walexander

Yeah, kinda crazy.

I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last two).

Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.

My C Instructor assigned us this in college in 2005, during a brief period where the dotcom bubble was still felt and the social network hadn't come out yet. At the time, there was a lot of talk about how programming was a dead in job in the the US and that all those jobs would just be outsourced, anyway.

I've thought about it a lot over the years, and especially came back to it last year with the rise of ChatGPT.

And QQQ rose 47% this year. This does not seem surprising at all. The entire market went up in 2023.

The most plausible theory I've heard is that the attackers used a BTC tumbler that was a honeypot controlled by feds.

But who knows, maybe the FBI has a quantum computer we don't know about.

Is this actually a serious question? Do you think there is no point to PayPal, or do you think your GitHub repo is an equivalent replacement? Is forwarding an email to a bunch of people equal to twitter?

The point of cryptocurrency and smart contracts from a technology perspective is that it is distributed, decentralized/p2p, and has immutable atomic operations. There were lots of early cryptocurrencies and lots of early ledgers. World of Worldcraft gold is a a digital currency if you want to call it one.

What bitcoin solved was decentralized atomic operations (double spend). That's pretty much it. Whether or not you need that is open for debate, but points like you're making are ridiculous.

You could do a similar style of hacking in Dark Forces 2, which had "cog files" that were controlled client side and let you change the projectile of any weapon. At first it was fun to replace your pistol bullets with rockets, or have your rocket launcher shoot light sabers.

Eventually we realized you could actually make structures like bridges and stairs shoot out of your weapon, so it created this minecraft/gary's mod meta game of building platforms and structures out of your weapons, a decade before those came out. Fun times and definitely helped me on my career towards software.

I don't know why people call Madoff's scheme or Enron bubbles. People acted quite rationally given they believed these companies were not completely fabricating their accounting.

Once it was found out what they were doing, the market acted rationally again, but dumping their value to zero.

The first nine months bitcoin was at a $10k and below level. They are making considerably more money since the boom took off after that.

I don't know if it will be 20x higher either. Just saying, this makes more sense than say, Zoom, which trades at $120B mcap.

I dont think the volumes will last, but if you look at volumes today and extrapolate further growth, then sure $100B makes sense.

Not sure what the operating costs look like for Coinbase, but here's some napkin math based on just the Coinbase Pro exchange .

They get roughly $200 per bitcoin trade. That's on both sides, so $400 per bitcoin transaction. Today was a slightly higher volume day but they did $1.6B in BTC-USD, so around ~30k bitcoin changed hands.

30k * 400 = $12Million

Bitcoin is 1/3 of their volume (they have a lot of other crypto currency pairs), so let's take 3x of that = $36 Million in trading fees today.

Bitcoin is a 24/7 market, so 365 days = $13.14 Billion per year.

This does not even count what used to be (still is?) their main business of just buying and holding bitcoin for people through DCA buys or on their app. They also are starting to have a bunch of other revenue streams through loans, debit cards, etc and invest in a number of early crypto projects.

I'm not sure what the multiple is going to be like since I don't know their expenses, but since most tech companies are valued from revenue and future growth expectations anyway, who knows.

There is no moral obligation for them to do so and yes they can choose not to enforce US IP law if they don't want to.

The US can also choose to place massive tariffs on any goods coming out of China, making them highly uncompetitive. Their choice, it looks like.

One of the points of the E2E security model used here is so that you don't have to trust Cisco.

Don't forget the MPAA and RIAA.