a university student why he is a fool.

And they were always shitcoins. They offered nothing useful and therefore failed.

The issue though is I have no confidence in the people who claim to understand Bitcoin either. Shrem and Karpeles have turned out to be crooks, the BTC Foundation has been doing nothing but squabbling like children for the last few months now, I also never saw a case of more impotence when I saw all the reps trying to defend Bitcoin at the NY regulation conference a few weeks back. They casually sat there and allowed lies to be uttered in front of everyone by the establishment and did little to counter them, I know there is decorum and all but really come on.

To top it off you have exchanges like btc-e whose members constantly cry about "shitcoins" like Doge while propping up dead and equally useless coins like Feathercoin or Terracoin, the whole thing is like payola with the old established coins being kept alive because of politics and tyrannical mods like Koolio banning you for any mention of competition while he simultaneously is developing and selling ASICs to mine for all these "shit" scrypt coins. I find the incestous business relationships around here questionable, like how Litecoin is propped up as the "silver" to Bitcoin's gold while Charlie Lee's brother runs one of the biggest exchanges in the world. What better way to make a fortune than develop an alternative to Bitcoin, hype it up for a year, and then have your brother sell your own creation on his exchange? And people say a 1% premine by a dev is crooked.

It only gets worse now with this whole Operation Scamcoin thing, instead of fixing problems in your own house we got people running around here trying 51% attacks and threatening to DDOS projects they don't like, extorting devs for money for the "permission" to make a coin (and where do you think this money is going, hmmmm)..

It is also kind of insulting to me that BTCtalk has been bantering around for months now about how Bitcoin is going to $100k a coin, maybe even a million dollars. This exuberant hype is what has been driving the newbies in, then the minute the Chinese sneeze everyone starts selling out leaving the newbies with the bags, yeah if you collected thousands of Bitcoins for pennies, a 50% drop in price might not be so bad when you are wealthy, but for working class schmucks who were promised a chance to escape the clutches of a debt-ridden society and rampant unemployment and who put up a good chunk of their salary to join the movement, it feels like a betrayal and only lends ammunition to the accusation BTC is a ponzi scheme. Where are all you hardcore libertarian types around to stand up to the Chicoms and tell them to screw off? You are dumping your coins and running off with fiat like scared little puppies. I thought Bitcoin users weren't supposed to care what oppressive governments think?

Finally the top 1% owning 80% of the Bitcoins doesn't speak well for decentralization, and how many of these coins are owned by immature teenagers who get their news from reddit?

Sorry but my experience so far in the last few months has been finding the whole thing to be amateur hour and a circus show.

And Satoshi needs to show himself. This "mysterious creator" bullshit is getting old, everyone attacked the creator of AUR for being equally anonymous but somehow think Satoshi gets to be immune from such criticism. I am still not even sure Bitcoin is not an NSA project. The movement needs a leader and a confidence boost and him revealing himself could do that.

So don't trust, learn. Don't use exchanges you don't trust, you wouldn't be the first. Don't invest in shitcoins (that would be almost all of them). Place a bet on the price on bitbet if you are sure enough, like others have done, put your money where your mouth is. Don't invest or trade on emotion. None of that changes fundamentals, your complaint is with human nature and not with the technology itself.

On btc-e specifically, I don't use it anymore due to several red flags popping up over the past few months. Most recently, I noticed they banned the IP my VPN uses. Even if I trusted them, it would be impossible to use them safely over wifis when traveling which is a requirement for me.