Nocoiners

Our weekly opinion piece and overview View this email in your browser   CoinDesk Weekly is sponsored by  February 18, 2018 Are You a Nocoiner? It's not just whether you own or like cryptocurrency. It's your attitude toward those who do. Read more in the THE TAKEAWAY below.   TOP TRENDS ON COINDESK Ride the lightning So bitcoin's lightning network isn't ready for prime time yet, but for those brave souls who want to use the second-layer technology for low-value payments, CoinDesk's Rachel Rose O'Leary offers a handy guide. Right now it's a fussy process, but as Rachel points out, the software's still in alpha phase, and devs are working on making the UX butter-smooth. Meanwhile, our tech lead Alyssa Hertig reports that several other major cryptocurrency projects are planning to test or implement some version of lightning. Litecoin, one of the earliest alts, is among the furthest along.  DLT in D.C. It was another busy week in the U.S. capital for policymakers studying the blockchain space, and for industry members who want to make sure they regulate with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's technical advisory committee convened a meeting on the subject and, in true Washington fashion, voted to form two subcommittees, one on cryptocurrency and the other on broader applications of distributed ledger technology. At that same meeting, CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz reiterated his call for the cryptocurrency market to form a self-regulating body a la FINRA or the National Futures Association Separately, but continuing that theme of primum non nocere, the CFTC's chairman, J. Christopher Giancarlo, testified on Capitol Hill again, telling lawmakers that any federal-level approach to cryptocurrency regulation should be "carefully tailored" to the risks involved.  But his agency made it clear that such risks exist – it also published an advisory about the brazen pump-and-dump schemes in this market. And addressing a different risk posed by this technology, a U.S. Treasury official called for stronger anti-money-laundering and combatting financing of terrorism measures worldwide. "Currently, we are one of the only major countries in the world, along with Japan and Australia, that regulate these activities for AML/CFT purposes," Sigal Mandelker said in a speech. "But we need many more countries to follow suit, and have made this a priority in our international outreach." See all CoinDesk stories ⭐ COINDESK SPONSOR ⭐ As bitcoin plunges, the co-founder of Ethereum is on to something new... Something much bigger than bitcoin. Going completely under the radar, he has worked for years to create the world's first blockchain hedge fund... His partners? Not the 0,00001% elite, but you and me. The crash of bitcoin is the start of something much, much bigger Get the story here (before everyone else does).   QUOTE OF THE WEEK "When bitcoin's lightning network comes online fully, any community not preparing scalable off-chain solutions is going to get left in the payments dust." – Stellar contributor Jeremy Rubin, explaining why other cryptocurrencies are adopting the second-layer technology. THE TAKEAWAY A nocoiner, according to Urban Dictionary, is someone who has no bitcoin. But not everyone who has no bitcoin is necessarily a nocoiner. Rather, what makes a nocoiner a nocoiner is not simply the absence of cryptocurrency from his investment portfolio, but his sanctimonious attitude about it. Urban Dictionary's definition, which was posted in December – about the time the word entered wide usage in the bitcoin community – goes on to describe nocoiners as: "....people who missed their opportunity to buy Bitcoin at a low price ... and who [are] now bitter at having missed out. The nocoiner takes out his or her bitterness on Bitcoin Hodlers, by constantly claiming that Bitcoin will crash, is a scam, is a bubble, or other types of easily refuted FUD." In other words, a nocoiner is full of what philosophers call ressentiment, defined by La Wik as "a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat." The Twitter user known as @crackbagged picked up on this psychological insight in a Medium post in June of last year, warning fellow bitcoiners not to gloat when the price reaches $1 million: "The people you told about Bitcoin may turn on you and assault you. You might be accused of witchcraft and thrown down a well, or worse. The mind of a nocoiner (a person who has no Bitcoin) is a dangerous place." Marco Santori, a lawyer who's represented bitcoin startups since the early days and now the president and chief legal officer of wallet provider Blockchain, recently tweeted his distaste for the word "nocoiner," writing that "it has a bitter us-vs-them flavor to it" and "smacks of partisan tribalism." But nocoiners engage in tribal signalling at least as much as bitcoiners. The nocoiner isn't just skeptical or even bearish about bitcoin. He feigns epistemic certainty that it will fail. A nocoiner doesn't simply express doubt about the use cases for cryptocurrency – he declares, unequivocally, that there are no use cases at all, in the face of evidence to the contrary. (A subset of nocoiners will assert that the only uses are criminal, implicitly committing the logical fallacy of appeal to the law.) The nocoiner mocks the bitcoiner's evangelical fervor, but he is every bit as religious in his convictions – and nowhere near as endearing. The first use of "nocoiner" on Twitter is believed to have been in February 2017, though the term's apparently been used in 4chan forums for several years. But nocoiners have arguably been around since long before Satoshi's white paper. As long as humans have walked the Earth, perhaps. In the late 19th century, Nietzsche compared the nocoiners of the day to tarantulas: "In all their lamentations soundeth vengeance ... and being judge seemeth to them bliss." Cards on the table: I myself was a proto-nocoiner in the late 1990s, a good 10 years before bitcoin's Genesis block. Working at a daily banking newspaper (a phrase that will be indecipherable to our grandchildren), I sneered at the dot-com boom and regularly gawked at F**ked Company, a website that printed unvetted rumors of layoffs and bankruptcies at the era's highflying startups (what an edgy name, I thought then). Incredulous about market valuations for companies with no profits or even revenues, I rolled my eyes and looked forward to the day when the the internet bubble would burst. Once this nonsense is over, I thought, we can concentrate on writing about serious companies. Like Countrywide, ha ha. In my defense, a lot of those tech companies I scoffed at were indeed frivolous, and most went belly-up or got acquired. But the internet still transformed the economy (though the financial services industry less so) and the subsequent mortgage boom and bust were far more destructive, all things considered. Even Fast Company is still around, while the tawdry gossip site that spoofed the magazine's name is long forgotten. Its rapier-like subtlety lives on at the r/buttcoin subreddit. The lesson from that era was not to revere entrepreneurs or to accept all technologists' claims unchallenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses over, question your assumptions about how the world will always work – and don't confuse a beautiful horse (the world wide web, bitcoin) with the flies buzzing around its rear end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox). In other words, you don't have to hold or even like bitcoin. Just don't be a nocoiner. – Marc Hochstein Share Tweet Beyond CoinDesk... OTHERS ARE TALKING ABOUT Next time some nocoiner compares crypto to Dutch tulip bulbs in the 1630s, show them this article from a history professor at King's College in London who did some digging and found that most of what people say about that supposed investment frenzy is actually untrue. For example, "Far from bulbs being traded hundreds of times, I never found a chain of buyers longer than five, and most were far shorter," the historian writes, later adding: "No one drowned themselves in canals. I found not a single bankrupt in these years who could be identified as someone dealt the fatal financial blow by tulip mania." The best part is that some of these myths got started as jokes, in satirical songs and pamphlets of the day, and were mistaken centuries later for things that actually happened. Elsewhere, a New York Times columnist considers whether the U.S. Congress should create a new federal regulator for cryptocurrency. Over in the U.K., the Independent cautions readers against joining the "moral panic" about bitcoin mining's environmental impact, noting that physical cash, particularly small-denomination coins like the U.S. penny, leave a pretty hefty carbon footprint.  And lastly ... you can keep your Lambos: "This Guy Lives on a Yacht He Bought With Money He Made Selling 'Pepe Cash,'" according to Vice's tech site Motherboard. Feels good, man. WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO This week we launched a new Twitter account: @CoinDeskMarkets, a special feed for bitcoin and crypto charts, trading talk and daily technical analysis on bitcoin, litecoin, ether, XRP and more.  Send feedback on this newsletter to marc@coindesk.com or tweet @MarcHochstein. And of course follow our main Twitter handle @CoinDesk.  Thanks, as always, for reading. Until next week ... Copyright © 2018 CoinDesk, All rights reserved. You're receiving this email because you subscribed for updates on our website. 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