sillysaurus2
Joined 13 years ago
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4,936
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Member since
Aug 21
sillysaurus2 at gmail.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 12 years ago
Honest or not, starting a startup for the sake of making money (whether that money will fund a more altruistic "end-goal" or not) is probably not the right reason to build a company.
Making money was exactly pg's reason for starting Viaweb. YC wouldn't be so hypocritical as to deny someone for advertising that as their reason, when YC itself wouldn't exist if its founder hadn't started a startup for the purpose of getting rich.
Comment · 12 years ago
Step back and ask yourself: What are my assumptions? Why do I believe these assumptions to be true? What if they aren't true?
You have at least 50 years ahead of you. That's a long time. But the next 5 years will profoundly shape your next 50.
If that feels like too much pressure, then simply don't worry about it. It's more important to relax than to optimize your life if you're the type of person who doesn't react well to a lot of pressure.
Comment · 12 years ago
The reason I submitted this is because it's an interesting phenomenon that fortunes can be lost or made so rapidly.
(An MtGox bitcoin can currently be sold for 0.4 bitcoin, so this was quite a lot of money being lost or made over the last hour.)
Comment · 12 years ago
The developer is Gregory Maxwell, aka nullc. Here's a very interesting thread in which he proposes that the bitcoin community should demand that every bitcoin exchange (and every other type of service which can hold bitcoin on your behalf, like webwallets) continually prove that they are not fractional reserve. In other words, proof that if every user of the service simultaneously tries to withdraw all of their bitcoin, then the service would be able to honor all withdraw requests: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yj5b5/unverified_p...
"I think that as a community we should start demanding these services continually prove that they are not fractional reserve. We cannot effectively eliminate the need for trust in these sorts of services, but we can certainly confine the exposure and eliminate a lot of this drama. With Bitcoin it's technically possible to prove an entity controls enough coin to cover its obligations— and even to do so in ways that don't leak other business information, and so we should. But this isn't something specific about MTGox, it's something we should demand from all services holding large amounts of third party Bitcoins. I wouldn't even suggest MTGox should do it first, rather— it sounds like a great move for their competition to differentiate themselves."
Here's the takeaway:
"This would leak the total holdings, and some small amount of data about the number of accounts and distribution of their funds, but far far less than all the account balances. Importantly, though— it could be implemented in a few hundred lines of python."
In case anyone from Coinbase is reading: you have a unique opportunity to be the first webwallet service to implement this, and thereby make the entire bitcoin community instantly fall in love with you. It would also set a minimum standard of quality for webwallet services in general, which would add a lot of value to the bitcoin ecosystem. It seems like this might be a pretty big business opportunity.
Comment · 12 years ago
Docker can be used as a screen replacement?
Comment · 12 years ago
Agreed. How could Gox imploding result in a better bitcoin world? I'd lose a ton of money, so my little world would be directly worsened. The price of bitcoin is now about $500, but it likely would've stayed >$650. And now people will forever use this as an example of why bitcoin is dangerous: financial unregulation is dangerous.
It will be just another page in history, yes, but it's a painful one. Personally I still believe Gox will ultimately be okay since everything still has a logical explanation, but hypothetically it seems hard to believe that Gox self-destructing would be anything but bad news.
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
This is mincing words. It's an attack on bitcoin. Many major exchanges were shuttered while they dealt with it, for example.
It's certainly not an attack on not-bitcoin, so therefore it's an attack on bitcoin.
Comment · 12 years ago
True, but we'll never know if they used unsalted SHA1 or scrypt. Is there no value in putting a technical note at the end of press releases like this?
Comment · 12 years ago
Ah yes, here's another website that stores "encrypted passwords." What's an encrypted password, again?
More seriously, why is the social convention to lie in these situations? Why not just say what methods they were actually using?
I suppose it's possible they were storing encrypted passwords. But then an attacker would be able to break all of them at once.
Comment · 12 years ago
More seriously, if the software was set up to retransmit bitcoin after a "failed" transfer, then that service could be exploited automatically. Mostly, this wasn't a social attack. The seriousness was that many services were set up to retransmit automatically, and did lose a lot of money automatically.
Comment · 12 years ago
The seriousness of this attack is that several major bitcoin services lost a lot of money because of it. It's an attack.