Honest or not, starting a startup for the sake of making money (whether that money will fund a more altruistic "end-goal" or not) is probably not the right reason to build a company.
Making money was exactly pg's reason for starting Viaweb. YC wouldn't be so hypocritical as to deny someone for advertising that as their reason, when YC itself wouldn't exist if its founder hadn't started a startup for the purpose of getting rich.
Exactly. To be more specific, I recall pg saying that his main motivation was that he wanted to solve "the money problem" (the fact that having to make money doesn't allow you the time you need to do other things).
Step back and ask yourself: What are my assumptions? Why do I believe these assumptions to be true? What if they aren't true?
You have at least 50 years ahead of you. That's a long time. But the next 5 years will profoundly shape your next 50.
If that feels like too much pressure, then simply don't worry about it. It's more important to relax than to optimize your life if you're the type of person who doesn't react well to a lot of pressure.
You can short on various exchanges, so as the market price drops, lots of people make a lot of money.
Even without shorting, as market price moves downward, it is only a loss for those holding. Those who got out at $950, and bought back back in at $800 have increased their holdings - as price fluctuates in the future, they increase their leverage.
Finally, you are focusing on fiat which is a tunnel-visioned approach. When BTC/USD drops, for those already in fiat it gives them more buying power. This is a gain, as yesterday they only had 1 BTC worth of fiat, and now they have 1.2BTC worth of fiat.
So it all depends on perspective, and you are right in your view. However there are many ways of looking at things, and my view isn't necessarily right either. I would say they are all valid examples though, of different ways of looking at it. Much harder to say which is "right".
Well BTC went down 20%, but since 80% of my portfolio is non-BTC, my BTC equivalent went up 20%!
Reality is you just lost quite a bit of money, but it makes it sound positive. Not that you automatically make these mistakes, but it is trivial to do that when letting your other currency float.
The developer is Gregory Maxwell, aka nullc. Here's a very interesting thread in which he proposes that the bitcoin community should demand that every bitcoin exchange (and every other type of service which can hold bitcoin on your behalf, like webwallets) continually prove that they are not fractional reserve. In other words, proof that if every user of the service simultaneously tries to withdraw all of their bitcoin, then the service would be able to honor all withdraw requests: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yj5b5/unverified_p...
"I think that as a community we should start demanding these services continually prove that they are not fractional reserve. We cannot effectively eliminate the need for trust in these sorts of services, but we can certainly confine the exposure and eliminate a lot of this drama. With Bitcoin it's technically possible to prove an entity controls enough coin to cover its obligations— and even to do so in ways that don't leak other business information, and so we should. But this isn't something specific about MTGox, it's something we should demand from all services holding large amounts of third party Bitcoins. I wouldn't even suggest MTGox should do it first, rather— it sounds like a great move for their competition to differentiate themselves."
Here's the takeaway:
"This would leak the total holdings, and some small amount of data about the number of accounts and distribution of their funds, but far far less than all the account balances. Importantly, though— it could be implemented in a few hundred lines of python."
In case anyone from Coinbase is reading: you have a unique opportunity to be the first webwallet service to implement this, and thereby make the entire bitcoin community instantly fall in love with you. It would also set a minimum standard of quality for webwallet services in general, which would add a lot of value to the bitcoin ecosystem. It seems like this might be a pretty big business opportunity.
This guy seems to be everywhere! He's a prolific Wikipedia contributor (administrator + many thousands of edits), and was also the guy behind the dump of a ton of pre-1923 JSTOR documents to the Pirate Bay, which in part helped pressure JSTOR to un-paywall its old/PD articles (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/swartz-supporter-...).
Agreed. How could Gox imploding result in a better bitcoin world? I'd lose a ton of money, so my little world would be directly worsened. The price of bitcoin is now about $500, but it likely would've stayed >$650. And now people will forever use this as an example of why bitcoin is dangerous: financial unregulation is dangerous.
It will be just another page in history, yes, but it's a painful one. Personally I still believe Gox will ultimately be okay since everything still has a logical explanation, but hypothetically it seems hard to believe that Gox self-destructing would be anything but bad news.
Scams happen even in supposedly highly regulated financial companies you only need to look as far as Bernie Madoff and Jon Corzie's MF Global this doesn't really have much to do with regulation.
I think the argument is that there's nothing to stop this from happening all the time and maybe even perpetrated by the same people. Yes, scams happen, but there are repercussions and sometimes preventative measures even work. The Mt. Gox soap opera is not something that would occur in a regulated baking environment (at least in the US environment), but in bitcoin it's been dragged out for months (since it became a target of the US Government). It's bad publicity if nothing else.
I believe in bitcoin and its long term potential, but there is no question that lack of regulated exchanges will stunt its long term acceptance.
"The Mt. Gox soap opera is not something that would occur in a regulated banking environment"
That just isn't true. Bernie Madoff got away with his outright ponzi scheme for nearly 10 years before being caught. Individuals expressed concern to the SEC about Madoff's investment fund as early as 1999. The SEC didn't do anything until 2009.
In the end not much money was actually lost though. The huge losses you see in the headlines were mainly the fake gains. If you "invested" $1m with me for 10 years and I reported a 26% annual return you would have a $10m account on paper, but the gains never existed and as such were never stolen. People who withdrew their gains were sued and had to return the money.
The scam was told to be $65B, but the actual losses were ~$17B and they have recovered more than half that (over $9B). Additionally the IRS let the losses be written off, so you and I ended up picking up another half of that tab.
tl;dr it was an awfully large scam, but not nearly as large as most think. Less than half the value of an instant message client actually and only a few Instagrams.
What's you point? The amount of money lost doesn't really have anything to do with regulation. people filed lawsuits to get their money back.
Good regulation implies preventing fraud through rigorous rules and monitoring before it happens or if it does before it gets out of hand to the point of needing to resort to the courts.
Isn't he in jail now? And also, which individuals? We are lucky enough to live in a society where "expressing concern" is not sufficient to put someone in jail.
Yes he is in jail, read the Wikipedia article for the details but basically people reported concerns to the SEC on 5 separate occasions beginning in 1999. The SEC ignored the complaints until Madof himself admitted to his sons in 2008 that it was a total ponzi and his own sons turned him in to the FBI. After he was arrested by the FBI in 2008 the SEC aka "the regulator" took action against him in 2009. Point is the regulator in charge didn't bother to investigate and didn't do anything.
Hashed Passwords, layman don't know what a "hash" is so they use the term encrypted since most people know what that is (even if it's incorrect terminology) It's pretty clear when they say that a weak or obvious password would be easier to crack, hash tables.
More seriously, if the software was set up to retransmit bitcoin after a "failed" transfer, then that service could be exploited automatically. Mostly, this wasn't a social attack. The seriousness was that many services were set up to retransmit automatically, and did lose a lot of money automatically.
Bitcoin the protocol? Bitcoin the idea? Bitcoin the network? Bitcoin the whole ecosystem?
I would argue it was an attack on Bitcoin the ecosystem, due to an _oddity_ of Bitcoin the protocol. Bitcoin the idea is still fully alive. The attack worked from within Bitcoin, the network.
There's an attack on credit cards because Target had a breach!
See, I can say ridiculous things too. Someone using bitcoins didn't follow protocol and as such as scammed out of money. This isn't a bitcoins-protocol issue, this is a people issue.
Note that the other exchanges are up now, very quickly after everyone stopped to check themselves.
Making money was exactly pg's reason for starting Viaweb. YC wouldn't be so hypocritical as to deny someone for advertising that as their reason, when YC itself wouldn't exist if its founder hadn't started a startup for the purpose of getting rich.