I think that most discussions of bitcoin aren't technical/development in nature, or startup oriented and bitcoin is pretty stable, tech wise. I think an innovative startup using bitcoin could get up on the front page for a while. But stories like how bitcoin is being taxed were up for a while, because that was a significant change for US people.
I think HN has actually had a fair amount of interest in the bitty coin. Heck, Coinbase is a YC company.
If people here seem disinterested, I believe it stems from a simple but subtle misunderstanding. The mindset of HN is something along the lines of 'Advances in science, technology, and our collective knowledge as a species are worthy endeavors that should be pursued regardless of personal gain'. Call it an 'open source' mindset. Bitcoin is making people money, a lot of whom are the same people posting about it on HN. For some, that's enough to ignore the technological advances and discount the whole thing.
In short...
Technology that monetizes via incorporation, series rounds, and a big fat valuation tacked on the end is socially acceptable.
I believe interesting BTC news, hits HN front-page rather often and from my experience most readers/users are fairly familiar with BTC and understand the technical side (protocol) very well.
Most HNers, being programmers, don't understand the socio-economic aspects of BTC but that's because they don't understand currencies (generally speaking) or the reason of existence of some institutions (e.g. the FED isn't a scheme of the rich for domination of the world's population, which bitcoin will finally set free, to use a free currency, with no fees, hurray!!!).
Being logicians by necessity, I'd argue that most developers could debate the socio-economic implications of bitcoin or any other currency better than you would expect.
In fact, it is my experience that most good engineers can accurately debate many concepts with which they are unfamiliar.
There just hasn't been much happening in the past 9 months with Bitcoin, it will probably take some time until the price will start to rise/fall significantly.
- Mt Gox, one of the biggest Bitcoin exchanges, closing it's doors, running away with around $500M of their client's money
- Dell, overstock, tigerdirect, paypal, braintree, balanced payments, newegg, and others started taking bitcoin
- We've had the Bitlicense proposal, we've had the canadian senate hearing
- We've seen the introduction of side-chains
- VC investments in Bitcoin companies are at more than $300M. The amount of money flowing into Bitcoin companies is almost as big as the amount of money flowing into all the internet companies in total back in the days
- We've seen the launch of professional companies like Circle, Coinbase and Blockchain had some big announcements of their own
- The FBI coins have been sold by the government to a single buyer
I could go on and on. We've seen MASSIVE amounts of huge Bitcoin news in 2014, whether you'd like to see it or not. You could not be more wrong stating that "not much has happened" during the past 9 months.
