Letter to Anti-Bitcoiners:
If they are all just here for the money, your arguments should be working...
When a group of people coalesce around a small foundation or argument they mostly reached dependently, it might actually be difficult to determine where their feelings on the matter are coming from - considering they are using boilerplate rhetoric to express themselves. It informs without saying that they are embarrassed by the real reason, which in the case of 'against Bitcoin' often boils down to a mix of indignance and ignorance. The indignancy is open - it is in style after all, but the ignorance well masked, for similar reasons.
I’m not judging.
How else makes sense to react to a loud minority of new millionaires evangelizing a technology for which they know less about than the average STEM graduate? And for those that understood the technology and knew about Bitcoin before its popularity: how else feel about the failure to capitalize in the face of this obnoxiously loud minority who flaunts success alongside a faux technologist LARP?
The most common misconception about Bitcoin is that it is a technological achievement.
Some savvy critics of Bitcoin have already taken my point. "There's nothing special about hashing, Merkle Trees, and public key cryptography, we've had those for decades." This isn't false, but it isn’t relevant. Bitcoin is not a revolution in technology, it is a revolution in economics. But now the second misconception lays in wait: those interested in Bitcoin are only in it for the money.
Or more accurately, Bitcoin investors are mostly speculators ultimately interested in United States Dollars. Decentralized as the protocol may be, the canon of Bitcoin is not about accumulating USD - and the test for the authenticity of this narrative is simple: if they were all just in Bitcoin for the dollars, coherent arguments against Bitcoin would have gotten them out eventually - yet adoption and real value of Bitcoin has steadily risen since its inception, bumpy it may be.
This means either that the best arguments against Bitcoin are not enough to convince even the ideologically-neutral speculators to exit en masse, or that there are more holders of Bitcoin who believe in Bitcoin than there are dollar sharks wishing to prey on the former. To accept this in good faith is to begin thinking with some maturity on Bitcoin; if any fatal flaw were to be discovered, there would be no more interested party than the holders. Basic educational resources on the matter start here, the deeper one goes into Bitcoin the harder it becomes to argue against it - is it a wonder the critics so often can’t grasp the basics? Perhaps it is no coincidence that those who have dug the deepest commonly happen to own some.
It is no sin that anti-Bitcoiners exist - but the hubris to believe one understands an economic system by its technological components, or that they do not need to understand something at all to reach conclusions about it creates nothing but noise. Anyone passionate about warning others of Bitcoin would be doing everyone a favor to develop some more sophistication. Moralizing can only mask ignorance for so long.