Topic: Reducing my bitcoin evangelization to non bitcoiners. (Read 362 times)

I've repeatedly over several years mentioned bitcoins for several people, and I've always taken care to only explain and tell about it to those I thought were receptive, meaning programmers and tech-people mostly. Sadly most of them haven't even done an ounce of effort in trying to understand the system, and several have even used shitty arguments from the press like 'bitcoin can be hacked and wallets stolen', 'too volatile', 'not backed by a government' etc. I have even sent out a few 'told you so' e-mails when I saw the price increasing rapidly and wanted some selection of my friends to benefit from it.

My goal was never to force bitcoin down the throat of anyone, but to sow a seed that they had to nurture and grow themselves.

After getting some feedback about bitcoin 'not being exciting' and too many of my connections 'not getting the point', I think this is it - it's time to rather spend the effort to contribute in the community and help build services using bitcoin. Some people would not 'get it' even if you said to them: Run 500 meters, and there will be 2 grands waiting for you on the grass.

Personally when I first heard about bitcoin I was sceptical, but I thought I had to keep an open mind, so I did some serious research for several days, and by the end of my research I was convinced this was something that was going to become big. This was back in early 2011.

I just does not get it why some people don't get it - but after extensive communication with a lot of these people, and they not really counteracting my arguments, but just spewing uneducated garbage for the large part, I've come to the conclusion that those people have no intention or desire to actually look seriously into bitcoin. It takes effort. Effort is something many people don't like too much.

It's the same with everything in life - if you want to go anywhere, you need to put forth a tremendous effort, and not give up when you meet obstacles. It's the mindset that's different between entrepeneurs and visionaries that see a possibility and grasp it and thos who doesn't get it, most of those people will forever be mediocre in every aspect of their life, because they rather waste their time rather than put it to productive usage.

I must say the worst thing was a friend who started to argue with me almost like it was a point of 'winning' the discussion, and that every argument I put into the discussion he had to dismiss some way or another.

When I started talking about inventions that was met with big resistance but that actually changed the world (air-plane, internet, telephone etc.) there wasn't even a response.

I do not get why people think they're entitled to an opinion about something that they do not know anything about. If you read a few news articles about something, that means that you know very little about the matters on hand, except from what the newspapers wrote.

Every case, every concept, every idea, every event has more to it than what you can glean from a newspaper article. At the very least, the only logical way to handle something is to try to educate yourself about it and then form an opinion, or just say that you're not interested in putting in the effort and that you don't know anything about it.

It's never been my goal to convince others to get into bitcoin, I just wanted to be a genuinely nice guy and introduce them to it, and then they could chose whether they wanted to invest or become involved somehow.

The only conclusion I have is that the certain subset of people I've tried to introduce bitcoin to are intellectually lazy. And this also holds true regarding the people I've worked with for the last few years, only a tiny percentage are actually hard workers that are creative, enthusiastic and really into their work. Most people only do the minimal amount of work required. It's especially annoying once you go towards a deadline in a software project, and you've repeatedly told the slow guys in the team that to avoid serious crunching by the end, it's important to work consistently from the very start of the project, and rather do things sooner than later. Lack of people putting in the effort often means that I and others who actually do put in a lot of work have to work very intensly together with the rest of the team when the deadline approaches, resulting in pulling allnighters. Which frankly is not neccessary.

Good team-mates are very hard to come by, and even those who work hard have their own quirks that makes it hard to cooperate when the stress level is high.