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As the anarchists and idealists on HN will soon learn, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin won't make a difference if anyone transmitting it is in violation of federal law.

How would the funding method make a difference? Any money you send, cash or otherwise, is going to end up the in the same Mt Gox account frozen by the feds, with no way to get the money out. Again, see e-gold.

The exact same thing happened with e-gold a decade ago. Expect an unsealed indictment with federal conspiracy and RICO charges to follow shortly.

This was inevitable. People can wax rhapsodic about the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, but once the feds freeze a few million dollars of a major exchange's assets, as they have done with every single anonymous digital currency since the beginning of time (e-gold,1mdc,Liberty Dollar) and launch a criminal investigation, the currency will be severely destabilized.

Within the next year I expect to see a cottage industry emerge where the true believers cash out frozen bitcoin accounts for pennies on the dollar.

A corporation is just a group of people. It's not possible for a corporation to be ethical or unethical, a corporation doesn't have a soul or a conscience.

It's possible for specific people inside a corporation to behave in unethical ways. However, the definition of maximizing shareholder value is not simply "make the stock price as high as possible in the short term." It's perfectly possible for executives in a corporation to take the high road as the optimal strategy for maximizing shareholder value.

Put your email in your profile, people in HN might see this post and want to reach out.

Your burn rate is $2K/year? Where do you live?

It seems that your reality is very different from the reality I, and most other entrepreneurs I know live in.

In my world, anyone who has a credible idea and meaningful traction can get a meeting with most VCs fairly easily. Are you suggesting that after such a meeting, an investor would refuse to fund someone with a good idea because they're not enough of an asshole or connected to the right people?

There's no need to be so dismissive so quickly. Our perspectives on the world are formed by reference experiences. I've seen numerous entrepreneurs come to Silicon Valley with absolutely zero connections, work hard to build a real business that makes real money (I'm talking B2B/SaaS products, not trivial social media apps), and raise funding from top tier investors when they had enough traction.

Perhaps you haven't seen this phenomenon. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is most heavily rooted in Silicon Valley culture, but I'm sure even in New York and elsewhere, the fastest way to get ahead, build your network, get connected to the people who run the world, etc is to be as helpful as possible to as many people as possible and know that eventually the rewards will come back to you.

The above statement may seem to you full of naiveté and wide-eyed optimism, but that's the optimal strategy for success for even the most hardened cynic; look up some research on persuasion through reciprocity and liking.

Can you explain the correlation between VC connections and assholery? The vast majority of founders who raise VC money are not born with VC connections. They earn VC connections and build social capital by (usually altrustically) helping other founders, creating a product that makes people's lives better, creating jobs and building a company with traction and growth, etc. I can't help but think that some of your "VC-istan" narrative is based on a mythological caricature of the startup world rather than reality. "VC-istan" isn't a perfect meritocracy, but it's pretty close. If you have a business with traction, VC connections will come to you, asshole moral character or not.

When the stock market drops more than 10%, trading is temporarily halted. This addresses technical issues and stops a potential panic. Bitcoin has no such controls. It looks like a grand social experiment. For everyone clamoring for a completely unregulated, decentralized free market, you got it with Bitcoin. Enjoy.

Let me rephrase then: Not all traction is revenue growth, but all revenue growth is traction(again, by definition).

Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.

I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness or sampling error.

A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs B2B companies and only compare consumer companies on traffic. Many of the companies on that list(including my company MixRank) appear to be doing quite poorly in terms of traffic until one realizes that each visitor to a B2B product is worth orders of magnitude more than a visitor to a consumer product.

Or it could be the most likely explanation: the existing US federal investigation of Intrade is moving to the next phase, a grand jury has issued a sealed indictment of Intrade staff, and their assets have been frozen.

This has nothing to do with VCs. Building a business-any business-is incredibly hard and stressful. I'm not sure if you've been there, but bootstrapping a business, really building something new and unknown from nothing, is infinitely more stressful than running a funded startup.

Raising money at least gives you a little cushion, a little breathing room to experiment and fail and try again. Bootstrapping, the "you don't sell, you don't eat" bootstraping, is constant, unending stress and fear. One single mistake, one bad hire or mismanaged advertising buy can kill the business, and the stress and pressure to stay alive is constant- the sword is always hanging over your head, and at any moment you think it's going to drop.

And that's what bootstrapping a successful, highly profitable business was like. I can't imagine what sinking all your time and savings into a failure would feel like. The sheer carefree bliss of never again having to decide whether you should buy AdWords ads or eat meat this week is worth whatever equity stake you give up.

Can you put your email in your profile? Those are exactly the kinds of events/culture I'd like to get more involved with.

How did you connect with that crowd? I've noticed a very high overlap between techies and hippies, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to stumble into a group of discordians short of randomly wandering the streets shouting "hail eris!".

He founded a startup with $350K in revenue and his parents will be disappointed? Really? This guy is not your typical at-risk high school dropout. He's clearly a true entrepreneur and a winner. At this point, he can pretty much write his own ticket in life. He doesn't need the arbitrary rules and stifling structure of high school to be successful.

His parents grew up in a very different world, and they need to understand the world has changed. Education and keeping your head down in a stable corporate job are not the ticket to prosperity anymore.

It's all too easy to dismiss someone completely based on their politics, but this(and government overreach in general) is one of the issues that the left and right should be able to come together on.

Remember, Issa was one of the leading voices in Congress against SOPA.

No, the it's highly uncommon for a proscecutor to refuse to drop any charges as part of a plea bargain. Not only would Aaron have been a convincted felon, but he would have had a dozen felonies on his record as priors. If the DA didn't want to make an example out of him, they would have dropped most charges and reduced the felony to a misdemeanor as is done in the vast majority of these cases.

If they were only looking for a 6 month sentence, why did they charge him with 11 counts of fraud? The judge is free to disregard the proscecution's recommendations and sentence the defendant to the full legal maximum. This is not common in federal cases, but it does happen.

Have you ever played America's Army?

This article makes that point indirectly. If the primary value of an MBA is the network, you should only go to a school where the network has meaningful impact on your career prospects: a top 5 school.

Contacting your representatives can make a difference. We saw it with SOPA and now we see it here.

Now we, as a community, need to keep up the pressure on lawmakers and make sure meaningful reforms are passed to make sure something like this never, ever happens again.

You're failing to make the distinction between revenue and enterprise value. EV could be a manyfold multiple of revenue.

As an employee, your taxes going up by at least 20% immediately. As a startup, loss of many of your customers and a significantly more challenging funding environment due to a fall back into recession and continued economic uncertainty.

He wa compliant with DMCA requests and even gave content owners direct access to delete copyrighted files. The purpose of the DMCA is to remove liability from hosts like MegaUpload.

"The project aims to draw attention to the fact that if you have access to technical labor, the startup and operating costs for an online project in 2013 are negligible. The biggest obstacle to creating something useful is finding the time to build it and attracting an initial pool of paying customers."

Good thing that in the brave new future world of 2013 labor and marketing are completely free of all costs, opportunity and otherwise.

Are you looking for something different than a CRM? Typically people will scan the business cards they get from a tradeshow with something like Worldcard and import the CSV into whatever CRM their organization uses.

You have to look at it from a purely pragmatic perspective. Everyone who wants cannabis, even teenagers, can currently get it very easily. Growing up, everyone knew it was easier to get than alcohol(drug dealers don't check ID).

In the states that are considering legalization, the vast majority of possession arrests end up with the charges dismissed or a civil fine anyway. So from a purely logical perspective, spending a ton of money on arrests that will only result in the charges getting dropped anyway makes no sense.