The problem is perceived as bitcoin stories crowding out other ones. Hiding the bitcoin stories (or ignoring them) does nothing to solve this. If the front page full of bitcoin stories (think Erlang day) users of this extension would find the page empty besides the Next link.
And it's not getting excessive. I just clicked through 20 pages of stories, and there is less than 1 bitcoin story per page on average. Only 2 pages have 2 bitcoin stories, and none have 3 or more.
Going back pages does not give you an accurate representation of the daily front page. Also, when I go a few pages back there is suddenly a huge swathe of non-URL posts for seemingly no reason.
I lifted a dataset[1] from http://hackerslide.com which has hourly archived front pages. With that and some dumb regular expressions[2] I categorized stories and how much time that story stayed on the front page. That is, two bitcoin posts on four different front-pages in a day would be 8 'story-hours'.
I'm sure this way of measuring has problems such as different times having different amount of activity on HN.
To me it seems like there are constantly 1+ bitcoin posts on the front-page everyday. Most of the time the posts are about some trivial event (bitcoin hits 8.5 on mtgox, EFF starts accepting bitcoins, EFF stops accepting bitcoins) or a blog post that discusses bitcoin. In all of these circumstances the discussion seems to follow the same trends and go over the same ground. If there is ever a truly novel insight it would be hard to find in the mess.
