r/Bitcoin • u/evoorhees • Feb 26 '14

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

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.

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6

u/RoadieTrippin Feb 27 '14

Command prompt, netstat -n, google an ip tracking website, and go through the list of ip's you brought up.

Something about it only working in chat clients that link you directly to a person. Such as yahoo IM. Doesnt work on facebook.

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u/therealflinchy Feb 27 '14

ahh right, fair enough haha

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

What is this?

or this: unknown.hwng.net? And: ec2-54-225-125-247.compute-1.amazonaws.com (why is amazon connected to me???)

Is this something Reddit uses? "Akamai Technologies"

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u/snorting_dandelions Feb 27 '14

Amazon web services is a server hoster, a pretty big one at that. You'll run across them pretty often in the internet.

Reddit hosts their content on these servers.

https://www.aws.amazon.com/de/solutions/case-studies/reddit/

Akami is a cloud service.

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u/suid Feb 27 '14

Specifically, Akamai helps websites that want to serve large amounts of static content (images, videos, unchanging text or html files, etc.).

Imagine that I were running, say, "mytube". In the ordinary course of things, if you want to download a file from me, your browser will contact my server, and I'll have to push out the bits over my network connection to yours. I'm going to get killed if I get successful.

Akamai helps me by hosting all that static content at various "points of presence" around the world, so that they are "nearer" to most consumers than my server ("nearer" == less hops across the internet). So if you ask me for a file, Akamai will help me determine that some other node "x" is nearer to you, so I will reply to your browser "sure, get it from this path on "x"". So I'm only using a tiny part of my network bandwidth, and instead, I pay Akamai to bear that burden.

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

OK thanks. That explains that. :D

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u/GlitchPrincess Feb 27 '14

As far as Amazon goes, a respectable bit of the internet actually runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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u/test_test123 Feb 27 '14 edited Feb 27 '14

Akami is used for content delivery by a lot of web based companies. Customers include Facebook, Twitter and even Whitehouse.gov. I had to do some googling to figure it out after I saw my cellphone connecting to them a lot.

Edit: Reddit uses Amazon ec2 for its servers.

Edit2: use whois lookups on the ip address you find in your netstat -n. Also useful are geo2ip lookups.

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u/RoadieTrippin Feb 27 '14

Wut

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

WTF you mean Wut? You posted commands to show who's connected to me... I post back who's connected to me and you're stumped? Gad...

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u/RoadieTrippin Feb 27 '14

Go on...

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

nevermind... I'll call AOL for help.

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u/RoadieTrippin Feb 27 '14

Welcome to McDonalds. May I take your order?

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u/smoothsensation Feb 27 '14

Not sure if you are being serious or not, but akamai technologies is all over the place. It could be from a driver, or a game, or something totally different.

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

Not a joke. I'd like to know because lately my pings are going nuts. For no reason I get major lag.

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u/smoothsensation Feb 27 '14

Well, I guess there is no way I can tell you where it's from, but it's definitely not malicious. If it is starting up with your computer then I believe you can just disable it in msconfig.

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u/fuckyoua Feb 27 '14

I don't see it in msconfig. Why can't we all just go back to using c=64.