441–450 of 553 posts
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Lots of people in the Bitcoin community have been saying for years to not touch MtGox with a ten foot pole.
The problem is they also say this about every exchange. It was enough for me to send half my btc to coinbase, but not enough to warrant any real urgency about it. Thus I lost about 7 btc due to this fiasco.
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And that is the point. Bitcoin as an open system means we are ALL the regulators. Issue is we cant see their FIAT.
How are we regulators? How can we demand anything from any enxchange? How can we punish them if they violate the rules, or our trust?
They are beholden to no one and there is no way to punish them if they violate the rules. (rules in the BTC world?! blasphemy!)
So Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value. And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that did it". So no cops, no jail sentences. I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. If you've been following this closely and you aren't writing the book already, you're missing out.
>I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. Madoff was estimated at ~$65b, the Enron settlement was $7.1b, Lehmen folded with $600b in assets, Comp-u-card overstated income and costed investors $14b, etc. etc.
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There is no such thing as money without trust of third parties. Transacting under the auspices of a neutral, trusted third party is what money means. The Fed has the backing of a sovereign power with its own currency and is central to the largest national economy in the world, as well as a great deal of the international economy. If MtGox's earned trust was an apple, you could see the Fed's from space.
"Transacting under the auspices of a neutral, trusted third party is what money means." Can you explain this a little more? How do I need to trust a 3rd party when I use, say, gold as money?
You have some apples, and Alice has some oranges. You would like some oranges, but Alice doesn't want any apples. So you go to Bob and sell Bob some apples for gold. You give Bob a bushel of apples, Bob gives you a bar of gold. Now you go take this bar of gold to Alice and try to trade it to Alice for a bushel of oranges. Alice tells you to fuck off, she doesn't want a bar of gold any more than she wants an apple. Bob doesn't want his bar of gold back, no backsies. No one in town wants a bar of gold, in fact.
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> And then I read that his hacked-together-in-3-days ssh server was for use in production. In a hosting service. That sounds like a brilliant technical guy, capable of running with a daft idea to completion (unlike me, with my collection of at-best-half-built personal projects), who should have some layers of protection between him and Real World Production...
That reminds me: "Now, people who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. " http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html
Inexperienced (young) programmers don't know what's been tried, and what's available. I've been dealing with this a lot at work recently, where we ended up doing poor reimplementations of off-the-shelf stuff due to a mix of ignorance, and honestly, a bit of hubris.
It's a good attitude to have in academia/non-production critical work, but the GP is right, production demands a more conservative approach, especially when money/safety is at stake.
The type of ignorance Joel writes about (see parent) is different, it's more like "slavishly following design patterns" and "writing copy-and-pasted, improperly factored code". Both are ignorance, but the first is better called "NIH", whereas Joel's is, "writing bad code".
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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.
Putting on my Lean Startup hat for a sec, I would even say that the M could allow for losing money. If it's early on and your customers are all in the 2 1/2% of innovators, they will put up with a little of that. Certainly if you make them whole, but probably even without. 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 opera…
I think minimum feature scope doesn't necessitate poor-quality software, just solutions that don't do everything for everybody. It's much better to ship a small feature set with very high quality, IMO, than a big feature set with low quality.
"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
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Bailouts.
Bailouts, plus a regulatory apparatus making fraud and deception harder to get away with, plus criminal and civil liability for illegal financial activity. But what's the state good for anyway?
Make the corporation pay back every penny they got illegally, then hang the bastards high to set an example.
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I've been around. What is bitcoin?, and who cares about whatever the hell 'Mount Gox' is?? Can we all get back to work on something meaningful to the future, family, or nature... someone we don't know about made up a currency, and some other company we also don't know about made up an 'exchange' of this 'currency' and now we still don't know what's going on and some 'bitcoins' are missing... the most it's all worth i…
> I've been around. What is bitcoin? From https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf : Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. Of course, t…
Pretty good Ponzi. Not as impressive as Bernie Maddof's, but extra points for the tech angle.