Marc Hochstein is the editor of CoinDesk.

The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a newsletter of order information distributed every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers.

A nocoiner, according to Urban Dictionary is someone who does not have bitcoin. But everyone who does not have bitcoin is not necessarily a nocoiner.

Rather, what makes a nocoiner a nocoiner is not simply the absence of cryptocurrency from his investment portfolio, but his moralistic attitude to his respect.

The definition of the urban dictionary, which was published in December – at about the time the word was widely used in the bitcoin community – describes the nocoiners as follows:

"…. people who have missed their chance to buy cheap Bitcoin … and who [are] now have the bitterness of having missed the Nocoiner .. Bitcoin Hodlers, constantly claiming that Bitcoin is going to crash, is a scam, is a bubble, or other types of FUD easily refuted. "

In other words, a nocoiner is full of what the philosophers call resentment defined by ] The Wik as " a reallocation of pain that accompanies the feeling of his own inferiority / failure on an external scapegoat."

The Twitter user known as @crackbagged picked up this psychological idea in a Post Mean in June of last year, warning his fellow bitcoiners not to rejoice when the price reaches $ 1 million:

"The people you told about Bitcoin can turn against you and assail you, you could be accused of witchcraft and thrown into a well, or worse, in the spirit of a nocoiner.Bitcoin) is a dangerous place. "

Marco Santori, a lawyer who represents Bitcoin start-ups since the early days and now the president and legal director of the blockchain wallet provider, recently tweeted ] his disgust for the word "nocoiner", writing that he "has a bitter taste " and "a feeling of partisan tribalism."

But nocoiners do tribal warfare at least as much as bitcoiners.

The nocoiner is not only skeptical, nor even bearish on bitcoin. He fakes epistemic certainty that it will fail.

A nocoiner does not simply express doubts about the use cases of cryptocurrency – he states, unequivocally, that there is no Case of Use at All to Evidence to on opposite . (A subgroup of nocoiners will argue that the only uses are criminal, implicitly committing the logical error of appeal to the law .)

The nocoiner makes fun of the evangelical fervor of the bitcoiner, but he is just as religious in his beliefs – and far from being endearing .

It is thought that the first use of "nocoiner" on Twitter was in February 2017 although the term is apparently used in 4chan forums for several years. But nocoiners have probably been around for a long time before the Satoshi white paper. As long as humans walked on Earth, maybe.

In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche compared the nocoiners of the time to Tarantulas : "In all their lamentations, it is the revenge … and to be judge seems to them the happiness. "

Mea culpa

Cards on the table: I was myself a proto-nocoineur at the end of the 1990s, a good 10 years before the block of Genesis bitcoin .

Working in a daily banking newspaper (an expression that will be indecipherable to our grandchildren), I mocked the dot-com boom and watched regularly F ** ked Company a website that printed unresolved rumors of layoffs and bankruptcies in the start-ups of the time (what an angry name, I thought then).

Incredulous about the valuation of the market for companies without profits or even income, I rolled my eyes and waited impatiently for the day when the internet bubble burst. Once these absurdities are over, I thought, we can focus on writing serious societies. throughout the country ha ha.

In my defense, many of these technology companies that I ridiculed were indeed frivolous, and most went bankrupt or were acquired. But the Internet has further transformed the economy (although the financial services sector is less so) and the subsequent boom and slowdown in mortgages have been much more destructive all things considered.

Even Fast Company is still there, while the tawdry gossip site that usurped the magazine's name has long since been forgotten. Its subtlety similar to that of a rapier is perpetuated at the 19459009 r / buttcoin subreddit.

To be clear: the lesson to be learned from this era was not that we should revere entrepreneurs or accept all technologists' claims without being challenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses, question your assumptions about how the world will always work – and do not confuse a beautiful horse (the World Wide Web, Bitcoin) with flies buzzing around its back end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox).

In other words, you do not have to hold or even love Bitcoin. Do not be a nocoiner.

Image of empty pockets via Shutterstock.

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