People Aren’t Actually “Investing” in Cryptocurrency, They’re Just Gambling

Plus they’ve completely lost their ability to discuss it sensibly

Photo by Javon Swaby

Last week — one day before Bitcoin took its biggest single-day plunge ever — I published an article entitled Bitcoin Is Dead. The article re-stated my strong belief that Bitcoin Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme and outlined the eight reasons why I believe Bitcoin won’t be the global currency of the future.

I don’t check stats on Sunday, but when I woke up Monday morning, I realized that I may have set Medium on fire over the weekend:

As I spent the morning wading through the cesspool that is the comments section, it occurred to me that many of the responses sounded the same — sometimes word-for-word verbatim — like pre-rehearsed lines from a Scientologist.

Most of all, it made me realize that a huge number of people who comment online have lost the ability to reason.

The Socratic method, which has sustained fruitful public debate for thousands of years, seems to be going extinct. Supposedly invented by Socrates, the method is “a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions.”