431–440 of 553 posts
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Jokes like this make me crazy. Seriously HTTP is layer 7. Why would you bother the former senator with anything above 4? tcp/ip is just fine. your buggy code is what's broken, thank you very much.
I believe the proper honorific is to reference the highest office, so it's the Vice President Al Gore.
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I clicked through and thought you were being too harsh. I mean, it can be fun to make toy implementations of things as an exercise. Doing an SSH server in PHP would be entertaining if you liked PHP. You'd learn something. And then I read that his hacked-together-in-3-days ssh server was for use in production. In a hosting service. Wow. Just wow.
well, is it better to have a hacked MVP released in production, or spend forever making it and never actually releasing it and then missing the window?
Or do you mean this as a metaphor for MtGox? In that case, I would say that I would rather miss the window than be the famous asshole who -- oopsie! -- lost $500 million of other people's money.
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I can tell you absolutely, without question, that when it comes to security and people's funds, there is nothing courageous about a hacked MVP in production. There's a difference between someone's to-do app one weekend, and this case. If you are handling people's money directly or indirectly, you need to care about that and take it seriously. Or don't ship.
Well I would argue that the "M" in MVP would necessitate never losing anyone's money. If I were going to create a trading platform, I'd probably start with one that only accepted Play Money.
That said, "flawless accounting" would be very high up on my feature list. I think the failure here isn't launching without perfection; it's operating at scale without perfection.
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Most people who've been around bitcointalk and bitcoin-otc know not to use MtGox since circa 2011 when their stunning incompetence was at it's height. Sadly there were plenty of media shill articles when Btc skyrocketed to $1,000 last year who were promoting them as the "Biggest Bitcoin exchange" without pointing people to relevant bitcointalk threads on what a nightmare that site has been over the years. If you read…
> Most people who've been around bitcointalk and bitcoin-otc know not to use MtGox since circa 2011 when their stunning incompetence was at it's height. And still, even 2 weeks ago, tons of people defended MtGox in HN threads, and said how it's a temporary glitch and they are very good exchange and such. Even when it was pointed to them that it's a service build by a guy with no actual knowledge of exchanges and no p…
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well, is it better to have a hacked MVP released in production, or spend forever making it and never actually releasing it and then missing the window?
what if the hacks you used to build your MVP result in unrecoverable real world damage to your self, your investors, and your customers?
One of the biggest risks is, "nobody gives a fuck", which is why MVPs are so valuable. It lets you test market hypotheses.
But if you're building something handling real money, then a pretty obvious risk is, "The system will lose money beyond our capacity to absorb losses." Their failure to address that risk here is at best negligence.
But given the size of the loss, I don't think we should rule out fraud. The interesting question is, "When did they know they had a problem?" Sometimes shitty accounting systems are just naiveté. But when they persist over a long period of time in a way that just happens to cover up loss, embezzlement, or theft, then it's worth asking: did they keep the shitty accounting because better accounting would have forced them to admit something they were hoping to cover up?
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Yes, if I have any schadenfreude here it's not for him. It's for all of the people who smugly told us for years that Bitcoin is superior to our "legacy" fiat managed and regulated monetary system system in every way, and anyone who can't see that is an idiot.
Yes, trusting a third party with your money, whether MtGox or the US Fed, is a bad idea.
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Yes, if I have any schadenfreude here it's not for him. It's for all of the people who smugly told us for years that Bitcoin is superior to our "legacy" fiat managed and regulated monetary system system in every way, and anyone who can't see that is an idiot.
Don't equate Bitcoin the protocol with dodgy websites. Unlike cash, radical transparency is entirely possible with Bitcoin. Bitcoin the protocol is as strong as ever, but customers of other sites should demand proof that their exchanges and online wallets actually control 100% of the BTC they claim to have in their custody.
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Well I would argue that the "M" in MVP would necessitate never losing anyone's money. If I were going to create a trading platform, I'd probably start with one that only accepted Play Money.
He did. It was called Bitcoin
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Done correctly, mixing N together means a strict 1/N chance of getting the source correct, and being more certain is impossible. Trivialized example: a friend and I split a single bitcoin each and send half to address A and half to address B, and we each control one address. Who owns A and who owns B? If A is used to buy something, am I the buyer or my friend? Since the private keys are generated offline, the fact th…
Aren't there mixing services that completely sever the connection to you? i.e. Me and you both want to launder coins, so through this mixing service we essentially swap coins. Now my spends get traced to you and vice versa (obviously this works a lot better with more people involved)
Pretty good Ponzi. Not as impressive as Bernie Maddof's, but extra points for the tech angle.
I am not aware of any indication that this was a ponzi scheme. Saying that it was, without evidence, is misinformation. The loss of coins was unintentional on the behalf of MtGox. It may have been stupid that basic abc123 auditing would have probably revealed that there was a problem months/years ago, but evil has not been shown at this point in time.
all I know is that an awful lot of people lost money.