What type of discussions have you been in? Were you able to convince anyone? How? What arguments?
After many discussions with close friends and online strangers I have encountered many reasons people dislike or straight up hate crypto/blockchain in general. This ranges from IT specialists to completely uneducated people.
So why do people dislike crypto? There seem to be a few big categories of reasons. First, there are those that understand the technology but feel that all the problems being solved with crypto have already been solved or there are better alternative solutions. Typical statements are: “Why have a digital currency? I can use my mobile app of my bank for digital payments.” or “We don’t need a digital self sovereign identity as our government provides ID cards with a built in chip that I can use to log into my bank, my government website”, “crypto is not usable enough for the common people”. These people can often be convinced by bringing good examples where blockchain is a better solution. Depending on the ego of the person, they can simply stop discussing once they realize that they might have to reconsider their opinion. I think this group can turn into real advocates of blockchain.
Second, there are people who don’t know crypto on a technical level but get their information from news sites, social media, advertising, etc. They seem to be uncomfortable with the concept of money that is not created by their government. This feeling is fueled by the news on scams, hacks, energy use and other FUD. Typical statements from this group are: “Crypto currencies use a much energy as a small country”, “Bitcoin isn’t backed by anything and can go to zero tomorrow.”, “Why would someone pay millions for a digital picture?”, “These currencies are only used to launder money.”, etc. I find this group difficult to reason with as they throw tons of different arguments at you but don’t stick around long enough to actually go into a detailed discussion on any of them. These people will only change their mind once the media takes a different standpoint.
Third, there are the people who partially understand the blockchain and don’t find it an innovation over what existed decades ago. I get this a lot with IT architects and the like. Statement such as “Blockchain is just a database signed with digital signatures”, “It’s not scalable”, “I can run the same ledger on a high availability cluster on Azure.”, .. This category of people often focus on a small subset of what blockchain is. Yes, it is a chain of signed blocks. But it is much more than that. It is also a consensus algorithm that allows us to collectively agree on the state. It is transparent and auditable by design. The “existing alternatives” these opponents refer to often miss many of the properties that blockchain project have. These people are similar to category 1. The main difference is that once you start a discussion, they fail to understand several important concepts and simply disconnect from the discussion.
Asking this here is useless. We are an echo chamber of crypto lovers
Ignorance
too many people complaining here..
can we just chill and talk about something more uplifting..
like buying burgers with bitcoin
People hate what they don’t understand.
First rule of being in crypto: „Don‘t talk about being in crypto!“
People hate anything that they don’t completely understand. Plus they have really bought into the idea that crypto is not backed by anything and will fade away while fiat is backed by gold reserve which is again untrue.
FUD is effective when you don’t know anything else about crypto
I think it’s a blend of misinformation, bad news, and people being uninformed.
– Many people read bad news about crypto and get a totally bad idea. I feel like the ever-growing hacks, rug pulls, trash NFTs, energy consumption news and other issues have plagued the crypto sphere. While we brush it off because we know the potential of the blockchain technology, most people who don’t understand the fundamentals will just think, based on this, that crypto is absolute trash.
Just 2 days ago I tried defending NFTs and how they can actually be useful, in the /r/pcgaming sub, and I got massively downvoted. Presenting facts and trying to have a decent discussion is absolutely meaningless when an echo chamber of people just decide to downvote (and then you snowball into more downvotes because you’ve already been downvoted before) – the issue here is people were already in a thread with bad NFT news. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this kind of thing. I’ve witnessed literal blockchain/crypto devs that are so knowledgeful be massively downvoted in threads with negative crypto news, in other subs, even if they present 100% true information…
– Uninformed: Again, people just don’t care about doing actual investigation/studying. I have a close friend who’s a programmer and while he’s slowly changing his mind, a few months ago he was really uninformed about crypto and thought it was a bubble. When I tried explaining to him how the blockchain, wallets, exchanges, smart contracts, PoW, PoS worked, he brushed it off as non-important and reiterated it was a bubble and the technology wasn’t useful. Why? Again, the base is bad news and misinformation.
I think I will stop debating or defending crypto in other subs. I can’t bother to present facts and real-world use cases, and people just dismiss my points with half-arsed arguments that make no sense, and then me getting a billion downvotes cuz herd mentality.
as someone who isn’t tech savvy or computer savvy, it took me a while to understand a lot of crypto concepts and gain confidence to use these blockchains, setup wallets, etc. but for those that are willing to learn you see the potential with nfts/ verifiable proof of ownership, play to earn gaming, earning yield with defi/staking, payments/store of value. it just takes an interest/willingness to learn, people are lazy. once doing this stuff is more user friendly masses will come, almost everything in the space hasn’t achieved it’s final form, it’s still being developed or in beta stages. the more i learn the more i realize how early we are.
A higher percentage of grifters and scammers to the user base than most other currencies, or at the very least scams are more widely reported in crypto.
They hate because:
* They don’t understand what is Bitcoin/Crypto.
* They believe it encourages criminal activity.
* It’s highly volatile, believing that the currency is heavily manipulated by big players
* The impact of news that describes crypto in a negative way.
Because crypto people are incredibly obnoxious?
Because of the high amount of scams and rug pulls!
Because they don’t understand the benefits of crypto…
They have too much fiat.
They hate new things and prefer to stick with what they usually know but that’s what comes with mainstream adoption
Only the people who don’t understand it what it could change and bring to them. This people hate it
Haters gonna hate
Trying to tell someone who is in crypto common sense is frustrating. Plus when you don’t agree with what they say. Most act like teenagers.
I’m part of an “innovation committee” for a large trade group, and when I brought up the benefits of DLT, i was met with a few naysayers.
Majority of their concerns were energy related, but then introduced them to Hedera and Algorand and they were much more open. Two even created a [binance.us](https://binance.us) account and bought decent size bags of both.
A few of the blowhards that think they know it all were using the “there are 7000 coins, how do you know which one to buy?” and “why don’t I just create a cat coin to go against doggy coin?” arguments, which were both easily overcome as well.
Society has an epidemic of people reading a few news articles about a topic, then thinking they know it all. In my experience, most of the people against crypto are just uniformed.
Because it’s right wing /s
I’ve tried to explain to some friends and some relatives, but in vain. In the end I get to be the weird one.
People are mostly sceptic, because they see a ‘too good to be true’ thing that looks like a scam. I understand their fear. They’re sadly either too lazy or too technically naive to do their own good research .
It makes me a bit sad sometimes, e.g. when:
* relative saves $200/month for his kid but puts it in a bank with 0.1% interest (while inflation is already 5%+ here in Europe). He doesn’t even consider DCA at a low cost index fund, let alone crypto.
* friend who works in the IT and has the capability to understand all the technicals, still fails to (mostly because of being stubborn) and keeps insisting that quantum computers will destroy all blockchains, or that PoW energy consumption will actually destroy the planet.
I stopped trying. I can’t convince anybody when my logical arguments supported with facts (like: bitcoin mining is <0.01% of world energy consumption) are countered with arguments of the type: I don’t believe you.
We generally stopped talking about crypto with friends and relatives. Sometimes we make jokes from both sides (and we do have fun), but a serious discussion doesn’t work.
I’m sorry, it’s their problem.
Crypto has been very volatile this past year.
People who dislike it either lost money from it or don’t know much about it.
While people who like have either made money or have hopes to make money from it. (I’m in this boat)
I’m gonna be honest I personally don’t see the point of making all these new digital currencies (there are so many different cryptos now) when we have ones that work already. But if I can hold some for a while and make a profit out of it I’m game.
Unfavorable personal experience, rugpulls, and the media.
Not my opinions but personally from other social media sites I see that people think NFT art is low quality and overpriced, the sheer number of hacks, phising, scams, rugpulls etc, environmental impact, cryptobros bragging, raising prices of gpus, illegal/illicit use.
Again, none of these are my opinions
People don’t like things that confuse them, makes them feel unintelligent
The things I hear are the ponzi scheme thing & 💰 laundering (which i always point out is moot because it is done more in fiat)
Hate can stem from ignorance. When you lack knowledge on a particular subject you either hate when people discuss it or just simply dismiss it. Its easy for people not educated on this topic have some hatred for crypto
Jealousy
heres to all you crypto loving mothers
It’s probably the same people who don’t trust 5G.
People I’ve talked to can’t grasp how it’s a currency, worth anything. I try to explain how fiat works but they don’t believe me or understand.
Most people think by earning more $ in a year they go into a higher tax bracket so they take home less, and refuse shifts to stay under that tax line because they need more money. Their opinions are as valid as anyone’s these days because of social media.
If people were told they have to learn how to manually send an email through SMTP or they miss out on 100x gainz they’d be sour to email also.
The only solution I think is wait for the tricky bits to be abstracted away. People need to be able to fill the gas tank in their car, get 26 GasBux they can redeem online via a stub on their receipt, and not realise they’re using blockchain before they can warm up to the idea. My worry here is they can still take those GasBux to some sketchy site where they’re stolen then complain to government how bad crypto is, so I truly hope the regulation coming doesn’t prevent our freedom of movement aka consumer protection laws just for ignorant people to exist in society safely.
Read around in r/buttcoin to see how fast misinformation spreads when it’s just a bunch of people patting each other on the back.
It’s mostly ignorance. I don’t know how it can be fixed when we take crypto and combine all the things people are ignorant about and put them in one package lol. I don’t care about their opinion anymore now that Visa, the NYSE, Ticketmaster, or car manufacturers are getting in on it. They’ll make something good and people will fall over themselves for it like they weren’t massive haters for the last 15 years.
Because other people are making money and they aren’t.
People gonna be fearful of stuff they don’t understand or challenge their worldview. Many people have only known the current financial system and have that mentality ingrained for however many years. Others see news media calling things scams or reading about doge or Shiba inu and think all coins are like that where it just reinforces that doubt. We live in an age of endless information but people are more rooted in their bubble of beliefs now more than ever. Crypto is no different.