Friends and family

Only 2-3? Please tell me your secret!

This kid is 18? And people trusted a million dollars in untraceable money to him?

Zhou Tong was 17, when his Bitcoin project was hacked (this is the thread where he announced the project, and was astutely pointed out (concernedly, not mockingly) that he was destined for spectacular failure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973301 ).

I really don't know why we keep trusting very young individuals on things that require implementation of _really_ good security. This is one of the places where ageism probably /should/ exist in some ways -- but the other way around from how we know it, because experience is one of the things that is really important here.

Age isn't the only factor in experience, though. Reputation and relevant experience is the key. There are people I would trust at 35 (for 15 years of experience) where I wouldn't trust someone at 45 (for 3 years of experience).

And then remember, John McAfee started McAfee in 1987 and left in 1994. He's 68 years old and I wouldn't trust him to tie my shoes.

indeed

upside of Bitcoin: no banks needed. or, anybody can run their own bank. innovate

downside of Bitcoin: anyone will run their own "bank". They will put Fortress in the name. It will be their first or second Rails app. They will live in their parent's basement. They will be experiencing puberty. But their stuff will be "secure" because they use "https://" on a few of their pages. Yeah.

A kid offering spamming and hacked twitter accounts using the same account on the forums too, so I doubt anybody did any real research into this person before sending him money.

1) What about gold then?

2) The Silk Road bitcoins were confiscated by police just fine. In fact Bitcoin is in some ways easier to trace and therefore confiscate. If the cops can trace a transaction to you they just apply some rubber hose cryptography.

More than 90% of gold value is speculative. This all will move to Bitcoin as it's superior by all measures. Storing and transporting gold is just way too expensive. The universe wants one money: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/54121516413/the-universe-wants...

Rubber hose is more expensive than QE. You can steal one person's stash, but cannot steal from millions at once (well, you can, but it'll be too obvious and very expensive). Just watch zebras crossing the river infested with crocodiles. The fiat currency is when all zebras find themselves in the slaughterhouse.

>1) What about gold then?

It is more easily dividable than gold.

Happened to me, more than once.

You sure seem to have a horse in this race

Yes, I would prefer that the women in my community are not sexually assaulted. I absolutely have a horse in this race.

Furthermore, I have been friends with Joe for years, and don't know Justine.

Yeah. He hates sexual assault.

They ordered drugs from him on Silk Road, that's how they got his packages.

Wait is this satire? I can't tell.

I was waiting for the punch line as well, and then scrolled up to see who the author was. His tagline says, "I defend laissez-faire capitalism, using Ayn Rand's Objectivism." So it's safe to say it's not satire.

That shouldn't stop you from finding it hilarious though.

He does say "Here’s a modest proposal".

I think the author just stumbled hilariously onto that phrase without knowing its satirical history.

We don't know this for a fact. There are quantum annealing algorithms for factoring numbers.

Things have changed since 2010.

Study wasn't done in 2010. That's just when that transaction shell game showed up from the perspective of the study. Do you have an up to date statistical analysis of the bitcoin transaction record to share?