Let’s understand Armstrong’s point. These are not hate emails, but rather they’re love emails.

I can’t speak for other cryptobugs who might be emailing Armstrong. For myself and those who I speak to, I think we respect Armstrong’s work and we don’t want to belittle, attack, or cause him undue stress. We empathize with what he has endured during the first decade of the 21st century. We’d prefer a mutually respectful relationship. It’s strange because we’ve been following him and supporting him since he was writing from his wrongful contempt-of-court imprisonment, and we admire much of his work and his extensive blogging. Much of his blogging dovetails with our positions.

The current acrimony between him and us is that he’s misrepresenting our views in public by claiming that we don’t think a CRASH & BURN is coming of the current nation-state, socialism, industrial age, debt-based system. Or by claiming that we don’t support his thesis on an imminent strong dollar, short-dollar vortex underway. Or by claiming we think cryptocurrency will immediately replace nation-state fiat currencies. We do not claim any of those. So when he slanders our position and misrepresents our position, then the mutual respect that we’ve had for him is put in jeopardy. We urge him to please be as mutually respectful as he wants us to be to him.

Also again we’re appalled at what the government did to him. And we agree that the corruption is out-of-fucking-control. And we read his recent blog wherein he stated that many of the analysts in Europe know the shit is on fire, but they can’t write anything in public that disagrees with the EU politics. And we understand his point that the large technology behemoths can’t also go against the governments. His recent blogs about GDPR have stated clearly that they’re not about stopping the data mining of the behemoths but rather to foist licensing and registration requirements on running an Internet service or website and to be able to censor dissension which is critical of the government. So they’re actually about destroying the smaller players and destroying decentralization. As you have noted in the past, and again recently w.r.t. GDPR, the West is actually destroying its own technology industry.

So we definitely understand the reasons that Armstrong is focused on the collapsing system. Our point is that the system is collapsing because it is antiquated+corrupt and yes it must collapse so that it can be replaced.

Our stance is that while it is collapsing, decentralized ledgers and intangible assets can be rising. It doesn’t require the old system to completely collapse before the new system can start growing. In fact, Bitcoin has been growing exponentially since 2009. The smartphone is now ubiquitous worldwide and was launched in the West at approximately the turn of the century. So decentralized ledgers should only be about a decade behind. So roughly ubiquitous within another decade from now.

However, in support of Armstrong’s skepticism, I offer the following link to my most recent blog wherein I explained in detail the technology of the various consensus ledgers. And frankly it seems to be impossible to achieve all of the following attributes. Pick any two: scalability, decentralization, security.

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@anonymint/scaling-decentralization-security-of-distributed-ledgers

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@anonymint/scaling-decentralization-security-of-distributed-ledgers-part-2

Armstrong wrote:

I do not know how else to say this. Cryptocurrencies are an ASSET CLASS and they are something to TRADE. All this stupid nonsense that they will revise the world monetary system with no pain and governments will be brought to the knees without firing a shot, I really do not know who makes up this nonsense. They clearly do not look at history nor do they understand human nature. We WILL crash and I hope the BURN then becomes possible where we get reasonable reform without the totalitarianism that is so common.

Cryptocurrencies are a trading vehicle – that’s it! It will by no means produce sweeping reform without the crash and burn. New ideas are adopted ONLY after a crash and burn. They called Keynes a nutjob and his ideas would be inflationary because the prevailing view was austerity. ONLY after the Great Depression did they turn to Keynes – NOT before.

I will add to what I already wrote. That we also know that cryptocurrencies are in a speculative bubble. Probably 99% of them will end up worthless in the end.

My disagreement with you is that the underlying technologies that we’re working on will likely spinoff into longer-term technological paradigm shifts.

As for the smartass remark, I am “too old” to understand the new age, I have been a programmer my whole life and what we have developed is still far ahead of the current norm.

Then I hope you’re able to comprehend my recent blog which explains the technologies in detail. If you can understand those blogs, then I will assume your skills are sufficiently up-to-date.

But the “old geezer” comment which I made because I was pissed that you were not giving us a fair hearing (i.e. back to the mutual respect point), is not really about whether you’re capable of understanding the new technology at a detailed level, but more about you apparently not being able to envision that tangible production is losing relative value compared to knowledge production. And knowledge production can’t be financed with debt which I started writing about in 2012/13:

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html

The above essay the most important to read.

(which was discussed in 2013: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0#msg3799720)

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html

https://steemit.com/science/@anonymint/the-golden-knowledge-age-is-rising

https://steemit.com/philosophy/@anonymint/geographical-cultural-ethos-science-is-dead-part-2

This is an epochal shift that corresponds with the epochal shift in the climate, reserve currency, West-to-East, rise of robotics, etc..

It’s all coming together simultaneously in the macro-scale 309 year wave that you identified.

We are by no means wanting to diminish the significance of your work. We just ask you please give a fair hearing to our life’s work and mutual respect. I’m age 53 and also have worked as a programmer my entire life. You’re a very accomplished man, but you aren’t the only accomplished man on earth.

The last time I heard that remark was when I was an adviser to Temple University. Merrill Lynch was trying to see the way to leverage your returns which ended blowing up Orange County California and resulted in lawsuits of over $2 billion from various sources back in 1994. The scheme was to buy 30-year bonds, short 10-year against them, and capture the difference. Then leverage $1 million into $10 million and the tiny spread would double the interest rate on the original capital. The Temple Board told them I had to approve it. The analysts/salesmen flew in, showed me the scheme, I rejected it and warned them that if interest rates rose, the trade would explode in their face. Their losses would be reversed leveraged. They went back to Chicago, reworked the numbers, flew back and said see it would be a break even. I laughed, told them they assumed they would be able to get out of a trade that went bad without volatility. That was a fool’s game. I explained that this was the trust fund for the university they wanted to speculate with. I would not approve it. They then told the board I was “too old” to understand the “new way” to make money.

You’ve told this story many times in your blog and I have always agreed with it. In fact, just today, I rebuked someone who was claiming there is a clever way to make a peg sustainable. I wrote:

[…] There’s no mathematical way to remove market risk entirely from a peg. Such a deterministic system would have no uncertainty.

Armstrong continued:

So the last time I was “too old” to understand the “new way” to make money was when I was 45. Human nature is always the same. When they have to say I’m “too old”, it means they have no legitimate argument to put forth. Such transformations of this magnitude take decades. NOT a single one of the big IT companies are doing ANYTHING with cryptocurrencies. Just trade it and be happy. Why put out this nonsense how it will change the world in a matter of weeks or months why that is absurd.

Hey Bitcoin launched at the end of 2008. Smartphone launched around the turn of the century. We’re probably about a decade or at most two, before cryptocurrency and decentralized ledgers could be ubiquitous. Although this hinges on someone actually solving the technological problem that extant consensus systems really don’t scale decentralized.