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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

If I go out and hire (say) tptacek (and the rest of Matasano) to perform a software security audit, aren't they're doing it to earn dollars? When a corporate board hires external financial auditor to look over their records, same thing. I don't see where your inference of altruism comes in.

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The difference is that tptacek won't claim that he's doing it because he cares about your software; he will say he's doing it to earn money. He will definitely try to do it well to maintain his opinion of a professional, but he won't be pretending he does something altruistic.

I'm not saying doing things for money is inherently bad. I'm just saying, let's call things what they are.

I still don't see where the claim of altruism comes in. We're labelling things for their effects. Matasano secures your software in exchange for dollars. I'm currently making software respond quickly to network events in exchange for dollars. The sandwich vendor makes me a sandwich in exchange for dollars. Calling us all "dollar miners", simply because we're doing it mostly for the dollars, is not really "calling things what they are" - it's a horrendously lossy focus on one particular aspect of "what they are".

I think I got the wrong sentiment from baddox's post and have been arguing against the "claim of altruism" that wasn't really made by anyone. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244741.

It was thedaveoflife who made explicit his understanding that a label of "transaction security auditing" implied altruism. He's not really answered queries as to how that's the case.

The difference is that you are exchanging money for a service between two willing parties. Bitcoin miners don't take anyone else's money in exchange for verifying transactions.

"Bitcoin miners don't take anyone else's money in exchange for verifying transactions."

Yes they do. Your whole point, I thought, was that they're being paid to do it. They presently take a small fraction of value from every bitcoin. They also receive any transaction fees offered by any of the transactions they are processing, but in practice those are presently (almost?) always zero.

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