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Comment by blue_light_man | Hacker News Reader

The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices.

Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations.

They are all here for their financial upsides.

Only trust the tech. The maths. If you can't do the work you would be fucked by them.

That's all.

I am not saying PG did something shady. I am saying even a well regarded figure like him in this community should not be taken for granted unless they back their claims by sold evidence.

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What I learned from this mess: nothing new. If anything this just reinforces what should already be painfully obvious: invest in real world value that you understand. I have not seen the real world value of crypto or understand how that makes makes outside of itself. Even before crypto currency markets were a thing and were like setting money on fire.

I apply that reasoning to all investments. Sure, I miss out on all the easy money hype trains, but the investment decisions are almost always safe and still better than market average.

the Warren Buffet mantra to investing. Been working now for 70+ years.

Funny how my takeaway (as someone completely removed from the action) has been the opposite: don't trust the tech, filter for trustworthy people. Time and time again we are shown that tech is not solving the human problem of greed and malice, and some kinds of tech rather amplify it.

How do you tell that people are trustworthy in the first place?

Especially if they got conned? There were plenty of trustworthy people trusting sbf.

By iterated experimentation, mostly. Social relations are a skill built on give-and-take actions on all levels, from the trivial chit-chat to lifetime friendships.

https://ncase.me/trust/

Look for signals and be skeptical I guess. Watch for over-promising. For someone giving advice, try to imagine how they could be paid or gain from selling you on this, or whether they could be influenced by people who do. For someone offering to take your money, do due diligence, look for track record and whether they make legal recourse early available. For example, transacting in cash or something similarly attractive to money launderers could be a red flag. (And yes 98% of subject industry should probably not be trusted so your filter has to be really selective.)

Make sure they have skin in the game[1], make sure they know they have skin in the game, and trust them with big things only if they have a good track record with smaller ones.

[1] In the case of dealing with money, 'go to prison if they steal it' does a pretty good job of filtering out the most common hucksters.

A dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. It’s the honest ones you should watch out for

Why trust the tech if it is built by the same untrustworthy people?

The truth is that for something to be truly spectacular in moving humanity along, you need both tech AND people. You named a bunch of celebrities…OF COURSE you shouldn’t trust those people, you don’t even know them.

Not trusting anyone is just a good way to grow old and bitter about the social state of the world.

I should have clarified. By don't trust people I mostly meant people you know from Internet and have never had a meaningful relationships with.

they have provided no evidence for which trust should be placed on their company or product.

Trust needs to be earned, and over a long time. Even a large company like google, have lost the trust they used to have, and have barely retained any back.

But if you trust people on the internet, at least your personal life won't implode in formation with your financials. MLM like herbalife and countless smaller ones, many of them in financials also on the product side, had already been preying on personal relationships before Satoshi even tossed his first coin at a hash function. Don't trust anything that looks to good to be true, and be wary of those that might be carefully tuned to stay just below that threshold.

Gotcha, makes sense. Unfortunately the phase “never meet your heroes” ends up true more often than not.

That sounds techno-utopian to me. You can't get around trust to people. Technology is run by people using rules and abstractions people agreed to adhere to.

Yes avoiding trust and attempting to construct something trustless is the biggest flaw in the bitcoin whitepaper.

Trust and identity are fundamental in financial transactions.

If there comes a day pg makes his twitter handle pg.eth or whatever nonsense a bunch of these guys were doing, I would lose all respect for him. But without that what PG and YC have provided is incredible value. Real world tangible value. Do you remember what snakes VCs used to be before YC came to the scene? Now my only fear is that Garry Tan on the other hand is indeed deep inside these scams whether knowingly or unknowingly. I hope better heads around him keep him and YC safe.

If you think YC somehow provides protection against rat duck games by VCs I have some very bad news to share with you.

I have spent and worked with VCs for over a decade. I agree that VCs like a16z and Sequoia are still snakes but YC is a forcing function for them to at least act like they are better.

you definitely shouldn't trust NFL quarterbacks. https://people.com/sports/former-packers-quarterback-brett-f...

All these people are saying "not your keys not your coins".

Should we not do that because, with one voice they are all saying that you should do that?

That is a statement one can easily verify through tech and from first principles. For example you can go through the wallet source code and verify the algorithms used.

Trust me we have the funds backed 1 to 1 in our exchange is not unless proven cryptographically.

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