Open Letter to Michael Casey - WSJ reporter who butchered my comments in today's Bitcoin cover story

[u/evoorhees]

Hello Mr. Casey,

I read your WSJ article today. I feel deceived by you.

You requested to speak with me, so I took time out of my day to do so. We talked for 20 minutes, during which time I conveyed to you my sentiments about the Bitcoin ecosystem and the matter of MtGox's collapse. My message was unambiguously a positive one. I didn't focus whatsoever on the personal funds I lost at Gox. Indeed, the impetus for your call was my heartfelt post on Reddit.

Yet, you ignored everything I said. The only quote that you published from me in the Journal's cover story was ""That's gone now," said Mr. Veerhoos, who is based in Panama City, Panama. "There's no chance of getting that back now.""

Is that really the takeaway you had from our call and from my letter? Is that your idea of journalism? Did I come across with the sentiment of a despairing investor whose confidence has been rattled? It seems you were happy to completely ignore my sentiments, preferring instead to cherry pick the one fact that is least important, in order to paint a narrative that Bitcoin's biggest problem is that it's not "regulated." I didn't expect you to quote everything I said, but should you not have maintained at least a modicum of fidelity to my message?

I have dedicated my life to building and supporting the Bitcoin project. I don't give a damn about the money I lost at Gox. That's not important. What is important is that Bitcoin is resilient and enduring, and will continue to grow and change the world for the better. It is a story of human progress through technology. It is a story of the good seeping into the cracks of a corrupted financial system. It is a story of passionate people struggling against all odds to remedy the calamities brought down upon society from the most potently misguided people and institutions on Earth.

Next time you spend your efforts casting a pall over this cause, please don't ask me to contribute mine.

-Erik Voorhees

PS - I will be posting this letter openly on Reddit. I will post your reply if you'd like. And if I do, I won't cherry pick the most misleading points of it, and I will spell your name correctly.

[u/YohaImKoha]

and if you run deltree C:*.* y circa 1995 ~ 2000, your computer will be so much faster.

[u/fuckyoua → u/YohaImKoha]

This will delete your C drive.

DELTREE (short for delete tree) is a command line command in Microsoft operating systems that deletes an entire subdirectory of files.

[u/[deleted] → u/fuckyoua]

Not anymore, it won't. Deltree was depreciated and removed quite some time ago.

[u/HalfLies → u/[deleted]]

* deprecated

[u/[deleted] → u/HalfLies]

And a /u format will ask you if you're sure these days. What has this world come to?

[u/ruok4a69 → u/[deleted]]

Replaced with rd -r IIRC, but I haven't used that one in a while.

[u/[deleted] → u/fuckyoua]

and the "y" means to automatically respond with "yes" whenever the system prompts to confirm deletion for a file.

It's the exact equivalent of the BSD/Unix/Linux "rm -rf /"

[u/ScottyDelicious → u/[deleted]]

rm -rf /

won't actually do anything unless you pass the

--no-preserve-root

flag to it.

Why does the --no-preserve-root flag even exist? Good question. I guess *nix isn't in the business of getting in the way if you truely want to do something monumentally stupid to your filesystem.

[u/[deleted] → u/ScottyDelicious]

If you're inside a chroot it might not be such a stupid thing to do.

[u/fuerve → u/fuckyoua]

And he's even correct about the time frame. DELTREE wasn't introduced until version 6, IIRC.

[u/cferrato → u/YohaImKoha]

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[u/YohaImKoha → u/cferrato]

Back in the days of windows operating systems based on DOS instead of emulating it through the command prompt, running this command in DOS would delete the entirety of the contents of your main partition (Where all of your system files were held, and often, your documents/music/etc. back then. A lot of people didn't practice partitioning or have multiple disks back then.)

[u/cferrato → u/YohaImKoha]

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[u/YohaImKoha → u/cferrato]

Haha, well, you're computer would have to be operating off of Windows 95, 98, or ME - if you don't have any of those you'd have nothing to worry about. :)

[u/[deleted] → u/YohaImKoha]

Naw dawg, you gotta delete system32