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Comment by bcook | Hacker News Reader

The info is useful, but not sellable? The two seem deeply intertwined. If I can prove usefulness, I can sell it.

Actually, you say the info has "a use"... does that not directly imply worth?

The info might be useful to someone, but not to the people who are buying vulnerabilities on the black market.

Imagine going to a tech trade show and setting up a stand for your lumber business. What you're selling has value and is useful, just not to the people you're trying to sell it to.

Let's assume the position of a spammer or ~0-day blackhatter... access to the accounts of the most popular website in the world are not of interest? (You could post a URL and have millions of people click it because they trust the poster.)

That's an especially ironic argument to try to make on this particular site.

Is that a retort or simply an unrelated observation?

Edit: My intent was to understand your perspective (and argue...), but this comment goes over my head, and it seems as though it was a thinly veiled insult.

What I'm understanding here is, that while it might be profitable to someone to have an exploit on hand that they can use, the actual work that goes into turning a profit from the exploit may be me costly enough that its not worth pursuing.

Not sure if you read Cryptonomicon, but there's a part there where Randy Waterhouse finds a crap load of gold in the middle of a jungle and then rationalizes that there's no easy way to get it out of there, making it worthless at that moment. That gold has value, but no liquidity.

This is a forum focused on the startup community. The difference between the merely-useful and the truly-marketable has been discussed ad nauseum on these pages, as that difference makes and breaks many startups.

Not an insult. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11251104

If you could have been more direct, I would have been more receptive to learning, rather than confusion and feeling excluded.

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