Schadenfreude
antipope.org
antipope.org
Leaving the entirety of your BTC savings on an exchange provided and managed wallet is utterly insane at the best of times but to have done so with MtGox was just asking for it.
There are countless examples stretching back years that reveal MtGox was nothing more than a badly run website put together by a bunch of amateurs who took an early bet on Bitcoin and got lucky.
It's been obvious to anyone who performed even the most basic of research that MtGox would one day blow up spectacularly and there have been vastly better options available for a _long_ time now: http://www.bitstamp.net, http://www.kraken.com and http://www.coinbase.com
It's sad people have lost money but MtGox users largely have only themselves to blame. The writing's been on the wall since almost forever, better alternatives have been available for a long time now and, regardless of the exchange, they should never, ever have left significant chunks of their BTC net worth on a wallet not under their exclusive control. If you leave all your money on an exchange controlled wallet, you'll eventually end up like the poor chumps who bought penny stocks from the Wolf of Wall street: robbed.
I just hope the entire BTC ecosystem doesn't come crashing down in the fallout.
As for MtGox users who lost money, I would think this counts as a capital loss that can be written off on their taxes. It can be used to offset capital gains or to reduce their AGI by $3,000 per year with carryover of losses into future years. It will be interesting to see the stance that the IRS takes of people who bought BTC for $1,000 each and then it turned worthless due to Mt Gox. The money is either gone due to capital loss (in which case it's deductible) or theft (in which case it's deductible, but better get a police report).
More discussion from a few months ago:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230477310...
So I'm not interested in blaming the victims here. What happened to them was perhaps predictable and certainly tragic, but like with the recent housing crisis it's important to distinguish between people who we wish had known better, and people who actually did have a moral or professional responsibility to know better. If anything, I'm way more interested in blaming the relevant regulatory agencies for not being quicker to do their jobs by ensuring that Mt. Gox was behaving responsibly. Perhaps this whole crisis could have been averted if, 3 or 4 years ago when BTC first got big, someone had thought to knock on their doors and said, "Hey, I'd like to meet your accounting team."
Just like you don't go on holiday somewhere far flung and a bit edgy and decide to walk down the street with all your money, passport, jewellery and documents on you.
That's understandable if someone just bought a couple bitcoins on a lark when they were under $100. But there are people who have lost a significant fraction of their net worth - those are the ones who really should have taken the time to know better.
Exactly. We really do need to design systems to be used by the human beings we actually are, not the super-humans we like to think we are.
Until then, it's going to be the currency equivalent of fantasy football, with a side business in digital transactions for otherwise illegal activity.
The problem I have with this comparison is the mortgage defaults and the subprime mortgage crisis were largely caused by personal greed. People thought that they deserve a house (and an expensive/big one at that) no matter if they could afford it or not. There was very little if any personal responsibility or financial planning.
I'm honestly not sure why anyone would have kept a substantial amount of BTC on Mt. Gox. If you are holding BTC, why not move it somewhere like Coinbase, where there may actually be some level of oversight and technical competence? You could always have moved it back to Mt. Gox to sell, and the transaction fees are trivial.
Frankly, that's not much better. Just move your BTC off the exchange in to your own private wallet. There's no excuse or good reason not to.
Make sure your private wallet is encrypted with a strong (16 char+) password, keep it on a USB stick and, every time you send coins from it, back it up again to a few places (spideroak, a second usb stick, CD-ROM, whatever).
> MtGox users largely have themselves to blame.
I agree but there is plenty of blame to go around. Right up until gox suspended bitcoin withdrawals almost everyone was quoting the gox price for over-the-counter transactions. Every time the gox price was used it gave mtgox.com legitimacy.
You are absolutely right about this and it certainly didn't help. I guess inertia and the fact that up until withdrawals were suspended MtGox were the second largest exchange by daily trading volume.
Funny enough, I had contact with their support desk on friday and one of my fiat withdrawals reached my banking account on friday as well.
All those countless examples with their wrintings on some wall since forever must have escaped me.
Good for you wise man.
I actually thought that the biggest exchange is also the one with the best reputation and capable of handling those transactions.
Even if MtGox had been the best run exchange in the world and was still going strong today, you should not have left 3BTC sitting in a wallet under their control. None of the exchanges have been going long enough nor is the BTC ecosystem itself mature enough to be granted that level of trust.
If you need to trade a large BTC amount always do it in a hit and run fashion, making sure the coins or cash are only on the exchange for the absolute minimum amount of time needed to make the trade. An exchange should be viewed as just that, an exchange. Not a bank or savings account.
It's a great thing to say when you want to be, as you say, a smug cunt. But it's not how investment works.
Risk and reward are strongly correlated. Some of the best investments ever have been in things that nobody understands very well.
I think there are great lessons that people can draw from this. And as somebody who hasn't put any money into BTC, I can certainly suggest a few. But "wait for perfect understanding" is not one of them. For the smart, that means, "wait forever". The less smart will just wait until they've run out of known unknowns. But there are always unknown unknowns waiting in the weeds to ambush you. Life is risk.
Risks add funny. That's why you're always told to put 15% of your investments in bonds. It's not because bonds are less risky than stocks, but because they are counter-cyclical and less correlated.
For the same reasons, putting a small amount of your wealth into very risky investments such as bitcoin can reduce your overall risk.
And if you have a good financial advisor the first thing he will tell you to do is diversify :)
This is advice is really not plausible to follow. Even the professionals can't figure out all the issues they need to figure out. That's why:
a) so many old corporations get disrupted from the blind side and die
b) so many acquisitions become a waste of of the acquiring company's money
c) so many startups fail
d) etc, etc
Any type of investor in any type of industry or stage of life will know that there is still risk exposure because they know they are not omniscient. How many all-star teams are there who look like sure bets? Many, many. History shows that they're not sure bets.
Yes, to do proper investing, you should do your analysis as much as possible, try to understand your target investment subject inside out, and make decisions based on sound logic and evidence, not hearsay and flimsy ideas. But you never know if you've missed seeing the black swan. The black swan doesn't hit you because you failed to do your analysis inside out. The black swan hits you because you had a blind spot that nobody could see, and you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, despite all your intellectual understanding.
The people who worked on the trading code for Knight Capital knew their stuff very well, they still missed the bug that caused their fund to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. The people at NASA were the best in the world at what they did, the Challenger still blew up. Peyton Manning won the NFL MVP and still lost the Superbowl.
Stuff will happen when there are many unknown variables in the air, and you won't know where your exposed to risk, even if you know the subject inside out, until it hits you. The only thing you can do is mitigate all the risks you do see and diversify so that the risk that you don't see don't hurt you as much as they would if you put all your eggs in one basket.
edit: I'll say that I agree with you to not put large amounts of money into things you don't understand. But I think the emphasis should not be put into that, but rather into diversification. Putting money into something you don't understand can be very lucrative if it looks good, as long as you can stomach the risk and afford losing all that money. So maybe I would say you should revise your statements from being about "large sums of money" and instead about "unacceptably large proportion of your money".
There's a huge gulf between the impossible ideal of somehow achieving an "all knowing, zen mastery" over an investment and the "this looks fun, prices keep going up and everyone else is doing it".
If you're going to risk large amounts investing in to something you should to try and get yourself as far away from the latter one as you can.
Bitcoin is in some ways, the realization of that dream. But Stross is so dismissive of it--no points for trying.
His disdain seems to be on the basis that Bitcoin is deflationary, but I don't think that's an issue for 2 reasons. Primarily, deflationary assets can exist side by side with inflationary ones with no problem. The existence of gold does not cause everyone to abandon fiat. I would argue the deflationary aspect is an elegant game theoretical solution to the bootstrapping problem and gaining adoption in a double-sided market.
Secondarily, if you think of Bitcoin as a money transmission protocol, a lossy protocol would be a lousy protocol.
If the argument is about intrinsic value, a Bitcoin is a token that allows you to transact on the Bitcoin network and that is where it derives its value from.
You must be overjoyed with the way things are going. A bit more push and we'll reach an Orwellian "dream".
My point is that this technology could cut either way. Imagine instead of mtgox we had a distributed exchange running open source code we could verify. Suddenly autonomous corporations seem less scary, at least to me.
I wouldn't read "Accelerando" as some kind of utopia, considering the eventual outcome.
> His disdain seems to be on the basis that Bitcoin is deflationary
I think cstross' problem with Bitcoin stems from exactly the same things that libertarians find so great about it: it's not taxed and nobody is in command (no monetary policy).
The fact that a major actor turned out to be incompetent highlights another area in which bitcoin is deficient: it lacks regulation (though I'll agree that the real-life banking world could use much tougher regulation and enforcement of existing rules).
You don't want the clowns running Mt Gox to design the next plane you're going to take.
Nobody wants that; the question is why, considering the history of the financial system since the US central bank was created (the Great Depression, the S&L crisis, the 2008 crisis, Maddoff, Enron, etc), what makes you think that having a centralized regulatory body avoids that problem?
That's a claim, but is it backed by historical evidence? Because the screwups of the regulatory bodies certainly are.
A problem with that argument is that people point out financial systems with central banks, plenty of subsidies, etc and claim "that's an unregulated system" because it lacks the regulations they find important, when in reality they're aren't.
Regulation doesn't have to be incompetent.
Well, the authors of the recent book Fragile by Design claim that in a populist system like the US, that's almost inevitable.
Personally, I don't hold great faith in the future of Bitcoin as a currency, but so what? It's an experiment! A chance to actually try economic theories that are impossible to test in the real world. I just hope the know-it-all conservative curmudgeons don't kill it before it has a decent chance.
I was quite disappointed by http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-wa...
You don't like bitcoin and wish it would go away. Ok, fair enough. ...but that's not a conversation. That's the end of a conversation.
Of all people I would have expected Stross (who've I've met in person and found to be quite awesome) would take the 'here's how it could be better, lets talk about it' stance, rather than 'this thing is bad and should just go away forever'.
You know, fair enough. You have a firm opinion and you're sticking to it. I respect that; but it's a boring conversation when you're not even willing to listen to the other side and talk about it.
It's his blog, it's perfectly appropriate for him to rant about things. Sometimes, you're not really interested in conversation.
Which is different from everyone else on the subject of BTC ... how, again?
Everyone seems to have their mind made up about Bitcoin, and to think that anyone whose opinion differs from their own is shortsighted, or irrationally optimistic, or idiotically conservative, or, or, or. Practically no-one seems willing to have an actual dialogue about the subject, and instead approaches these threads from a perspective of defending their established — entrenched — position.
Why should Charlie be any different?
That's certainly how I feel about it. I'm sure there are people capable having a rational, nuanced discussion about it. But 99.7% of what I see online is glibertarians, gold bugs, utopians, tulip bulb salesmen, tinfoil-hat survivalists, people dreaming of the singularity with one hand in their pants, sociopaths, wannabe-drug lords, day-trader driftwood, sexist creeps [1], and people who make Richard Stallman look reasonable and well-groomed.
I'm hoping that this crash is severe enough to get us to the Trough of Disillusionment [2], so we can find out if there's a pony in there somewhere [3]. But honestly, I doubt it.
[1] http://www.ariannasimpson.com/this-is-what-its-like-to-be-a-... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle [3] http://judymintz.com/2012/12/04/theres-got-to-be-a-pony-some...
I view the lack of regulation as a feature, not a bug.
Bitcoin is an arena for innovation and new ideas for micro transactions and programmable contracts and probably lots of decentralized things nobody has thought of yet. Were it left to the existing financial regulators and institution, the pace of innovation would be glacial and they would prevent most new ideas from coming into fruition. Why would they want innovation? They have an effective monopoly and use regulations to prevent competition. And these companies know that if they take major risks and nearly kill themselves, that they'll almost certainly be bailed out by a magic bag of free money.
It's refreshing to see a financial system with no bailouts for companies that crash and burn.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is just a land where P. T. Barnum is endlessly proven right. Nobody gets hurt who isn't dumb enough to play.
Insofar as an apartment renter is violating a rental agreement to effectively lease out their apartment to a third party without permission, I can see your point. But this isn't always the case. I'm open to hearing about your opinion, but not sure how AirBnB can really be considered a predatory company at any rate.
http://www.rooflines.org/3498/airbnb_way_to_make_ends_meet_o...
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airb...
I emphatically disagree. A site, upon offering a wallet-type service has (or would have, in the presence of regulation) a fiduciary duty to its users to protect their holdings. ISTM that in the Wild West of Bitcoin, the situation is, instead, "Sucks to be you."
Maybe you're comfortable living in that world. I don't think that's remotely grounds on which to suggest that everyone else should be comfortable with the same level of risk.
This was an expected outcome given what information was public about Mt. Gox, but I'm not suggesting that the users deserve to be out of their money.
The only thing I like about what happened is that nobody is going to bail out Mt. Gox's owners. And this incident should hopefully make people more cautious about where they store their money.
> Maybe you're comfortable living in that world. I don't think that's remotely grounds on which to suggest that everyone else should be comfortable with the same level of risk.
I'm also not suggesting that everybody else should be comfortable with any particular level of risk. The great thing about Bitcoin is that it's voluntary. Nobody is forcing another human to use it - you only do so if you feel it's the best avenue for you.
That said, I see the lack of regulation and high level of risk as something that should just be taken into account by the buyers. This necessarily means only dipping your toe in and experimenting, not viewing it as a solid investment. When it becomes more secure, less volatile, and easier to use, people can take larger positions in it.
Also, we should probably come up with better software solutions that don't rely on third parties.
You can't really do anything this big without some people getting burned, unfortunately.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-airbnb-party-hou...
If Bitcoin succeeds, this won't be a problem.
My point was that predictability is the more important characteristic for value transmission, not trajectory.
Charles Stross should love the idea of Ethereum, then:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9671/ethereum-next-generation-cry...
At the moment, he's burning through his accumulated goodwill almost as fast as the central bankers he seems to love so much are printing money. It's disappointing and sad.
Maybe in the end it boils down to this: Either you believe that insight can be gained from what Economics has to offer, even though you always have to check the underlying arguments, due to the different schools of thought out there. Alternatively, you can wave it all away as needless nonsense and trust in the collective cognitive power of young men high on technology.
Your choice.
There are a lot of idealists in the anarcholibertarian community who talk about "violence" as something that can be taken off the table. And what this shows is that violence is endemic. You can't take it off the table, you can just think of different ways to manage it.
I would really like to not see Bitcoin regulated or protected, except to the extent it is used to subvert meatspace laws. I just want to see what would happen if, e.g., it wasn't considered a crime to "steal" bitcoin. Ideally, it should also be legal to mug someone in real life for his bitcoin, so long as bitcoin is the only thing taken. Because cryptocurrency or not, holding a gun to someone and asking them to hand over the bitcoins they have under their mattress is always an option. Then we could see if the community came up with non-government based solutions to these problems.
What if Bitcoin does recover? Would that change your opinion?
"But Bitcoin doesn't have a fiscal policy: it wears a gimp suit and a ball gag, padlocked into permanent deflation and with the rate of issue of new "notes" governed by the law of algorithmic complexity."
Out of curiosity, what's your opinion on crypto-currencies that aren't deflationary, or that rely on proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work?
This is what's interesting to me about all of this. I don't think anyone knows whether or not it's going to work in the long term. The only predictions (both positive and negative) that I've seen have come from dogmatism and not from data. The ultimate test is whether or not it actually works. Very rarely are radical ideas like this put to the test, which is why it's so exciting to watch it unfold. I have no idea what is going to happen.
Well, that's because we've never had a cryptocurrency of this scale before. Of course, we've had other alternate currencies (Ithaca Hours, anyone), and based on that data, Bitcoin's future doesn't look too bright? But you could make the argument that those aren't the same.
One reason that you aren't seeing much "hard" data in favor of Bitcoin is that the Austrian school of economics (which provides the foundation for deflationary economics) actively rejects empirical research and deductive reasoning[0][1].
In contrast, virtually all economic models that are taken seriously[2] do try to incorporate fundamental principles (inductive reasoning), but revise those in the face of empirical evidence when necessary (a process that's not dissimilar to what is done in, eg., quantum mechanics - a field in which theory oftentimes advances beyond the means to test theories empirically).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School
[1] https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp
[2] Yes, I am excluding Austrian economics, because very few non-Austrian economists actually take them seriously
> Critics generally argue that Austrian economics lacks scientific rigor and rejects scientific methods and the use of empirical data in modelling economic behavior. Some economists describe Austrian methodology as being a priori or non-empirical
a statement which includes citations from five different sources. You may disagree with that conclusion, but I think it's clear where I found it in those two links.
And if you dig a bit more into both of links that I provided, you'll find a more detailed exposition, even in sections that don't use the word "data" explicitly.
My favorite example of this is the ultimatum game [1]. The game has two players. The first player proposes a split of a "pot" of money. The second player can accept that split and take their share, or reject the split leaving both players with NOTHING.
The "rational" action for the first player to take is to suggest a split where he keeps the largest amount of the pot possible. The "rational" action for the second player is to then accept that split, because something is better than nothing.
As you can imagine, real-world runs of this game have proven that nobody acts "rationally" (splits of less than 20%, when proposed, are often rejected). Homo economicus [2] doesn't have emotions or empathy. It doesn't value extrinsic things like "justice" or "fairness". Homo sapiens does.
In other words, while people might act rationally, the economic definition of "rational" and the common definition of "rational" are often two entirely different things.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
I agree. I was mostly trying to assert that we shouldn't confidently make predictions in the absence of data.
I didn't know about the Austrian School's attitude toward empirical research--no wonder I don't agree with what they say.
Anyways, the thing with transformative new products is you have to be notably better in order to get people to switch. "Just as good" isn't good enough. "Less good but you get a lot of ideological satisfaction if that's your thing" is certainly not good enough.
So far, BTC is a speculation vehicle, not currency.
If anything, my views are learning towards BTC being a widely used medium of exchange (not necessarily a medium of account) but a poor speculation vehicle. Demand for BTC is (sublinearly) proportional to transaction costs and the size of the BTC economy - I can easily envision scenarios where transaction costs go sufficiently low that BTC demand remains low.
I do some math here if you are interested: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/demand_for_bitcoins.h...
I'd agree that this doesn't change the fundamentals of BTC, actually. If enough speculators didn't know that this could happen, maybe this changes perception enough to doom BTC, but it would have been doomed anyways in that case.
I'm not convinced that it's possible for BTC to become a widely used medium of exchange without also being a medium of account -- it's just too much friction for your average retail user to convert to BTC in order to buy something while holding most of their wealth in dollars or whatever. Why not just buy in dollars? If the only utility is to mask shady purchases, it might have a future in that niche, I guess, but that implies a small BTC economy in the long run.
I guess I can see a place for a crypto currency with a stable exchange rate to other currencies, as long as the crypto part holds up and the volatility mellows out, there's real utility there for people who want untraceable purchases. But BTC as "god's currency for true believers, going to take over the world because we have an unrelated ideological beef" doesn't really impress me.
What I envision: I take an auto and the driver tells me the fare is 100rs - 60rs meter + 40rs because fuck you it's Bangalore. He gives me a BTC wallet. My phone goes to an exchange, converts $1.65 or so into BTC and transmits to the drivers wallet. His phone then converts the BTC into rs.
I'm generally viewing BTC as a medium of exchange for cases that would otherwise require a bank transfer or currency conversion. There are a lot of these.
Just because Bitcoin is unregulated and uncontrolled today does not mean it always will be.
And to my original point:
MtGox incompetence is not much of a data point either way, other than that MtGox couldn't have come into existence in a more mature landscape.
Can’t speak for the author (who’s actively commenting here) but I believe the idea (common in Transaction Cost economy) is that whether Mt.Gox were amateur was hard to determine without knowing how to operate for yourself the kind of service that they provided; not necessarily at their scale, but well enough to go without them. This means that most folks who were interested in their service were presumably not able to sort them from the other: lots of assumption there, but imagine shill-ridden forums, cross-accusation of cluelessness, the FBI presumably involved, them being in Japan…
This is not a new problem, far from it: I would recommend Avner Greif’s ‘Magrihbi traders’ and the reappraising discussions by its author. A casual reader could leap the century of nepotism-based boating, and the local fairs in Europe to conclude that the invention of currency, concomitant with the Nation-State, were both a way to empower trade. A less casual reader (like me) would love to send Greif, (the now late) Coase & Oliver E. Williamson to Japan and on-line to investigate what went wrong.
Once you have a State, why an inflating bureaucracy is also a classic result of transaction cost theory and an issue in organisational incentive — but I don't think that part is mysterious to you.
Now, that sounds like a good idea. But at that point, we're talking about a cryptocurrency equivalent of real grown-up money, which would sort of kill its appeal to a lot of the folks who rant on about the evils of fractional reserve banking and hoard gold because they think it has some sort of mystical inherent value -- the sort of folks who invest in what William Gibson termed "Dunning-Krueger-rands".
Now, that sounds like a good idea. But at that point, we're talking about a cryptocurrency equivalent of real grown-up money
I'm extremely amused, because Dogecoin is inflationary. So Dogecoin is "real grown-up money" by your definition.
Some of us are interested in it because Bitcoin represents an experiment into a distributed network for ownership, in the same way that the Internet is a distributed network for data.
Ultimately, the economics of Bitcoin don't hugely matter in the long term, because crypto-currencies can be programmatically traded between different blockchains using distributed contracts. The hard part is getting an interface up between "normal" currency and crypto-currencies.
There are already some crypto-currencies out there that experiment with different economies and setups. Dogecoin (yes, that Doge) has a fixed inflation rate, for instance, while Peercoin uses a proof-of-stake/proof-of-work mixup that gets around Bitcoin's large use of computing power.
Nobody is preventing you from coming up with awesome-inflationary-proof-of-stake-charlie-coin. NOBODY. The source to the variety of coins (there's more than a hundred) and the variety of non proof-of-work based ones, is all online, on github mostly.
You're just sitting on your blog bemoaning and insulting the community, and you do jack fucking squat.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Git push or shut up.
You don't want to do that? Well that's grand then, you're just sitting there on the sidelines with no investment either way and spouting your bullshit theories but no willingness to put your money where your big potty mouth is. that's rich Charlie, really grand.
And of course, by "fiscal policy", we have come to agree that this means that banks can do what they want without any imposed limit and will always unconditionally be bailed out by the public (which mainly consists of people who are not only not benefiting from the banks' practices, but in fact are actively exploited by them for some ledger-juggling short term winnings; see the so called "housing bubble").
My bitcoins in my personal wallet seem to be "riding out" everything just fine. What am I missing?
Did he say there was an "insult to the dollar currency" when Lehman Brothers went under?
He didn't say as much, but it wouldn't have been that inappropriate if he had. The fall of Lehman Brothers actually was a symptom of a failing currency, just because the USD and most other currencies around the world are failing much slower than BTC, doesn't mean they're doing alright either. There's a world-wide currency war going on where everybody is trying to devaluate their currency to try to inflate away debt, so yeah, you could say the fall of Lehman Brothers was (part of) an "insult to the dollar currency". That doesn't make BTC any better as a currency though, somehow people who like BTC always seem to mix these two things up.
In 2013 I would have agreed. So far in 2014, the price fluctuations have been modest(though different people have different tolerances for risk, of course)
But it's just sad. There is no joy to be derived out any of that.
Why would you want a BTC exchange to fail? Or even the whole currency?
What's the popcorn for? You're gonna laugh at posts written by people who lost money? Isn't there an endless stream of youtube videos where someone is getting hurt because of their stupidity and with higher production values (HD!) than a bitcoin forum?
A lot of commentary looks to me like a completely pointless exercise in signalling that amounts to "I don't like those libertarians/nerds who are pushing bitcoin. Dorks."
The distinction here isn't inflation vs deflation, but flexible policy set by current leaders according to circumstances vs rigid policy set by past leaders according to ideology.
I can see why external regulators ensuring Mt. Gox's solvency (or various blockchain based surveillance mechanisms proposed by a number of people) might have helped this situation, but that has little to do with a central bank altering interest rates and purchasing assets to tweak the money supply.
I just don't understand the connection between monetary policy and fraud prevention/bad accounting/etc. Explain like I'm a 5 year old child.
I get along with most ideologies but blaming "bitcoin" when really it's just a rulebook in cpp that a bunch of people voluntarily decided to run is somewhat silly and misguided.
I like that about the gimp. I don't want him to have compassion with MtGox or those who've been told to stay away from MtGox for over a year.
Yes people should not have kept their stuff on Gox. People have been warning from Gox since 2011 (where has Charlie been there? Nowhere, ahyes, hindsight 20/20 and all that?).
But it happened, and now there's lots of angry and hurt people. Maybe not add insult to injury mkay?
There are people who have paper losses. Losing something you never had feels bad, but it's not an actual injury.
There are people who put real money into a completely unregulated financial instrument via a completely unregulated financial company named after a trading-card game. Hopefully they took the advice that's in the first chapter of any book on money management and didn't bet more than they could afford to lose. If so, then there's no hurt.
There are the people who had no clue and took a bath. They did get hurt, and I feel bad for them, but they are incidental to the drama.
Then there are a lot of people who have been hyping BitCoin to the skies. Where they got hurt is in their egos. There, I think adding insult to injury is richly deserved. They are the people who led the clueless into this, so fuck them.
And insulting people who just lost real money in whatever fashion. It's just not considerate. But, if Charlie had been there, the last 3 years, warning people off gox, well, I would emphasize. BUT HE HASN'T. Stross the dickwipe wasn't there, trying to wean people off Gox. He has only opened his piehole today, because it's the hip talk of today. It's shameful and illconsiderate. It's also showing an astounding lack of empathy as to be basically psychopathic.
Stross is a walking talking psychopathic incident waiting to happen.
He has been warning about BTC in general and there are many, mainly speculative, aspects of Bitcoin that are prone to people getting burnt.
To very many people, this is no surpise. At this point, these people are quite grumpy for having been laughed at by some members of the Bitcoin community.
But that doesn't mean you should insult the people who did get hurt by gox. They lost $55m in fiat and 770kbtc (around $0.5b). They're in a bad place right now, and they're gonna learn their lesson without pissing from on high.
But Stross's words aren't mainly directed at them. They're directed at MtGox, and the many people hyping BitCoin and waving away any need for regulation. And you know what? Those people deserve mockery. The MtGox people lost and/or stole the money. And the BitCoin fanboys created the shangri-la atmosphere that tempted a lot of fools in.
I also will enjoy it when the investors who funded duds like Lucas Duplan (Clinkle) lose their entire investment and some degree of reputation.
I'm a regular reader of Valleywag and whenever some poser gets humiliated, I'm glad to see it.
You know what this is not? It's not schadenfreude and I wish people wouldn't use that word.
I don't want these people (HN libertarians, top VCs, Silicon Valley scenesters and idiots) to suffer. I just don't care if they suffer. And, so it is that most of the best things for society right now hurt the people at the top of that world.
However all enterprises are designed to enrich those who got in early. If you have an alternative model, please suggest it, otherwise this sounds like a bitter and empty criticism.
Replace Business A with Bitcoin.
>I wish people wouldn't use that word.
Why? There is no English equivalent and it represents a concept that is a well known phenomenon which has been subjected to scientific studies.
I wish they wouldn't use it when it doesn't apply. It's a perfectly fine word.
Psychological studies of the kind you're referring to aren't scientific. To be valid science, a study must test a theory, an explanation, but the class of studies to which you refer only describe. Sort of like saying, "The night sky is filled with little points of light," and calling it astronomy.
What the hell are you talking about?
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/69046
Abstract: To test the hypothesis that Schadenfreude, pleasure at the suffering of others, will result when an envied person experiences a misfortune
http://psp.sagepub.com/content/28/7/953.short
This study tested the hypothesis that schadenfreude (or pleasure in another's misfortune) would be more closely related to resentment and a wish to correct a perceived injustice than to envy, and that sympathy would involve different processes.
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2005-11932-007
The present study tested the hypothesis that Schadenfreude, pleasure at another's misfortune, results when a misfortune is perceived as deserved.
Mt. Gox was a, har de har har, Magic card trading site (and ebay is for pez dispensers), and everyone knew that it was fatally flawed and fundamentally incompetent...that it was often cited as the go-to if you wanted to get into BC was just a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about, and everyone burned deserved what they got.
That it was by far the largest such site, and its metrics were canonical for BC was just an oversight, cheered on by ignorant people. And the fundemantal, basic malleability flaw, that still existed in the reference client, was "clearly" documented in some wiki page somewhere in 2011.
And if another exchange falls, the excuses will appear immediately, making it evidently clear that all was known to any in the know long before.
Stop reading after that. For the millionth time, the problem is not in the language but on the programmer. So if it was made, by the same person, in RoR or <insert hipster language that makes your panties wet> it wouldn't suck?
An average PHP programmer is not the same as the average Rust / C / Haskell programmer. Knowing that someone chose PHP as his tool does tell you something about the author, and it's not anything good.
In all honesty it does seem like a bad language choice. A choice more likely to be made by a bad programmer than a good one. At least in my experience it's the sub-par programmers who choose to do stuff in PHP and tout it as being a fantastic language. YMMV.