The pretty strong anti-establishment streak held by goldbugs and cypherpunks is largely shared by HN though. I think much of the sneering comes because there&#x27;s a third type of person that influences discourse around Bitcoin to some extent: shills.<p>Obviously a lot of Bitcoin evangelists have large BTC holdings because it&#x27;s entirely in keeping with their belief that it&#x27;s a brilliant idea, and many if not most exchanges, altcoins and even blockchain based trading schemes weren&#x27;t conceived as ways of persuading fools to part with their money. But many Bitcoiners are speculators and <i>some</i> of the schemes dreamed up around Bitcoin were scams or might as well have been, which hasn&#x27;t really been the case for flavours of Linux. FOSS evangelists might have made similarly grandiose claims about their project and the philosophy behind it, but they weren&#x27;t trying to pump the price of their commodity holdings at the time or running get rich quick schemes - they usually weren&#x27;t even expecting to get paid!<p>Something of a tangent I know. I largely agree with you on the virtues of some inflation in an economy as a whole, but I think it&#x27;s pretty evident now that Bitcoin is neither replacing currency as a whole nor representing a sufficiently stable store of value to encourage hoarding on any scale. Frankly Steam accepting BTC is no more economically destabilising than Steam deciding to accept inflationary-by-design Linden Dollars.