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Andy Watson
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On Quora, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong expressed his ideas about Bitcoin community, its users bigotry to the currency systems, and praised the increasingly popular Dogecoin.
Crypto-currencies have already become mainstream, and each one has developed its own set of users and a rather committed family all over the world.
While Bitcoin has occupied the top place among all digital currencies, Dogecoin is already snapping at its heels, gaining a popularity especially among Reedit users. Even its CEO is a big fan of doge-meme inspired currency.
In his post on Quora the CEO of Reddit, Yishan Wong, answers the Quora question “What does Yishan Wong think about Dogecoin?” where he talks about his attitude towards the crypto-currencies, and explaining both its pros and cons, as well as their iterations including dogecoin, which he effusively praises, saying “Dogecoin is great.” He said that the best thing about Dogecoin is that its user base is different than Bitcoin’s.
“It’s not about bitcoin. It’s about anyone being able to create and launch a crypto-currency much like bitcoin, but with little tweaks and changes to fit the usage needs of the population looking to transact in it.”
Crypto-currencies may be the same in Wong’s eyes, but the ideology behind the crypto-currencies is the differentiating marker. And Wong is not particularly taken with Bitcoin’s userbase:
“Without being too inflammatory, the userbase for bitcoin is basically crazy libertarians who are increasingly poorly-informed about currency systems and macroeconomics. I say “increasingly” because at one time it was fairly well-informed libertarians but as the currency has become mainstream, it’s attracted more poorly-informed individuals and the conversation have become more polarized and less knowledge-based, driving the well-informed and balanced people away, or at least prompting them to recede into the background.”
In some ways, Bitcoin has become synonymous with the techno-libertarian dream. It is as much known for being the first crypto-currency as it for its desires to break free from government and traditional baking institutions. Wong thinks this is ridiculous:
“Thus, I think that the obsession in the bitcoin community with bringing down central banks, fiat currencies, and governements (sic) is misguided and generally misses the point of bitcoin, which I think is that for the first time in history, we have the technology for enabling extremely low-friction electronic payments and certain trust-delegation mechanisms. That in and of itself is incredibly valuable.”
Although it might seem that Wong is against the virtual currency, he actually does not have any problems with bitcoin. Instead, it’s some of the users who are giving it a bad name. He argues that there is an obsession with ending central banks, fiat currencies and governments and this is “misguided and generally misses the point of bitcoin.”
“I think is that for the first time in history, we have the technology for enabling extremely low-friction electronic payments and certain trust-delegation mechanisms,” added Wong. “That in and of itself is incredibly valuable.”
In addition to saying all of this, Wong believes that Bitcoin makes it easier for tracking illicit or illegal items. This is due to the blockchain, or public ledger of the Bitcoin system, writing “I would not be surprised if the NSA is actually heavily in favor of Bitcoin because by combining their other data streams, they can cross-correlate activity on the blockchain and essentially know exactly who is doing what.”
