If you ever have the urge to start your argument like this, realize that you have already lost and it doesn't matter whether you have the facts on your side, the law on your side, or bang your shoe on the table. Your argument is failed.
It's particularly sad because in this case, his ultimate argument is that bitcoin is a largely failed to technology because it doesn't do what it's been promoted to do since day one. That is an accurate statement. All of the particulars that support that statement are correct.
But Perry is absolutely wrong when he says "you shouldn't have an opinion… unless you truly understand the technical details…" Not only should you have an opinion, you must have an opinion. You have a perception. You have cognition. You can reason.
In fact, you can come to a negative opinion about bitcoin as "an anonymous, low cost, etc., etc. cryptocurrency" without talking about the technical inside bits at all.
(We'll leave aside for the moment the issue of whether bitcoin ever promised anonymity or just pseudonymity, given that the whole underlying idea is that it is a publicly accessible open ledger. Anyone that claims anonymity has already undermined their credibility.)
From a nontechnical perspective, there are only two questions which are important about bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general):
Firstly, CAN I BUY THINGS I WANT WITH IT? Bitcoin barely passes the bar in answering "yes" to that, and mainly because you can buy what are effectively gray market Amazon gift cards with bitcoin. And other business gift cards, but the Amazon cards are the most useful.
Secondly, CAN I EARN ANY OF THIS CURRENCY FOR WORK I WANT TO DO? This is where the whole system breaks down to a hideous, grinding stop. Because you can't. Good luck trying, and I appreciate the work @openbazaar is doing this field, but you will fail.
This second issue is the big problem, and possibly the one which is impossible to overcome – because it's rooted in the fact that no one wants to use bitcoin to pay you to do work. The entirety of the bitcoin economic infrastructure is built on a parasitic connection with fiat.
Sure, there have been some experiments which effectively leveraged inflation rates in order to deliver portions of coin pools to active users of various platforms (I'm looking at you, @steemit ), but they don't work very well. The vast volatility make them generally terrible.
Without even touching the question of whether the underlying technical processes make crypto currencies in general and bitcoin in specific untenable, they have an immense, perhaps unconquerable set of issues even the non-technical can talk about.
In short, "I can't get paid in this shit." That makes most modern crypto currencies even less useful than playing World of Warcraft eight hours a day and selling gold on the gray/black market. Chinese gold sellers are more legitimate than cryptocurrency.
Again, I reiterate, this is not even touching on the technical issues because it doesn't have to. There are's to simple questions that any lame man can ask and have an opinion about the answers at hand.
In a sense, this is part of why the cryptocurrency community at large it's no respect – because they don't deserve any. Even when they're right, they make arguments from arrogance and evoke the sensible response, "please, for the love of God, don't agree with me."
It's almost as if, like Catholicism, cryptocultism gave birth to its own antithetical Satanism. Classic Satanism is just anti-Catholicism, flipping the doctrine on its head. A lot of anti-cryptocurrency talk is just cryptocultism in a black robe.
@threadreaderapp unroll
