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>> I know people will say "Well, you should have known. The signs were all there." But there were no signs. > It was not impossible to tell this was going on.

>> I know people will say "Well, you should have known. The signs were all there." But there were no signs. > It was not impossible to tell this was going on. How do you tell, though? The comment you replied to was about the lack of signs, so claiming that signs existed doesn't really help anyone.

patio11 9y ago
How would one perform investigative journalism on a Japanese company? One way might be "write down everything they say", "identify the subset of these statements that an external actor has signal on", "identify the subset of those statements that the external actor would have a social or legal obligation to confirm or deny", and "write some on-dead-tree letters." Mt. Gox said lots of things, including some things which were, ahem, very effing improbable and yet which alleged very specific facts about people outside of the building. "We're totes solvent; all of our assets are on deposit at Mizuho", "All of our problems are due to banking partners", "The Financial Services Agency said we're compliant with all their regulations", "Japanese banks can't send more than 10 wire transfers per day; it's physically impossible because they're technologically backward", etc etc. This is sort of similar to "But how do you know that their application is vulnerable, $SECURITY_RESEARCHER?" The answer "I bothered to look" might be unsatisfying, but it is not inaccurate.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  We understand you bothered to look. We're asking "What are the specific actions you took, so that in the future, we may take them? What did you discover that led to your tweet? Was it hard evidence, or was it more of a list of worrying signs?" Writing on-dead-tree letters is a flowery way of describing what you did, but it gives no actionable signal.
  - patio11 9y ago
    I'm sorry you lost money, sincerely. One of the reasons that I'm so vocal about my opinions on Bitcoin is that I think that, when it achieves its true value of 0, it will wipe out a lot of geeks of good will. I cannot agree that you had insufficient notice from me regarding my opinions of Bitcoin or operations in the Bitcoin economy. That tweet went as close to the line as I could without risking arrest, contemporaneously. It was preceded by probably a few hundred comments on HN and Twitter about Bitcoin and businesses in the ecosystem. I appreciate that you want a list of steps you can take in the future. I have described a way to reproduce the unpaid, unpublished original research project which I did, in sufficient detail for any competent researcher to reproduce it. You think that that series of steps is not actionable. I respectfully submit that you are not capable of reproducing it; these are two different things. You are illiterate in the language that the research was conducted in. I'm sorry; that is true, and it is the nicest possible way to phrase it unambiguously. You should, in the future, not make investments which you are incompetent to evaluate the risk factors of. If you must, you should secure the advice of competent professional advisors. If you believed yourself competent to evaluate the risks of doing business with Mt. Gox or believed the quality of the advice you had to be adequate, you should be skeptical of your self-assessments of your competence or your ability to evaluate competence in a professional advisor, and apply this skepticism to your reasoning process about future investments.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      (For context, I edited out "if you'd made a ruckus on HN, you could've prevented a lot of suffering" from my previous comment. Mostly because I disagreed with myself that it was up to Patrick to do that.) Patrick, I respect your writing. But your answers are rarely straightforward. Even now, when you risk nothing, you refuse to reveal precisely what you knew and how you came to know it. I'm skeptical that you knew anything of consequence, and I think this is a way for you to appear prescient. But if you say you discovered something, we have no choice but to believe you on reputation alone. I wish you'd share with us what the Great Sages know, but who can blame you for wanting to stay a member of their ranks? It's only through secrecy and obfuscation that you can maintain the aura.
      - peteretep 9y ago
        > you refuse to reveal what precisely > you knew and how you came to know it I see, in his previous comment: > Mt. Gox said lots of things, including > some things which were, ahem, very effing > improbable and yet which alleged very > specific facts about people outside of the > building and then a list of those facts that could be fact-checked.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        What could he, as an outsider, possibly have written to a bank that would let him determine whether Gox was solvent? The simplest answer is "nothing," but we're meant to believe otherwise. We could go through each item on that list and try to reverse engineer which entity he wrote and what he asked, but this indicates he isn't being straight with us. That's fine; it's his right. But it's a little odd. If someone performed some badass investigative journalism that could've blown the whistle on the Gox case long before anyone knew about it, who wouldn't want to brag about it after the fact? Especially when it'd be so easy to illustrate the steps taken. We're talking basic questions like "What did you write?" and "What did they say?" But we're meant to guess.
        mootothemax 9y ago

patio11 9y ago

How would one perform investigative journalism on a Japanese company? One way might be "write down everything they say", "identify the subset of these statements that an external actor has signal on", "identify the subset of those statements that the external actor would have a social or legal obligation to confirm or deny", and "write some on-dead-tree letters." Mt. Gox said lots of things, including some things which were, ahem, very effing improbable and yet which alleged very specific facts about people outside of the building. "We're totes solvent; all of our assets are on deposit at Mizuho", "All of our problems are due to banking partners", "The Financial Services Agency said we're compliant with all their regulations", "Japanese banks can't send more than 10 wire transfers per day; it's physically impossible because they're technologically backward", etc etc. This is sort of similar to "But how do you know that their application is vulnerable, $SECURITY_RESEARCHER?" The answer "I bothered to look" might be unsatisfying, but it is not inaccurate.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
We understand you bothered to look. We're asking "What are the specific actions you took, so that in the future, we may take them? What did you discover that led to your tweet? Was it hard evidence, or was it more of a list of worrying signs?" Writing on-dead-tree letters is a flowery way of describing what you did, but it gives no actionable signal.
- patio11 9y ago
  I'm sorry you lost money, sincerely. One of the reasons that I'm so vocal about my opinions on Bitcoin is that I think that, when it achieves its true value of 0, it will wipe out a lot of geeks of good will. I cannot agree that you had insufficient notice from me regarding my opinions of Bitcoin or operations in the Bitcoin economy. That tweet went as close to the line as I could without risking arrest, contemporaneously. It was preceded by probably a few hundred comments on HN and Twitter about Bitcoin and businesses in the ecosystem. I appreciate that you want a list of steps you can take in the future. I have described a way to reproduce the unpaid, unpublished original research project which I did, in sufficient detail for any competent researcher to reproduce it. You think that that series of steps is not actionable. I respectfully submit that you are not capable of reproducing it; these are two different things. You are illiterate in the language that the research was conducted in. I'm sorry; that is true, and it is the nicest possible way to phrase it unambiguously. You should, in the future, not make investments which you are incompetent to evaluate the risk factors of. If you must, you should secure the advice of competent professional advisors. If you believed yourself competent to evaluate the risks of doing business with Mt. Gox or believed the quality of the advice you had to be adequate, you should be skeptical of your self-assessments of your competence or your ability to evaluate competence in a professional advisor, and apply this skepticism to your reasoning process about future investments.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    (For context, I edited out "if you'd made a ruckus on HN, you could've prevented a lot of suffering" from my previous comment. Mostly because I disagreed with myself that it was up to Patrick to do that.) Patrick, I respect your writing. But your answers are rarely straightforward. Even now, when you risk nothing, you refuse to reveal precisely what you knew and how you came to know it. I'm skeptical that you knew anything of consequence, and I think this is a way for you to appear prescient. But if you say you discovered something, we have no choice but to believe you on reputation alone. I wish you'd share with us what the Great Sages know, but who can blame you for wanting to stay a member of their ranks? It's only through secrecy and obfuscation that you can maintain the aura.
    - peteretep 9y ago
      > you refuse to reveal what precisely > you knew and how you came to know it I see, in his previous comment: > Mt. Gox said lots of things, including > some things which were, ahem, very effing > improbable and yet which alleged very > specific facts about people outside of the > building and then a list of those facts that could be fact-checked.
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        What could he, as an outsider, possibly have written to a bank that would let him determine whether Gox was solvent? The simplest answer is "nothing," but we're meant to believe otherwise. We could go through each item on that list and try to reverse engineer which entity he wrote and what he asked, but this indicates he isn't being straight with us. That's fine; it's his right. But it's a little odd. If someone performed some badass investigative journalism that could've blown the whistle on the Gox case long before anyone knew about it, who wouldn't want to brag about it after the fact? Especially when it'd be so easy to illustrate the steps taken. We're talking basic questions like "What did you write?" and "What did they say?" But we're meant to guess.
        mootothemax 9y ago