And 100% of them are just trying to suck up to the rich the hardest to get some cash thrown their way for posting. Their whole community has been built 100% around that from day 1.

I was gonna say ‘libertarian brainrot’ but yours is more specific.

I would phrase this as “good marks” and “foolish” rather than “stupid”, it’s important to stay humble enough that no one is safe from a con.

Echoing something that has been said here before (too lazy to find proper credit sorry): “Rationality™ is a get smart quick scheme”, falling for one family of scams makes you more likely to fall for a similar one.

There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies.

This is absolutely true and, I think, is also the core answer to OP’s question about why rationalists love cryptocurrency.

Because the core conceit of Bitcoin, and everything that followed, was the idea that you could “be your own bank” - that you would have complete control over, and complete responsibility for, your own financial transactions. If you get hacked or scammed, or send your money to the wrong account, or lose your private key, or forget your password, there’s no bank or government you can appeal to to fix the problem. Once cryptocurrency is gone, it’s gone for good.

And to be clear, this is cryptocurrency working as intended - independently of the scams and the bullshit and the obvious fact that cryptocurrency is based on nothing but people’s belief in its value, the fact that erroneous cryptocurrency transactions cannot be reversed is a feature. It’s a selling point.

For normal people, this is obviously a horrible idea, because normal people recognize they can make mistakes and want to be able to fix those mistakes, especially when they involve things like their life savings.

Libertarians and rationalists and their ilk, on the other hand, don’t really believe they can make mistakes. They think other people are stupid and irresponsible. Other people could screw up and lose their money. But the libertarian, with his superior mind, does not fear making a mistake or becoming the victim of theft. He’s too smart for that. His confidence in himself is boundless.

So the libertarian doesn’t need the safety net of laws and governments and banks and credit agencies that protect the average person from theft and error. When the libertarian is told he can be his own bank, and save his wealth in a format designed for irreversible transactions, where one mistake would lead to his wealth disappearing forever… well, the libertarian thinks this is a great idea, because he doesn’t believe he would ever make a mistake.

You have to think yourself very smart indeed to be that stupid.

“I like everything about cryptocurrency except all the things that are wrong with it”.

Not really sure why currency has to be “outside the control of any single person or entity”. Other than an intellectual curiosity. Currency is inherently social. Goldbugs keep harping on about the inherent value of gold, but its value is just as socially constructed as cowry shells or giant granite rings. China was a huge trading party in the time before the Opium wars and it preferred silver to gold.

i can kinda understand “liking the idea” in the same way that I “like” the very simple currency systems in single-player video games, where you do work (fight monsters, collect items, win Pokemon battles) and are automatically rewarded with currency you can use to buy items, which are always reasonably-priced because the game developers balanced it that way. It’s just that these systems have nothing to do with reality. But that simplistic view of money is pretty much all that’s left of cryptocurrencies if you look past the get-rich-quick scheme.

The existence of a currency that everyone can transact in is fundamentally a public good. It must be maintained with the public good in mind, rather than the good of whoever happens to have lots of it or whoever has the ability to personally influence it.

Are you sure something that something that approximates this is a good thing?

Not to mention that I don’t think it’s possible to truely make something like that in the physical sense. You can make Forward Time Traveling Anal ZProof Coinbutt that gives you free Blockchain blowjobs, shit is about as good as using the money in SimCity 3000 save files as a medium of exchange if it doesn’t connect to reality (i.e. has a system of sourcing and managing information in a reliable manner).

Or am I missing something? Genuinely curious.

You often hear crypto proponents on Threadi (not the oort cloud of types who de facto only care about high risk speculation and are pushing bags, the genuine ones) say that they want to use crypto as a way to fight data brokers/collection, but that doesn’t make sense (to me). The payment is just one step of the process and you can’t leave civilization at scale.

But for me personally, I don’t see the point of such a system if one can’t manage current challenges with human organisation in democratic leaning countries or perhaps even more broadly (at whatever level/scale that is relevant for you). It seems like you would just be back at square one but with more wallets, random useless shit you have to memorize and having to track client/protocols updates and some other crap.

Sure we might get a technology at some point in the future that truly impacts human nature, but in that case all bets are off and we are entering pretty avangarde sci-fi.