10 ms·

Schadenfreude

102 points by cstross 13y ago

drcode 13y ago
> A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. My bitcoins in my personal wallet seem to be "riding out" everything just fine. What am I missing?
- w0utert 13y ago
  So everything is great because you (still) happen to be among the lucky few that have profit from holding BTC? Got it...
  - drcode 13y ago
    It has nothing to do with profit, it has to do with the fact that OP is calling the failing of a specific business a crisis to a currency. Did he say there was an "insult to the dollar currency" when Lehman Brothers went under?
    - w0utert 13y ago
      >> 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.
      - drcode 13y ago
        Fair point.
- pjc50 13y ago
  The Harold Wilson argument: the numeraire of your wallet is indeed unchanged. The value of what you can buy with it has fluctuated dramatically.
  - drcode 13y ago
    > The value of what you can buy with it has fluctuated dramatically. 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)
weavejester 13y ago
"A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. It'd be extraordinarily painful, but it wouldn't devastate the currency in perpetuity." 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?
- gphil 13y ago
  > What if Bitcoin does recover? 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.
  - thenmar 13y ago
    It's fascinating to watch it happen. I hope it does recover. But I hope the most vocal proponents become a little more mature. I think part of the reason bitcoin seems radical to people, especially the tech-outsider non-first-adopter crowd, is that bitcoin is championed by radical free market types who don't just want deregulation, they want complete abolition of government.
  - chimeracoder 13y ago
    > The only predictions (both positive and negative) that I've seen have come from dogmatism and not from data. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School [1] https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp [2] Yes, I am excluding Austrian economics, because very few non-Austrian economists actually take them seriously
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rayiner 13y ago
For me the schadenfreude isn't about cryotocurrency versus fiat currency. To me the whole Mt. Gox mess is a reminder that there are enough bad actors in society to screw things up, and combine that with ineptitude and you have a recipe for this sort of event. Sure its just one event, but its also a small community, and the event is quite huge proportionally. And its not going to get better. Indeed, as the stakes get higher, it will get worse. Its a corrolary to the idea that DRM will always be broken, no matter how technically sophisticated you make it. 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.
VMG 13y ago
> "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." 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.
deleted 13y ago
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ericb 13y ago
Stross's disdain for bitcoin is existentially disappointing to me. The man wrote the first book I read where distributed autonomous corporations transacted on their own behalf. The idea of python based corporations and legal denial of service attacks blew my mind. 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.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  (Assuming you mean Accelerando) You do realize that was a nightmare, not a dream? Those autonomous corporations are the antagonists.
  - randallsquared 13y ago
    Interestingly, I also didn't remember that point. The autonomous corporations (and the lobsters) are pretty much the only detail I remember from _Accelerando_, and the bit about them being the villain was lost.
    - pkinsky 13y ago
      They weren't villains. Accelerando portrayed the rise of autonomous corporations as something akin to the Great Oxygenation Event, with human society (and humanity) playing the part of the previous anaerobic ecosystem.
  - ericb 13y ago
    I didn't take the idea of an autonomous corporation as inherently bad, but maybe I should have. A nightmare is just a flavor of dream--it is still a dream.
julie1 13y ago
the money first property is its volume should be controlled, preferably by human beings. It should avoid arbitrary effect such as the money coining belongs to an elite without any legitimity. Right now, bitcoin is a kind of speculative ponzi like bubble based on hash of hash which has no other value than the belief of the gullible :)
yummyfajitas 13y ago
I don't understand what deflation has to do with this. Did the inflationary nature (or "real" monetary policy) of the USD somehow prevent Madoff/MF global/etc?
- cwp 13y ago
  No, but Madoff went to jail, Corzine narrowly avoided it, and MF Global is out of business. Governments can't prevent crime, but they do punish it. 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.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I still don't understand - what does a leader-based monetary policy vs a rule-based monetary policy have to do with businesses going insolvent? If the US adopted some rule-based monetary policy (e.g. NGDP targeting or just plain old "don't print more money"), would Goldman suddenly collapse like Mt. Gox? 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.
  - BryanBigs 13y ago
    MF Global is out of business because Corzine mismanaged it, and the guy wasn't even banned from the industry for stealing $800m. Hardly an example of government punishing anything. More an example of a peer of current leaders getting off.
corford 13y ago
Rather than enjoying some shadenfreude (directed at MtGox and its users, not Bitcoin itself), I'm bewildered by the users and upset that their stupidity has allowed this predictable fiasco to happen. 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.bitstamp.net, http://www.kraken.com http://www.kraken.com and http://www.coinbase.com 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.
- 300bps 13y ago
  BTC ecosystem won't come crashing down because BTC has real-world utility. 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/SB10001424052702304773104579268322915488180 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230477310...
  - mcosta 13y ago
    How can the IRS check the truth of your BC loss statement?
higherpurpose 13y ago
What does having a fiscal policy have to do with anything related to this issue?
pyalot2 13y ago
Doesn't Charlie understand that real people got hurt here? I find it incredibly insensitive to post something like that. 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?
- deleted 13y ago
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- wpietri 13y ago
  I think there are a few kinds of hurt here. 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.
  - pyalot2 13y ago
    Point stands that are people who, for whatever reason, had assets on Gox. And they got hurt real bad. Although people have been trying to warn everybody off Gox FOR THE LAST FUCKING 3 YEARS, they still got there. 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.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I want Bitcoin to fail, because to me it's a scam designed to enrich the few who got in early. I understand that this is an important problem, but this is just a very long con. 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.
- sneak 13y ago
  I don't think you know what scam means.
- gress 13y ago
  I agree with the vast majority of your comments - especially about the state of the industry. I'm also not a libertarian and I'm fairly neutral about whether I think it would be good if bitcoin achieves some massive scale. 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.
- aestra 13y ago
  Business A has an idea but needs people to invest in it to take off. Group B takes a risk and invests in Business A. Business A succeeds and Group B is now enriched. 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.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    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.
fuj 13y ago
> and implemented in PHP! 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?
- antidaily 13y ago
  Exactly. As if that has anything to do it.
- Anderkent 13y ago
  Except it wouldn't be the same person. 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.
- mimog 13y ago
  > For the millionth time, the problem is not in the language but on the programmer 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.
corresation 13y ago
Many with a vested interest in bitcoin are desperately performing damage control, evident in every thread about this issue. 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.
spindritf 13y ago
I find all the Schadenfreude over MtGoX disgusting, especially here. Sure, it was likely to fail, even more likely than your regular startup. And no, I have like 0.0005BTC. 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."
sneak 13y ago
Authoritarian statists are disgusting. 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.
julie1 13y ago
If charles stross talks about money, I would like the opinion of neal stephenson :) (REAMDE was right about that too, and his opinion is that money should always be indexed on resources, so that the economy is monetary bounded the same way we are resource bounded.)

102 points by cstross 13y ago

> A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. My bitcoins in my personal wallet seem to be "riding out" everything just fine. What am I missing?

w0utert 13y ago
So everything is great because you (still) happen to be among the lucky few that have profit from holding BTC? Got it...
- drcode 13y ago
  It has nothing to do with profit, it has to do with the fact that OP is calling the failing of a specific business a crisis to a currency. Did he say there was an "insult to the dollar currency" when Lehman Brothers went under?
  - w0utert 13y ago
    >> 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.
    - drcode 13y ago
      Fair point.
pjc50 13y ago
The Harold Wilson argument: the numeraire of your wallet is indeed unchanged. The value of what you can buy with it has fluctuated dramatically.
- drcode 13y ago
  > The value of what you can buy with it has fluctuated dramatically. 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)

weavejester 13y ago

"A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. It'd be extraordinarily painful, but it wouldn't devastate the currency in perpetuity." 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?

gphil 13y ago
> What if Bitcoin does recover? 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.
- thenmar 13y ago
  It's fascinating to watch it happen. I hope it does recover. But I hope the most vocal proponents become a little more mature. I think part of the reason bitcoin seems radical to people, especially the tech-outsider non-first-adopter crowd, is that bitcoin is championed by radical free market types who don't just want deregulation, they want complete abolition of government.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > The only predictions (both positive and negative) that I've seen have come from dogmatism and not from data. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School [1] https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp [2] Yes, I am excluding Austrian economics, because very few non-Austrian economists actually take them seriously

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rayiner 13y ago

For me the schadenfreude isn't about cryotocurrency versus fiat currency. To me the whole Mt. Gox mess is a reminder that there are enough bad actors in society to screw things up, and combine that with ineptitude and you have a recipe for this sort of event. Sure its just one event, but its also a small community, and the event is quite huge proportionally. And its not going to get better. Indeed, as the stakes get higher, it will get worse. Its a corrolary to the idea that DRM will always be broken, no matter how technically sophisticated you make it. 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.

VMG 13y ago

> "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." 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.

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ericb 13y ago

Stross's disdain for bitcoin is existentially disappointing to me. The man wrote the first book I read where distributed autonomous corporations transacted on their own behalf. The idea of python based corporations and legal denial of service attacks blew my mind. 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.

JulianMorrison 13y ago
(Assuming you mean Accelerando) You do realize that was a nightmare, not a dream? Those autonomous corporations are the antagonists.
- randallsquared 13y ago
  Interestingly, I also didn't remember that point. The autonomous corporations (and the lobsters) are pretty much the only detail I remember from _Accelerando_, and the bit about them being the villain was lost.
  - pkinsky 13y ago
    They weren't villains. Accelerando portrayed the rise of autonomous corporations as something akin to the Great Oxygenation Event, with human society (and humanity) playing the part of the previous anaerobic ecosystem.
- ericb 13y ago
  I didn't take the idea of an autonomous corporation as inherently bad, but maybe I should have. A nightmare is just a flavor of dream--it is still a dream.

julie1 13y ago

the money first property is its volume should be controlled, preferably by human beings. It should avoid arbitrary effect such as the money coining belongs to an elite without any legitimity. Right now, bitcoin is a kind of speculative ponzi like bubble based on hash of hash which has no other value than the belief of the gullible :)

yummyfajitas 13y ago

I don't understand what deflation has to do with this. Did the inflationary nature (or "real" monetary policy) of the USD somehow prevent Madoff/MF global/etc?

cwp 13y ago
No, but Madoff went to jail, Corzine narrowly avoided it, and MF Global is out of business. Governments can't prevent crime, but they do punish it. 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.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I still don't understand - what does a leader-based monetary policy vs a rule-based monetary policy have to do with businesses going insolvent? If the US adopted some rule-based monetary policy (e.g. NGDP targeting or just plain old "don't print more money"), would Goldman suddenly collapse like Mt. Gox? 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.
- BryanBigs 13y ago
  MF Global is out of business because Corzine mismanaged it, and the guy wasn't even banned from the industry for stealing $800m. Hardly an example of government punishing anything. More an example of a peer of current leaders getting off.

corford 13y ago

Rather than enjoying some shadenfreude (directed at MtGox and its users, not Bitcoin itself), I'm bewildered by the users and upset that their stupidity has allowed this predictable fiasco to happen. 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.bitstamp.net, http://www.kraken.com http://www.kraken.com and http://www.coinbase.com 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.

300bps 13y ago
BTC ecosystem won't come crashing down because BTC has real-world utility. 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/SB10001424052702304773104579268322915488180 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230477310...
- mcosta 13y ago
  How can the IRS check the truth of your BC loss statement?

higherpurpose 13y ago

What does having a fiscal policy have to do with anything related to this issue?

pyalot2 13y ago

Doesn't Charlie understand that real people got hurt here? I find it incredibly insensitive to post something like that. 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?

deleted 13y ago
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wpietri 13y ago
I think there are a few kinds of hurt here. 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.
- pyalot2 13y ago
  Point stands that are people who, for whatever reason, had assets on Gox. And they got hurt real bad. Although people have been trying to warn everybody off Gox FOR THE LAST FUCKING 3 YEARS, they still got there. 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.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I want Bitcoin to fail, because to me it's a scam designed to enrich the few who got in early. I understand that this is an important problem, but this is just a very long con. 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.

sneak 13y ago
I don't think you know what scam means.
gress 13y ago
I agree with the vast majority of your comments - especially about the state of the industry. I'm also not a libertarian and I'm fairly neutral about whether I think it would be good if bitcoin achieves some massive scale. 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.
aestra 13y ago
Business A has an idea but needs people to invest in it to take off. Group B takes a risk and invests in Business A. Business A succeeds and Group B is now enriched. 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.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  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.

fuj 13y ago

> and implemented in PHP! 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?

antidaily 13y ago
Exactly. As if that has anything to do it.
Anderkent 13y ago
Except it wouldn't be the same person. 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.
mimog 13y ago
> For the millionth time, the problem is not in the language but on the programmer 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.

corresation 13y ago

Many with a vested interest in bitcoin are desperately performing damage control, evident in every thread about this issue. 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.

spindritf 13y ago

I find all the Schadenfreude over MtGoX disgusting, especially here. Sure, it was likely to fail, even more likely than your regular startup. And no, I have like 0.0005BTC. 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."

sneak 13y ago

Authoritarian statists are disgusting. 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.

julie1 13y ago

If charles stross talks about money, I would like the opinion of neal stephenson :) (REAMDE was right about that too, and his opinion is that money should always be indexed on resources, so that the economy is monetary bounded the same way we are resource bounded.)