dasht

Employers turning a blind-eye to intra-company dealing / distribution is not at all a new thing but I don't think that was the poster's question. I think the poster was talking about open-ness and public face. Again, for VCs and such -- and although that crowd will sometimes deny this -- founders are supposed to be cookie cutter stereotypes.

An openly pot-head founder risks offending or scaring customers or buyers or later investors. It also indicates some who doesn't get the "performative" aspect of being a commodity founder: the expected degree of conformative role playing.

I think it is still taboo among most VC's and angels. Founders are supposed to be cookie-cutter stereotypes who fit a pre-established program. Your personality / public face can be "challenging" but not challenging, if you know what I mean.

Bah. I call BS. You sound like a San Francisco real estate speculator or developer. "High density infill" projects are loved by the people who make money off the development of the property but no matter how much you weaken zoning protections to get there they somehow never manage to swing prices when demand, like it is now, is just so much greater. What you do accomplish with these projects, typically, is building very high-end price units, often of compromised quality (cheap materials, absurd square footage, etc.) Of course this does have the effect of reducing gentrification. On the contrary it steps up the pace while simultaneously leaving the city with a less desirable housing stock in the long run.

I think PG is asking the wrong questions. None of merely plausible hypotheses as to the motive of an imagined government actor creating bitcoin is testable.

Perhaps more importantly, we've skipped entirely past the question -- a question we might actually be able to begin to answer with evidence -- what what bitcoin is actually doing in the real world beyond the obvious and superficial details that make headlines.

Setting aside whether the two groups you name are likely suspects, the fact that both public identities and open institutional affiliations does not contradict the hypothesis that a government did it.

For historic precedents, see for example Wikipedia on "Project MKUltra", or the book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power" by Seth Rosenfeld.

PG remarks that there were probably peer reviewers but none has stepped forward. Either of the two examples I gave illustrates how long and how tightly private-sector collaborators with secret government projects can keep their mouths shut.

The reasoning in this short message has been a consistent part of RMS' talk and actions since the very beginning of the GNU project. Earlier than Ogg Vorbis, the very existence of the LGPL is an example of similar reasoning, applied.

You wrote: "I can't recall any specific quotes but he was ready to burn ten bridges"

I think you might have been conditioned to expect RMS to be that kind of self-defeating extremist because many people who are opposed to him, including some who pretend otherwise, describe him that way.

The poor sap made an off-hand remark from the dais during public comment on the Council's plan to send a letter to the USPS asking them to delay the sale of our historic downtown post office. He was, in effect, making idle chit-chat, not a real proposal, and he was apparently drawing on some half-remembered pop article about fighting spam. A local "news" web site made hay out of it, trolling for clicks.

It measures a skill very different from ordinary typing, so, no.

A lot of people read this and this kind of story and they want to talk about the morality or value systems of these kids, themselves, and so forth.

I propose that there is a much more important reading:

Youth unemployment is extraordinarily high (effecting minorities even worse than these mostly-white kids, of course). Youth incarceration rate / engagement with the justice system is very high.

The numbers of people "dropping out" of legitimate society altogether look to be high and growing.

People's personal feelings about all this aside, it pays to notice when society starts to fray so badly as this.

This quote is one of those intuitively plausible things that turns out not to be true: "the more important point to analyze is: when you add it all up and average over all businesses, is it a wash? After all, those dollars must be going somewhere, and I would think that they're making some communities somewhere pretty happy."

It doesn't work that way. Think of the "lifespan" of a typical book-buying dollar:

(a) A dollar in circulation is created along side a corresponding dollar of debt. Banks are not getting dollars out of their vaults when they make loans. They are typing some numbers into a computer and creating entirely new dollars.

(b) The dollar passes from hand to hand in various transactions, eventually reaching our book-buying consumer.

(c) Someday, the dollar will likely cease to exist when it is used to retire debt. Even before then, the dollar can wind up "parked" (noncirculating) in large accounts that are held in reserve (e.g., in cash or in constantly rolled over treasuries).

A dollar spent at a big corporation like Borders is much more likely to reach state (c) sooner. This missing spending doesn't move to some other community, it just never takes place.

The Linux kernel has not been a project of "love" since at least the time that Linus was hired by Transmeta in 1996. The bulk of the heavy lifting that keeps it going is paid labor.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, work on Perl was funded by revenue from books, employers, and conferences. Apache by financial donations to an NPO.

In the 1990s, the "community value" of helping others by offering free support in on-line forums was promoted by industry as a way to gain reputation enough to get a job. It was promoted by some investors as a way for commercial efforts to gain users and obtain free labor without paying the full cost of support.

Clay claims that it was "something new" when Linus could post about the kernel in its earliest days and get a "global network of collaborators". That's a remarkable claim that ignores not only the entirety of the GNU project effort that preceded it but decades of (quite often commercially motivated) software sharing the preceded that.

Clay has confused a difference in the modality of economic collaboration that becomes possible when source code is shared, with "love".

On the topic of motivation he is also too glib. He asserts that Linus' collaborators asked for nothing other than the chance to come together and do something interesting. That it was suddenly possible to do big things for love.

He ignores that it took all of 23 months before the founding of VA Research (as evidence that commercial interest was already, by then, a major factor).

This kind of talk bothers me because it takes what I think of as a high value (love) and misrepresents it and misrepresents history. He encourages a vaseline-coated rose-colored rememberance of industry history. It's not a kind of talk that leaves credulous listeners more informed -- pretty much the opposite. And worse, it leaves them in that state feeling all warm and fuzzy that somehow this must be love.

Paul Graham, or anyone "in the know", may we please hear a bit about what the equivalent of a term sheet looks like for a Y Combinator non-profit investment? Is Y Combinator giving a grant? Is Watsi issuing debt to Y Combinator? What's the financing model here?