I'm quite happy to trash Bitcoin because it's userbase is intolerable, the sooner it goes to zero the better. Their idiocy have caused genuine harm to people who are new to asset trading/speculation: people who bet on Bitcoin with their retirement, their kids college fund, etc.
Underscoring every positive Bitcoin related news is the implicit solicitation to `invest` in Bitcoin.
People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early adopters were idiots, a lot of the internet's early adopters were seedy criminals and pests too.
Bitcoin's community will evolve in the same way every online community does. It's found some early traction in the form of speculation which has encouraged people to buy and own Bitcoin. Now that a lot of people know what it is and own some, it's easier to test services built with BTC.
I have never seen the Bitcoin reddit community advise or even imply that people should put more than they can afford to lose in Bitcoin, no matter how much they believe in it. Outside the BTC-e trollbox, I really doubt anywhere has. These people who bet their retirement on Bitcoin are probably just as likely to lose it on anything else they might get excited about.
Personally, I find the userbase intolerable because it's logically inconsistent. The entire point of the properties of the currency is to drive decentralisation and the end of our dependency on the financial industry and its monopolies... and yet the community cheers every time there's a new bank, or centralised exchange, or processing network, any time a major company starts accepting bitcoin so they don't have to deal with the little shops, or any other proprietary, monopoly-forming system built on top of Bitcoin.
>community cheers every time there's a new bank, or centralised exchange, or processing network, etc
More exposure = more publicity = more people buying in. If there is one thing about the community is consistent about, it's about getting rich off Bitcoin.
It may not seem that way from the outside, but there are tons of reasonable people among Bitcoin users. I would say there is a very vocal minority who despises anything that is remotely related to regulation, for example, but you shouldn't judge the technology on that alone.
There are some obvious exciting things that can be built with it, and if it would take off it has the potential to level the playing field for payments processors. That can only be good.
Underscoring every positive Bitcoin related news is the implicit solicitation to `invest` in Bitcoin.