2026-09-03
Why Do Smart People Still Hate Bitcoin?
I have a friend who runs a hedge fund. Sharp guy, reads everything, has forgotten more about markets than I’ll ever know. Mention Bitcoin around him and watch his face change. Not confusion — contempt. He’s not alone. Plenty of people who are demonstrably good with money treat Bitcoin like it’s beneath them.
And it’s tempting to just write that off as boomer energy or “old finance guys don’t get tech.” That’s the story crypto Twitter tells itself, anyway. But I don’t think it holds up, and honestly it’s a bit lazy. Some of the smartest, most skeptical people I know have looked at Bitcoin carefully and still walked away unimpressed. So what’s actually happening there?
They got burned by the wrong version of the pitch
A lot of the smart-people-hate-Bitcoin thing traces back to timing. If your first real exposure to crypto was 2017 (ICO mania, “utility tokens,” a coin for literally everything) or 2021-2022 (NFT monkeys, leverage blowups, FTX), you didn’t meet Bitcoin. You met a casino wearing Bitcoin’s face for credibility. People who are good at spotting nonsense are, correctly, good at spotting that nonsense. The problem is a lot of them never separated the original asset from the circus that grew up around it.
Category error: they’re grading it as an investment, not a system
Ask a finance person to evaluate Bitcoin and they’ll reach for the tools they know — discounted cash flow, P/E ratios, “what’s the underlying cash flow.” Bitcoin produces none of that. It’s not a company. Judged as a stock, it fails instantly, which feels like a knockdown argument if that’s the only lens you own. Whether that’s the right lens is a separate question nobody in this camp tends to ask.
Sunk cost of being early and wrong
This one’s less flattering but it’s real. If you confidently called Bitcoin a bubble in 2013, and then again in 2017, and then again in 2021, at some point changing your mind costs you something socially. It’s easier to keep being the guy who was “right that it would crash eventually” than to admit the thing survived three obituaries and might be doing something you didn’t originally understand.
They’re not wrong about everything
Here’s the part crypto people don’t love hearing: the smart skeptics usually have a real point buried in there somewhere. The volatility genuinely is disqualifying for a lot of use cases. The energy conversation isn’t just FUD. Plenty of the ecosystem really is scams wrapped in decentralization language. Dismissing the skeptic wholesale is its own kind of category error.
None of this means Bitcoin is a scam or that it isn’t a scam — it means the “smart people who hate it” aren’t a monolith, and neither are their reasons. Some are reacting to 2021’s circus. Some are applying the wrong toolkit. Some just don’t want to eat crow. Worth figuring out which one you’re actually arguing with before you argue.
If you want the fuller, less Twitter-brained version of this — the actual arguments for and against, without anyone trying to sell you a coin — that’s basically the whole premise behind The Bitcoin Skeptic’s Guide. Chapter 14, “Is Bitcoin a Scam?”, digs into exactly this tension in more detail. Twenty-one honest questions, no evangelism, written for people who are tired of both sides shouting past each other.