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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The plugin folder is writable by current logged in user so a trojan dropper can easily load a malicious plugin.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you allow for the fact that a virus is already on your system, then you've already lost. It'd be one thing if iTunes was allowing the equivalent of root escalation, but it doesn't sound like it's even doing that.
News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop.
It sounds like we're going to be stuck with d0 for awhile. If they get banned, I assume they'll create a new account and do this all over again. I'm at least hoping they'll be reasonable.
I suppose Gox could be buying up all the goxcoins less than $300. But then you'd see a decrease in future volume until the volume reaches zero. They wouldn't do that, because they're not smart enough to pull it off without anyone noticing.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There is no interpretation to be made there. You willfully ignored it.
I didn't think you were new to HN, judging by your comment history, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you've been banned before. Perhaps you feel your new identity gives you a vantage point from which to snipe at others. But either way, would you please clean up your writing?
I think this is the problem:
"There's too much woo and too many chipped shoulders and opportunists these days and they need a smackdown."
You feel you're on a mission, and that your mission supersedes following the rules. It doesn't.
I apologize that my original comment was lightweight and lacking sources. If I make such a claim, I should back it up with sources. I'm about to fall asleep though, and I don't remember where precisely I saw it.
Within the last couple months, there was a pretty big discussion featuring BSD licensers vs GPL licensers. If I remember correctly, the GPLers were saying that by using BSD, one enables software freedoms to be taken away, and therefore BSD and MIT licenses should be strongly opposed.
It's almost impossible to imagine someone reading their comment and misunderstanding them, unless they were bad at reading English.
The point you're trying to make is based on the mistaken assumption that they were being unclear. They weren't. Nothing was obscured. No one seriously believed that they meant to imply ownership instead of "you are."
They also weren't doing technical or business writing. It was empathy, which is sometimes helpful.
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.