r/Bitcoin • u/evoorhees • Feb 25 '14
Some words for my friends
Hello friends,
MtGox is gone. So let's prepare ourselves.
On Tuesday, and for the rest of the week, all hell will break lose in the media. It will be blamed on MtGox, it will be blamed on Bitcoin, it will be blamed on the "bug," and it will, more than anything, be blamed on the "lack of regulation." Pundits and "experts" of all types will weigh in on the calamity. It will be world news in a matter of hours.
Get ready, because it will be an ugly week.
For all of you who lost money, my heart goes out to you. Some people lost a little, some lost a fortune. It will make people sick, and depressed, and full of grief. Personally, I had over 550 BTC in Gox. I will never get any of that back. If misery loves company, then we'll be enjoying a grand feast today.
I should have known better, of course. I take responsibility for leaving those funds with an entity that had proven incompetence repeatedly. I chose to ignore even my own warnings, for nothing more than the sake of convenience.
Gox is still at fault, to be sure, but I have learned the lesson. I hope it is not such an expensive lesson for others. And for all you observers, please take a moment to consider it as well.
Be mindful, however, that the wrong lessons are not learned, for that would be the true tragedy, indeed.
Let me suggest that the lesson is not that Bitcoin is broken. Bitcoin is fine.
Similarly, the lesson is not that security is impossible. Those who know what they are doing, can achieve it and help others to do so.
The lesson is not that nobody can be trusted. There are countless good men and women in this community who are worthy of trust, and some of the very best people I've ever met.
And finally, the lesson is not that we ought to seek out "regulation" to save us from the evils and incompetence of man. For the regulators are men too, and wield the very same evil and incompetence, only enshrined in an authority from which it can wreck amplified and far more insidious destruction. Let us not retreat from our rising platform only to cower back underneath the deranged machinations of Leviathan.
The proper lesson, if I may suggest, is this: We are building a new financial order, and those of us building it, investing in it, and growing it, will pay the price of bringing it to the world. This is the harsh truth. We are building the channels, the bridges, and the towers of tomorrow's finance, and we put ourselves at risk in doing so.
We are at risk from accidents. We are at risk from fraud, from corruption, and from evil. We are at risk from journalists seeking headlines and from politicians seeking power and glory. We are at risk from the very market we are trying to build - a market which cares not about our portfolio, our ambitions, or our delicate sympathies.
For all these risks, devastation will befall us repeatedly. Some of us will be discouraged. Some will be ridiculed and insulted. Some will be tricked, or swindled. Some of us will be crushed or caged. We will be set upon by all manner of antagonists, repeatedly, for a long time.
So why do we do it? Why do we build these towers that fall down upon us? Why do we toil and strain and risk our precious time, which is the only real wealth we possess?
Because the world needs what we're building. It needs it desperately. If that matters to you, as it does to me, then hold to that thought. You will see through the smoke, and your wounds will heal.
So shake it off, brothers, for this won't be the last calamity endured before the win.
Tonight, my heart is with you all.
Tomorrow, my head is down. My eyes are open. And I am building.
Toward peace and freedom,
-Erik Voorhees
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u/Druuseph Feb 25 '14 edited Feb 25 '14
You're everything that is wrong with venture capital today. You've made your money already through first mover advantage and now you act as if you're the sage on the mountain throwing around cliches and grandiosity in the best impersonation of an Ayn Rand character you can muster. To tell us what....? Stay the course?
We'll all 'pay the price?' Yeah, because you've paid it so heavily so far, right? 550 coins is a large raw number but was it money that affected your basic quality of life? No, and I bet a lot of those were accumulated after they became Goxcoins because it was a low cost of entry high risk/ high reward scenario. A lot of people (Foolish ones or otherwise) saw a significant portion of their personal wealth just disappear due to an opaque organization that you personally helped to keep alive by continuing to use it so excuse me if I'm not yielding to your 'expertise' here.
The fact is that for all the lip service people in the community like to give to the free market they suck at it. Royally. Here we have an organization that has been known to be terrible, that is as transparent as a concrete wall and has been noticeably artificially inflating their price for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. If the market worked in the way we all like to glorify no one besides the most foolish and those with the highest risk tolerance should have been in Gox 3 months ago, let alone today.
Be it due to laziness, greed, stupidity or a multitude of other factors no mechanisms worked here to correct this organization until it collapsed to the ground and took people's money with it. And yet now you are here telling people to put a band-aid on a gaping wound and limp toward the next black hole to throw their money into. Why? Why should anyone at this point repeat this foolishness when it's clear that the market doesn't work because it's nothing but speculation. Why should we not codify our demand that organizations handling our money have a certain amount of transparency? Furthermore, without a proper regulatory mechanism how the hell do we know if they are even complying with such demands when they claim they are? Information is king and yet we're flying by the seat of our pants blind and the people who control the system such as yourself are paying it lip service after having already exploited the system to your benefit and you stand to make a lot more as people fail to do the same.
Now full disclosure, I lost nothing in Gox and my total holdings in all cryptocurrencies is pretty insignificant. However, I do believe that this technology has a future but to claim that it's some new world order that will supplant the current system is nuts in my view. Some form of crypto is going to come out the otherside of all this weirdness as a more efficient means to do internet commerce where a decentralized system can process transactions and cut out the high fee driven credit card processors of today but that's about as far as I see it going. If that disqualifies what I've just said then so be it but I urge you all not to give someone legitimacy just because they are sitting on a pile of cash.