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It's not even in the top 10 most astonishing things about this story, but the amount of money the author's brother made in bitcoin while working hard at the sta
by danso 7y ago
It's not even in the top 10 most astonishing things about this story, but the amount of money the author's brother made in bitcoin while working hard at the startup game is astonishing:
> “He wrote a white paper on cryptocurrency and why Ethereum was going to skyrocket,” my dad told me. “A number of his friends became rich off of him.”
> None of us know how much Yush made, or where the bitcoin is now, but through his investments, he was able to bankroll at least $50,000 per month on running his new start-up, his former business partner, Nate Argetsinger, told me. Susan Farrington, a former CMU administrator and so-called “college mom” to Yush, told me that when she was between jobs, Yush suspected that she might be struggling.
> He called her up one day and said, “By my calculations, you are probably having some financial difficulties by now.” After much persistence, he transferred $10,000 worth of bitcoin to Farrington. “Honestly nobody has done anything like that for me,” she told me as her voice cracked. “It made him happy.”
- pjc50 7y ago> None of us know how much Yush made, or where the bitcoin is now Almost certainly the secrets died unrecoverably with him.
- ur-whale 7y agoIt's actually a feature of Bitcoin I really like: unless you carefully plan for your death, no one will be able to inherit your coins. Inheriting money is the worst possible thing if you believe societies should be meritocracies.
- jcims 7y agoEh, the idea that people shouldn't be able to control what happens to their assets after their passing is, to me, even worse.
- dooglius 7y agoYou can, it just takes a bit of work. In fact, you can do so much more because bitcoin transfer can be done in a way that is opaque to tax agencies. It is entirely possible that that is what happened here: I don't get the sense that the money would have gone to the author, or that her family would tell her if they did get the money.
- jcims 7y agoI'm more replying to the parent that says inheritance is the 'worst possible thing'.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI know we’re going way off topic, but I’d rather keep a higher proportion of my earnings while I’m alive in exchange for losing control of whatever assets I have left over.
- lr4444lr 7y agoI don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but consider the implications of this worldview: no one would rationally invest in any business venture that they might not live to see come to fruition, and that higher wealth to invest correlates with being older.
- denzil_correa 7y agoThe other implication would be that people genuinely interested in a cause would invest money in such beyond lifetime business ventures. That could fix some of the perverse incentives with such ventures.
- jackpirate 7y agoThis is simply not true under any standard definition of "rationally." You are assuming a loss function that values only growing the wealth of your family, whereas many other people have different loss functions that lead to different rational behavior.
- lr4444lr 7y agoI never said families, nor did the OP: just that being able to make decisions, protected by law, as to who receives your assets after you die is a desirable thing for long-term productivity. Name 1 other "loss function" that would scale society-wide. Even the charitable impulse requires that there be well established businesses at which the recipients can spend and benefit from the money, businesses which take a lot of time to build without seeing a return on investment.
- crusty 7y agoThis doesn't seem like the "feature" that would get you the outcome you want. People more exposed to the traditions and practices of securing wealth for posterity will do so with cryptocurrencies, and others get no aid in avoiding the lose of everything. It just serves to reinforce what was, no merit required.