Nick Szabo  🔑

I don't expect everyone to be civil, Nick. I know better. I do expect civility from well-known experts, like yourself and Saifedean, who hardly qualify as part of the "unwashed masses." I also expect them not to encourage or apologize for incivility in others.

Some of the most well-known "experts", better known and with much better pseudo-scientific credentials (e.g. "Nobel" prizes) than Saf or I, have treated Bitcoin people with great incivility. Who knows what these "rules" actually are since your own peers do not abide by them.

Shame on them. But what does it mean to call them my "peers"? I'm a free agent. I don't belong to any school or movement. I am probably closer in many of my fundamental beliefs to Bitcoiners than I am to many of them.

You are a professional economist, no? Fellow professionals are often called "peers". As for "free agent" -- you work at the DC area Cato Institute, yes or no? You have a boss there, yes or no? And a paycheck that depends on keeping that boss happy, yes or no?

People with bosses don’t like admitting that their actions are influenced by their boss, even if it’s only subconscious. I say this as a person with a boss, unfortunately.

It's very obvious that people with bosses are highly influenced and constrained by said bosses. Especially true for political or economic opinions of people working at political or economic think tanks. Yet the preposterous pretense that they are "free agents".

P.S. if you are so worried about civil discourse, you would do well to focus your ire on Nouriel Roubini, whose comments have been astronomically more obnoxious than anything said on this thread.

I also have consistently rejected claims like Roubini's to the effect that Bitcoin is a scam, or Ponzi scheme, or bubble, or whatever. I have my doubts about Bitcoin becoming a dominant money. I hope I'm wrong. But I am not of that ilk.

But have you criticized his pathological tone and his barbaric incivility? Show us where you've done that or GTFO and don't come back until you have done so.

Sigh.

Unfortunate that someone who has written so fondly of Bitcoin, is subject to this. @GeorgeSelgin if you haven't seen this, it's worth looking at: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bit-block-boom/2019/how-to-meme-bitcoin-to-the-moon/ … maximalism is very deliberate, they play to win, and it works. Not worth taking personally.

I don't think that rudeness is part of any strategy of playing to win. I think it hurts the case for Bitcoin, for freedom in currency, and, most of all, for libertarianism generally. Believe me, if it disgusts me (and it does), it discusses many more who haven't tried to engage.