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I work with a lot of software engineers and tech people, and I have noticed an interesting trend.
I have found that these same people who are eagerly awaiting the next node.js release, pre-ordering the latest gaming devices, or constantly browsing Hacker News for tech updates, are some of the most reluctant to want to understand bitcoin.

Why is this?

From the outside it seems natural that tech people would gravitate towards bitcoin as new and exciting tech, but often when I bring it up they seem to mentally 'shut down' and not want to have anything to do with it. I am not particularly pushy, just talking general ideas and concepts. But often people I have spoken with are not even interested in trying out a wallet or playing around with some free sats.
At a high level I think this because bitcoin fundamentally is not about the tech. The technical aspects such as the distributed ledger, blocks, UTXOs, and consensus can be highlighted in a 10-minute YouTube video and many people already know how this works. The real innovation is the political, philosophical, and second-order considerations for what all of this means.
Fundamentally bitcoin is an anthesis to the current order, requiring a certain critical mindset. Acknowledging the reality and consequences of bitcoin by virtue also acknowledges the fallibility and inevitable collapse of the current system and paradigm. As CBDCs start to become deployed, as currencies inflate and fail, and as authoritarianism creeps into western democracies, the prospect of a changing world order presents an existential question which for many people is far more comfortable to not consider.
Interestingly, this may also explain the continued wasted interest in s**tcoins by otherwise talented developers. People can work on 'blockchain tech' within more structured confines without needing to develop a real political conciousness.
Software and tech people will likely have done well over the last few years as WFH and soaring salaries makes this a highly lucrative career path. However this same corporatisation has captured the tech market massively, meaning the demographics of hackers / developers from the 90s and early 2000s internet and cypherpunk movement are a lot different to the current cohort.
Energy use, tax, and equality are quickly parroted as rote counterpoints to bitcoin, but really they are a knee-jerk justification of intent: "I no longer need to care about this thing you are talking about as it challenges my world view."
I have also found that in general younger people are also a lot less open to understanding bitcoin than older people. I have found explaining bitcoin and its implications to someone who lived and worked through 2008 or Web 1.0 is a lot more straight forward than people who were too young at the time to remember much. This is only exacerbated by the increasing influx of ideology as the legacy order tries to justify itself.
I do see this trend with young people flipping eventually, as more people emerge into a world where bitcoin is naturalised and the issues with the current financial system are more and more obvious. The apathy towards change will get rerouted into a desire to seek out solutions, I hope.
I have experienced exceptions to all of the above ideas, and they are of course generalisations, but it makes me realise the importance of developing nuanced dialogue and discussion for communicating the idea of bitcoin.
– CE
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That explains why so far BTC didn't function as an inflation hedge: because by raising interest Fed acted as it should. Once they abandon sane monetary policy again and start debasing, it will rise 😉
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Damn that was a good read, thanks!
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I think sometimes the problem with very smart / specialized professionals is that they assume the economists and finance people "overseeing" the current system are just as sophisticated. Many in general have been lulled into believing Keynesian propaganda such as inflation is necessary and are hung-up on how information could ever replace currency.
They don't understand that money is information historically and its the norm to have a hard currency vs fiat when looking across human history.
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I agree. There is an acceptance of systematic trust and axioms from which technical people are able to do their technical work. To start questioning these systems or the underlying principles can be difficult for an engineering-minded person to accept.
It takes a rebellious and fluid mindset to question the way things, and an old-school hacker ethos to do something about it.
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I think sometimes the problem with very smart / specialized professionals is that they assume the economists and finance people "overseeing" the current system are just as sophisticated.
Very true! I have another perfect example for this.
GMO agriculture. No matter on which of the both sides you're on. Both pro-GMO and anti-GMO people just fail to realize that the biggest impact besides biology is economic. When farmers get in more dependence of big corporations or some farmers get an advantage over other farmers. This has nothing to do with biology. Just like software developers don't get that Bitcoin is not just software.
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I have a few well-educated and extremely smart friends, some of them with very comfortable material lives. They are intellectually curious... until you mention Bitcoin. 😅
My theory is, to embrace Bitcoin you need to be lucid about the role governments play in the problem that Bitcoin tries to solve.
I suspect that most people intuitively get it, but because they depend -- directly or indirectly -- on the government (for their salary, juicy contracts, protection of property, health care etc), they will instinctively view Bitcoin as an existential threat. This will only change once they understand how Bitcoin can provide a much better alternative.
It's like people understanding the moral issues of slavery but hiding behind the fact it has always existed, and also because they are genuinely worried about who's going to pick the cotton if we free all slaves.
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It depends on where you live. A white American/West European already has the most freedom of financial access compared to the rest of the world. Good banking, least amount of inflation (again, vs the rest of the world). You don't need fuck you money unless your financial privileges are fucked.
I have no issue explaining the goals of Bitcoin to anyone in my third world country, even my retired, non-tech parents. They do have doubt about the actual ability to pull off such goals but not the design choices like limited supply or dismissal of trusted third party.
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Smart/specialized technical people are just normies with skills. Finding a skilled person who is also a bitcoiner is rare but not necessary if you have a budget that pays software developer salaries. Premines and rug pules have at least until now been more lucrative to the venture capital crowd where all the money flows hence the lion's share of normie technical expertise gravitates to shitcoinery. What I am saying is that normies just follow the money. People just gravitate to the power centers.
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They know it's kind of a red pill. Coincidentally it's why ethereum is popular because it's kinda the blue pill
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Many great points already made by others, and much more articulately than i can.
One reason in my opinion is probably that many technical people realize how bad the tech actually is, i.e. why would anyone use something as inefficient as a blockchain, so they don't make the effort to realize why, unlike for shitcoins, this is the actual compromise bitcoin HAS TO make to get its unique properties. It always gets us back to the observation that Bitcoin suffers mostly from the image created by the cesspool of shitcoins pretending to be decentralized while obviously they are not.
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I work in the tech industry and software devs, outside development, are some of the dumbest people I have ever met
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Dumber than a soup salad sandwich. The lack imagination and foresight. They want to make money not software. Not all of them but a wide swath of them.
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You make a good point about bitcoin not being about technology. This reminds me of a video of a lecture from an MIT computer science professor who was very anti bitcoin and blockchain in general. Twenty minutes into the presentation he makes this point about how bitcoin is oh so inefficient because there are thousands of copies of the entire blockchain around the world. It dawn on me then that most tech people are so worried about optimizing things in a narrow sense that they completely ignore threats from "outside" of the tech sphere, like politics.
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A lot of people in tech are too close to it to really understand. As I mentioned salaries are already high and people are used to following the rules and playing the game, so for the most part they have never 'needed' something like bitcoin.
The danger of a technocracy (government by technicians who are guided solely by the imperatives of this tech) is that we build the wrong technology. Arguably the challenges of the last two years have highlighted the dangers of this.
Regardless, an entire application layer will be getting built out in the coming decade upon Lightning and Bitcoin and most tech people have not really woken up to that yet. There is some huge opportunity for startups and new ventures in this space and I am actively looking for opportunities myself to become involved!
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Yes technical people building for the clowd (pun intended) are not solving the greatest problems. The best techies that actually have some pride in their creations will shun big tech's walled garden trash and build truly decentralized in the spirit of the original internet.
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Also you don't need to communicate the idea of bitcoin. Who communicated the idea of dollars or whatever currency you use? You just use it
Same with bitcoin just use it and shut up. Not really kidding
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Definitely need to communicate it. Takes many touch points for people to get onboard and it is in humanities's best interest to use bitcoin.
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I think communicating the values is important so that they wont be lost too soon, but using it aka actions speak louder than words :) I am trying to find ways to use Bitcoin and i am spending some of it every month
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‘if you don’t get it, I don’t have time to explain it’ vibez fr. after 12 months of bitcoin and family/friends thinking u crazy talking 24/7 bitcoin. bitcoin is hip-hop, punk, skateboarding, psychedelic and art. normies have other priorities going on 😸
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I like this sentence "I have also found that in general younger people are also a lot less open to understanding bitcoin than older people. " biggest proponents of btc, mainly over 55 yrs old, Adam beck, nick Szabo, Micheal saylor, Cathy wood, Stanley drukenmiller, and over 40 yrs a Antonopoulos. many young people don't get btc, they are just not inherently against it because it is virtual
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однополярный мир заканчивается. наступает эра много полярный. для понимания мироустройства нужно понимать биткоин откуда он берётся.
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"[Many] programmers understand the benefits of everything and the trade offs of nothing."
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great post!
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