Hacker interview – Gummo (2020) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
He almost always starts by asking if someone grew up with both parents. That's an interesting thing to know but interview after interview this question leads interviewees down the same path and it leaves blind spots.
I hardly ever hear him ask in depth about their early experiences at schools, churches, childhood friends, extended family, the healthcare system, sports, media, etc.
There are some Freudian assumptions baked into his interview style and I think if he challenged himself to try other angles he could go from humanizing the guests to individualizing them.
To be fair, they're normally 30 minute interviews even in 3-hour long interviews very rarely do any interviewers go in depth on any subject. I think I understand what you want but I don't think you'll ever really find it.
He's interviewed drug addicts, gang members, prostitutes, gangsters, pimps, inbreds, cross-dressers, skinheads, rapists, homeless, transgenders, native americans, kids.
It lets me meet people I normally wouldn't have the patience to get to know, and it humanizes them.
(...)
The latest comments came as part of a follow-up interview published on Saturday after the initial discussion occurred in late 2020. During the first video, Gummo stated that he built four supercomputers to mine Bitcoin when it was priced at around $200-300 back in 2013, and generated more than 80,000 BTC within a year and a half. According to his claims, he has now amassed roughly 179,000 BTC."
https://cointelegraph.com/news/truth-or-fiction-popular-form...
given $1 millilon to mine ..who does that
somehow in 2014-2015 when btc is at 200-300 and already very hard to mine, gets thousands of btc with a supercomputer, which would not have worked well. he needed asics or gpu. and constantly upgrading hardware. the setup he shows would not have worked.
verdict: a great embelishment. maybe he mined some btc but nothing close to billions of dollars.
Venture capitalists? Musicians like Nas invested in Coinbase. They may have capital, high level technological knowledge, interest, but not the domain expertise to implement the code.
The claim was that an executive on Wall Street was interested in crypto and collaborated with him.
Peter Thiel’s fellowship is also in the same spirit. A billionaire gives some smart teenagers $100k to experiment and sees what happens.
On a much lower scale, even I with my limited wealth is interested in hiring someone else to do some programming exploration on my behalf, even though I’ve been a senior software engineer myself. It’s plausible that a high paid Wall Street executive finds it better use of their time and money to focus on their core competency making orders of magnitude more than a million a year, and then outsource the crypto exploration to someone else is a more effective programmer. Security people are well versed in cryptography, so it’s not that crypto currencies is out of scope of a hacker’s area of expertise.
The idea of capitalism is that people use capital to do the heavy lifting. If you don’t have the capital, then one way to get their is building up capital by working jobs in some area of expertise. After a certain point, it is more financially optimal to spend time allocating capital / assets than it is to grind away doing the labor yourself.
> $200-300 back in 2013, and generated more than 80,000 BTC within a year and a half
Which $16-24 million. That’s a significant amount, but it’s not unimaginable for the HackerNews and tech crowd. Many people here are a degree of separation or less away from that wealth. If you work at a unicorn, that person would be the founder.
What’s prosperous about the claim? That someone, who was likely sufficiently affluent and had their basic needs met, HODL’d $20 million worth of coins since 2013?
The word supercomputer may be abused, but there are Bitcoin miners who produce thousands of Bitcoin a year. A supercomputer here can just mean a really big cluster.
Does anybody know this guy? It would make me feel great that he reads Hacker News.
The follow-up interview from March 12, 2022:
Second interview was quite different. He kinda brags about being a hotshot hacker and claims to own $7 billion in bitcoin. The latter point is plausible based on the first interview, but why would you ever say that out aloud on a very popular youtube channel…
Bragging about how much money he has, however, seems both stupid and dangerous. I cringed when I heard about his wealth, on account of his own safety. If you own more than a few million bucks worth of Bitcoin, you better not say this.
THIS.
I used to think doing a PhD is lonely, but even then you have venues to discuss your ideas. Even with esoteric or difficult topics, there is an opportunity to package it for the masses. E.g. physicists.
I imagine it’s hard for hackers to even communicate with their significant others. This is not a topic you can go to school for and meet people who have the same context.
At some point during the second interview he starts to digress about current society, inter-human relationships (or lack of) and technology, the "dangers" of the meta-verse and so on. This is ok, but it is more of an informal conversation between two individuals that are not experts on those fields, and it has to be put in perspective as such.
It also shocked me quite a bit when he went into details about his financial situation and I felt a bit disturbed about his vigilante-like statements regarding his hacking activity to "protect" the people that needs protection.
At some point in this second interview I was not sure if he was talking about actual concerns regarding society and technology or if he was just projecting his own personal struggles and worries about human relationships, isolation, and meaning of work, life and everything else.
(Edited to correct some spelling and grammar)