Why do old people keep yelling at Bitcoin?
There is this narrative that young people like Bitcoin very much — they are therefore called naive and inexperienced by the elderly.
And the elderly people don’t like Bitcoin very much — they are therefore called conservative and incomprehensible by the youngsters.
The truth is probably somewhere in between.
You might have heard about the recent backlash about Congressman Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, talking about cryptocurrencies.
He said
“We should prohibit U.S. persons from buying or mining cryptocurrencies,”
as well as comparing people that use cryptocurrencies to criminals, since he doesn’t see any use for it other than for nefarious actions and tax evading when there is already a currency like cash in place.
This obviously led to a massive backlash within the crypto community. One member, however, went further and pointed out that this is kind of hypocritical when his top campaign donation came from a company which was involved in exactly such things.
That didn’t paint a good light on Mister Sherman. This post got — by now — over 800 retweets and is probably topic in more articles than just this one.
Apparently Brad Sherman then actually came forward to said community member and asked him to stop:
I say apparently because we can’t know for sure. This could easily be faked, although you have to ask yourself, why he would fake that. His initial post already gained enough traction.
So assuming this is true, you can tell just by that how the old people don’t know how to use the new age media.
Because even replying to that just paints you guilty. And especially since this is not a secret channel to ask somebody to stop spreading FUD about yourself.
This backfired horribly. As did his overall questioning of cryptocurrencies. Henceforth Mister Brad Sherman will probably be a meme for “old man yells at bitcoin” and joins the ranks of Warren Buffet.
So why do these elderly people hate so much on Bitcoin?
Well in the case of Brad Sherman it is quite clear: he doesn’t understand it. Or to be more precise, he didn’t even take the time to read up on it.
He keeps going on about how we already have a digital form of payment, like Visa and MasterCard, which just shows that all he knows about Bitcoin is that it is digital.
While that is part of it, it really isn’t the reason for its success. He even depicts himself when he literally says “I could go to any hamlet in India and pay with my visa”.
First of all that is more than questionable and I would go so far and say that this actually doesn’t work. But Bitcoin — which he is trying so hard to discredit — can actually do that!
All you need is a PC and the Internet or just a mobile phone and you can send Bitcoin. That is fewer requirements than paying with visa would have.
His next point is that we do have a means of settlement like the dollar and what the great failure in that might be.
Well, it is the fact, that the bank rules how much money I can send when I can send it and I have to pay for transactions and the fees aren’t small. Just to name a few.
I could go on about this for a while, the whole clip is infuriating to watch, especially since he talks like it is something for kids and is making fun of the whole concept with his body language. I understand why people started hating Mr. Sherman after this.
The whole clip here:
The biggest problem in all of this is, that Mr. Pollock, the person who had to answer Brad Sherman’s questions was not capable of addressing these. He virtually never answered any of the questions properly or shipped around them, despite the answers being pretty clear for anyone who actually researched what Bitcoin is.
So it seems that the answer to my initial question is, that either the elderly can’t fathom what Bitcoin is or they couldn’t be bothered to research it.
Their mindset that it is something invented by kids certainly doesn’t help.
They are not approaching the topic as open-minded people. They’ve used their hard cash for 20, 30, 40 years and they do not want to change it in their old age.
I would assume these men are intelligent people, if they would approach it unbiased, they would probably realize what Bitcoin is about. But you can clearly tell they don’t even know what they are talking about.
And worse, they don’t care. I wonder if they handle most of their decisions in Congress like that?
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