Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry you lost money, sincerely. One of the reasons that I'm so vocal about my opinions on Bitcoin is that I think that, when it achieves its true value of 0, it will wipe out a lot of geeks of good will.

I cannot agree that you had insufficient notice from me regarding my opinions of Bitcoin or operations in the Bitcoin economy. That tweet went as close to the line as I could without risking arrest, contemporaneously. It was preceded by probably a few hundred comments on HN and Twitter about Bitcoin and businesses in the ecosystem.

I appreciate that you want a list of steps you can take in the future. I have described a way to reproduce the unpaid, unpublished original research project which I did, in sufficient detail for any competent researcher to reproduce it.

You think that that series of steps is not actionable. I respectfully submit that you are not capable of reproducing it; these are two different things. You are illiterate in the language that the research was conducted in. I'm sorry; that is true, and it is the nicest possible way to phrase it unambiguously.

You should, in the future, not make investments which you are incompetent to evaluate the risk factors of. If you must, you should secure the advice of competent professional advisors. If you believed yourself competent to evaluate the risks of doing business with Mt. Gox or believed the quality of the advice you had to be adequate, you should be skeptical of your self-assessments of your competence or your ability to evaluate competence in a professional advisor, and apply this skepticism to your reasoning process about future investments.

(For context, I edited out "if you'd made a ruckus on HN, you could've prevented a lot of suffering" from my previous comment. Mostly because I disagreed with myself that it was up to Patrick to do that.)

Patrick, I respect your writing. But your answers are rarely straightforward. Even now, when you risk nothing, you refuse to reveal precisely what you knew and how you came to know it. I'm skeptical that you knew anything of consequence, and I think this is a way for you to appear prescient. But if you say you discovered something, we have no choice but to believe you on reputation alone. I wish you'd share with us what the Great Sages know, but who can blame you for wanting to stay a member of their ranks? It's only through secrecy and obfuscation that you can maintain the aura.

    > you refuse to reveal what precisely
    > you knew and how you came to know it

I see, in his previous comment:

    > Mt. Gox said lots of things, including
    > some things which were, ahem, very effing
    > improbable and yet which alleged very
    > specific facts about people outside of the
    > building

and then a list of those facts that could be fact-checked.

What could he, as an outsider, possibly have written to a bank that would let him determine whether Gox was solvent?

The simplest answer is "nothing," but we're meant to believe otherwise.

We could go through each item on that list and try to reverse engineer which entity he wrote and what he asked, but this indicates he isn't being straight with us. That's fine; it's his right. But it's a little odd. If someone performed some badass investigative journalism that could've blown the whistle on the Gox case long before anyone knew about it, who wouldn't want to brag about it after the fact? Especially when it'd be so easy to illustrate the steps taken.

We're talking basic questions like "What did you write?" and "What did they say?" But we're meant to guess.

I think a large part of the problem of "verifying" Gox was that people desperately wanted the story to be true.

If a big-name bank operated a bitcoin exchange that was repeatedly hacked, came up with a mountain of excuses about why people can't withdraw, made nonsensical claims about doing business (e.g. 10 wires/day, not trading in the USA etc.), no-one would use them.

(edit: in The Real World, I imagine they'd have been shut down in seconds flat thanks to regulations, but for the sake of convenience let's pretend regulations don't exist)

Instead, we had a plucky new underdog that people wanted to believe was creating history.

You see a business destined to fail, I see a line of incompetent exchanges playing Russian roulette. One of them died and the rest got lucky.

Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Cryptsy, more I've forgotten, were the competitors really more reliable?

I've been in a position to see some absolutely insane stuff happen on exchanges [most of it gets quietly buried), and I really don't think MtGox was anything remarkably different.

I don't think patio11 is claiming he did any in-depth investigation, and is saying that when the company seemed to start having problems they made odd claims like a bank cannot process more than X payments per day sound unlikely enough that they indicate a person lying to cover their ass

you're being pretty unreasonable. he took a look at the body of evidence, including statements from the company itself, did some follow-up (i doubt the specifics actually matter), and got a really bad feeling about it. the technical term for this is 'spidey sense'. also 'bad juju'. or 'his bullshit detector went off'.

what if the answer you're looking for is, "he called up someone at mizuho, went and got a beer, and the guy let it slip that that gox is broke."

then what? hmm? haha what are you going to do about that? that's how the vast majority of insider information (note i didn't say insider trading) is passed. are you going to replicate that the next time around on a specific asset that's about to crash, or a specific company that's going to go insolvent? good luck, friend. this is how the world works; you clearly were not in on it, none of us were, that's why a bunch of people were left holding their dicks in one hand and an empty wallet in the other (i don't deal in bitcoin because i'm too dumb to comprehend it, but i saw the carnage online).

at the end of the day he believed something differently than most. it's not any more complicated than that. that's how people generally make a bunch of money, or in this case, prevent from losing a bunch of money.

also, he lived or lives in japan and speaks japanese, so that's probably going to be the major hurdle for you to grasp his process - he has a lot more day to day context of how all this stuff works in that country. unless of course, you live there too, in which case, that's even worse for you. sorry pal.

then what? hmm?

Then... That's the answer. Obviously. The point is, he's given no answer yet made grandiose claims.

I suppose it's lucky he doesn't feel like telling tall tales. He could cook up something convincing.

Please produce the research you claim to have conducted, instead of simply calling others incompetent.

«when it achieves its true value of 0»

People who say that are people who don't understand fiat money's ONLY purpose is to track who owes what. It's debt-based. If Alice pays 1 unit of currency to Bob is because Bob gave her a product or service worth 1 unit of currency. Bitcoin is great at tracking "debt": universal, electronic, decentralized, robust, inflation-proof.

The "true value of 0" reflects the huge confidence of legacy providers (Patrick/Stripe) that crypto will sink. They may well be correct but for a community of "Entrepeneurs", it's entertaining to see the same patterns of technology disruption applying to the so called distruptors.

> when it achieves its true value of 0

I don't understand how someone can hold the opinion that Bitcoin has no value. At the very least, it enables a lot of crime, which is valuable to criminals.

Technically, the true value of any currency as time -> infinity is zero. I have no doubt that at some point in the future, USD will be worth less then the paper it's printed on.

The problem is that most of us can't wait until time -> infinity.

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