dsbatten on Nostr: Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live" You look at me ...

Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live"

You look at me sideways and say "Ah... why?"

I reply "Planets are awful bad. Pluto/Uranus/Neptune, you'd freeze. Mercury, you'd burn. Venus, you'd be poisoned. Jupiter and Saturn, you'd be crushed. Mars: nothing to breath.

It's true. Most of the planets, including over 5700 exoplanets, are really really bad places to live.

The conclusion that this means earth is uninhabitable is a basic logic fail.

Now imagine some self-proclaimed crypto-commentator tells you "Bitcoin is a scam"

Again, you look at him sideways and say "Ah... why?"

He replies "Most crypto has gone to zero. VCs dump on retail. Memecoins are complete rugpulls. Pre-mined tokens, you get diluted to oblivian. ICOs, you're the exit-liquidity for founders and early investors.

It's true. Most of the thousands of cryptocurrencies launched since 2009 are complete scams.

But again, the conclusion that this makes Bitcoin a scam is equally a basic logic 101 fail.

Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, the right temperature band, and liquid water.

Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with the combination of no insider enrichment, a fixed supply that nobody can change, and a 17-year unhacked decentralised ledger.

In both cases, some very special and unique features make the general rule inapplicable to the one obvious exception.

This logical fallacy has been around long enough to have a name. Aristotle spotted it about 2,300 years ago and called it the "Fallacy of Accident" - taking a pattern that's true for a category and forcing it onto the one member where evidence shows it obviously doesn't hold.

A few days ago, Ben McKenzie sat on Jon Stewart's podcast and committed this exact logic-fail: citing crypto's failures as his evidence against Bitcoin.

He's not the only one to fail in this way. Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde all conflated Bitcoin with all crypto for years. Many journalists still fail to distinguish Bitcoin from all other crypto (though the better ones are starting to).

In fact, this fallacy has been deployed for years with impunity by people who either don't know, or forgot to mention that Bitcoin has unique features making it materially different from all other crypto.

The irony is that Bitcoiners and crypto-critics are on the same page: the rugpulls, the insider enrichment, the tokens engineered to extract value from retail investors are all things that Bitcoiners like @CorySwan and other have been vocally calling out for over a decade, long before category-conflating journalists and actors from teen dramas decided they had an opinion about it.

It's not that hard

Unless you have the attention-span of a gnat-fly, you can easily do 5 mins research (AI-assisted if you really want) and discover either what the core differences are between Earth and all other planets, between Bitcoin and all other crypto.

Earth is an incredibly, uniquely habitable planet for humans to live.

Bitcoin is an incredible, uniquely suitable form of currency for humans to use.