The deceptively complex world of RRULEs - <AUTHOR> https://nylas.com/blog/rrules?hackernews

<comment><USER2> This is actually what prompted me to start work on luatz: [https://github.com/daurnimator/luatz](https://github.com/daurnimator/luatz)

Trying to implement RRULEs you need all sorts of fun date math + converting back and forth between time zones.

I never released my ical library (didn't get it open sourced from work); but luatz lets you write your own :)

<comment><USER3> that's pretty awesome :) too bad about the ics library! the world needs more tools like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i got tired of all calendars being based on this system, which i find too restricted. You cannot encode many types of holiday, Easter or many religious festivals. You can't track the moon either.

So, i wrote my own calendar and the events work as a start datetime, end datetime and optional recurrence. the recurrence is encoded as a small script "generator" statement (LUA actually). The script uses a rich set of built in "function kit" such as "fullmoon", "newmoon" etc. Things like Easter need the moon, and so do many religious festivals.

The generator returns the NEXT datetime, so that the calendar can chain these events so that scrolling works nicely and you only calculate what you need.

# Example Generators

## Annual date (eg birthdays) return nextMonthDay(d, september, 23)

## monthly date, `v' of month return nextMonth(d)+v-1

## first monday of next month return nthkDay(nextMonth(d),1,monday)

## last sunday in a month next year eg last sunday next march. finds next april 1 and works back to last sunday return nthkDay(nextMonthDay(d+7,april,1),-1,sunday)

next monday on or after next May 1st eg may day return nthkDay(nextMonthDay(d,may,1),1,monday)

eg last monday in may, spring bank holiday return nthkDay(nextMonthDay(d+7,june,1),-1,monday)

## third tuesday of the month return nthkDay(nextMonth(d),3,tuesday)

## fourth thursday in November (Thanksgiving USA) return nthkDay(nextMonthDay(d, november, 1), 4, thursday)

## second monday of october (Thanksgiving Canada) return nthkDay(nextMonthDay(d, october, 1), 2, monday)

## mothers day UK 4th sunday of Lent = 3 weeks before easter sunday return cal.nextEasterSunday(d+22)-21

## first and third thursday of the month function cvrs(da) local d1 = nthkDay(thisMonth(da),3,thursday) local d2 = nthkDay(nextMonth(da),1,thursday) if d1 > da then return d1 end return d2 end return cvrs(d)

## first weekday of month function weekday(d) local da = cal.dayOfWeek(d) if da == sunday then d = d + 1 elseif da == saturday then d = d + 2 end return d end return weekday(nextMonth(d))

## first weekday on or before given date of of month function weekdayb4(d) local da = cal.dayOfWeek(d) if da == sunday then d = d - 2 elseif da == saturday then d = d - 1 end return d end return weekdayb4(nextMonth(d)+25) -- example

## easter return cal.nextEasterSunday(d)

eg good friday return cal.nextEasterSunday(d+3)-2

eg. Easter monday return cal.nextEasterSunday(d)+1

eg shrove tuesday return cal.nextEasterSunday(d+48)-47

##* moon phases return cal.nextNewMoon(d+1) return cal.nextFullMoon(d+1)

## ramadan

this generates the logical 1/9 islamic. Howeever the fast of Ramadan is often started the day earlier if based on the observational moon note that it _always_ begins the sunset beforehand.

y,m = cal.islamicFromFixed(d) if m >= 9 then y=y+1 end return cal.fixedFromIslamic(y,9,1)

\-- end of ramadan is the end of month 9 \-- Eid-al-Fitr (Ramadan ends) y,m = cal.islamicFromFixed(d+1) if m >= 10 then y=y+1 end return cal.fixedFromIslamic(y,9,30)

\-- Al-Hijra (Islamic New Year) return cal.fixedFromIslamic(cal.islamicFromFixed(d)+1,1,1)

## Hebrew

\-- Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) \-- 1st of Tishri return cal.fixedFromHebrew(cal.hebrewFromFixed(d)+1,7,1)

\-- Yom Yippur \-- tishri 10 return cal.fixedFromHebrew(cal.hebrewFromFixed(d)+1,7,10)

<comment><USER3> Did you release the code to this? It's a really interesting idea! How did you ensure they are deterministic or run in constant time? (Or are they not guaranteed to?)

One of our goals with the Nylas calendar APIs was to make them backwards compatible, so that developers could still interact with Gcal/Exchange. This means we're really restricted in what we can expose at this point. Having more sophisticated tools for defining repeating events or moments in time is certainly where we want to go, though!

<comment><USER4> I developed this as an app for Windows and Android. it could work on linux too. Although i didn't release it. The main reason is that i didn't consider it finished. I did a month view and a day view, but i wanted also the week view. Although i do use it as my daily calendar.

Complete calendar data and rules are stored as a single text file! that's what i wanted too (about 1MB for 20 years' data). I can make manual backups!

Regarding the exiting formats, i wrote an importer that converts iCal to LUA. Basically, just a set of templates. Indeed the original idea was to offer a UI to people whereby clicking on things would automatically generate bits of LUA generators - sort of non-programmatic interface for non-power users.

For efficiency (deterministic run-time), each generator takes a date and returns a date. So that it always returns a later date than it is given.

The calendar is generated on demand, so today I'm viewing August 2015. If i scroll down to September/October etc. The generators are called until they return dates _later_ than my current view (or stop generating). I can scroll down years and years and everything works fine.

Primitives such as "nextNewMoon" etc can either be coded in LUA as part of initialisation, or added to the internal LUA run-time. The calendar algorithms are all from "Calendrical Calculations" by Nachum-Dershowitz. Although i converted them to C++ (from lisp!).

At some point i need to finished the Chinese calendar :-)

<comment><USER3> Software is never finished, you just decide it's ready to ship. :) If you'd like a smaller audience, I'd love to try it out and maybe write some of my own patterns/generators. I'm going to check out that book too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Story of Walk – United by the Soviets, Divided by Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://deepbaltic.com/2015/10/28/the-strange-story-of-walk-united-by-the-soviets-divided-by-freedom/ <comment><USER2> > In fact, the stream doesn't neatly slice the town into two equal parts: it > meanders through the city, giving a wide berth to the actual centre. As a > result, Estonia got a significantly better deal [...]

Kind of nice to hear that some countries have managed to set down borders without violence, even if the results wasn't satisfactory. I can imagine it would have been easy for Latvians to keep this an open issue until Soviet occupation rendered the point moot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. I also liked the way in some cases the inhabitants saw the border as a sort of political nuisance that got in the way of things getting done - e.g. dispatching ambulances to pick up ill people and take them to the nearest hospital, instead of simply the nearest hospital in whichever country they were located at the time.</comment></comment>


What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After a Coup in America? - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/what-would-happen-in-the-minutes-and-hours-after-a-coup-in-america <comment><USER2> > Trump would have to do something that threatened humanity to catalyze an > uprising. "Nuclear war with China or something," Ginsburg suggested. > Basically, Trump would have to start a world war that no one wanted.

In reality the opposite is true. Media is trying to spin Trump's antiwar preferences. The military-industrial-spy complex clearly prefers a war, best with China or Russia, but currently only with Iran. And the public is easily persuadable on this.

But demonizing Trump over his anti-liberal agenda started these attempts already. It's not enough for a coup though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two centuries of peaceful transfers of power? How time flies: I would never have guessed that it was 2065 already. :-p

</comment><comment><USER4> This could never happen, the USA don't have an embassy there</comment>


Why So Few Violent Games? - <AUTHOR> http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/ <comment><USER2> The author is sarcastic, but actually quite right. We don't have many games that actually explore violence, give it a deeper meaning or use it as a rhetorical device (like GTA V did superficially with the torture scene). There are many games with a violent shell, but it's actually about scoring points. Killing an enemy in an FPS gives me the same kind of satisfaction as solving lines in Tetris. The last time I played a violent game for its violence was as a teenager.

<comment><USER3> Oddly enough, one game that hit me hard with the violence in it was Pikmin. Simple and cute, you can't help but learn to love and nurture your little underlings, but as the game progressed it became tougher to overcome challenges and before long you started having to plan on sacrificing percentages of your Pikmin just so you could achieve your goal. The first Pikmin death (with a beautifully haunting wail) hit me pretty hard. I never fully got comfortable with their sacrifices and felt every death fairly strongly.

This is of course fairly different than something like your average game where death isn't permanent or particularly impactful, especially when killing nameless/faceless opponents.

<comment><USER2> I was too young to "appreciate" the gruesomeness of Pikmin when I played it, but your post got me thinking if it was intentional. For anyone interested, I found an interview that covers the topic right at the beginning: [http://www.gonintendo.com/s/208519-miyamoto-on- pikmin-3-and-...](http://www.gonintendo.com/s/208519-miyamoto-on-pikmin-3-and- death-ds-3ds-experiments-inspiration-and-a-4th-playable-character)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I worked at Angel Studios about 15 years ago (doing projects for Nintendo and Disney), one of the many things that I liked about the company was a conscious decision by the four owners of the company to not create violent content. They were a class act.

Not too far off topic: my brother and my grandson absolutely love violent games. I don't understand the appeal. What I do like are driving games and strategy games.

<comment> loup-vaillant Interestingly, even extremely graphically violent games on the surface can be felt as non-violent in a competitive setting. I recall this "playing to win" essay, talking about Street Fighter. (If characters punching each other to unconsciousness is not violent, I don't know what is.)

In fighting games, competitive players tend to concentrate on the structure _behind_ punches and suffering. They see a game of anticipation, dexterity, and timing. They talk about hit boxes, priorities, frame advantage… Those players would probably enjoy an abstract version of those fighting games.

Hmm… we could even test that: could we make a game that have a similar structure to Mortal Kombat, only it doesn't even look like 2 characters punching each other to death?

<comment><USER5> It's interesting that you bring up Mortal Kombat, which wasn't the first fighting game, or necessarily even the best fighting game, but it certainly was the one that looked the most like two characters punching each other to death.

<comment> loup-vaillant Actually, I choose to name that one precisely because of its violence. Hopefully helps make my point.

I would have liked to select another name for its underlying mechanics, but I'm not knowledgeable enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you didn't get the crawford reference, you need to play Siboot[1] right now. It's middling in terms of how fun it is, but interesting to see how much it was possible to model social interaction 27 years ago.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_%26_Betrayal:_The_Legacy_of_Siboot)

<comment><USER7> Where can we play it? Wikipedia just describes it.

<comment><USER6> It used to be posted on his home-page (and I think the wikipedia article used to link to that?) But I couldn't find it on there any more. It's available on most abandonware sites though (use the Mac version with a mac emulator, the MS-DOS version has some important bugs in it).

[edit] The source code for it is available still on his homepage, but You'll need paschal and assemblers for MacOS to build it I imagine.

[http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source- code/index.html](http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/source-code/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh. It's sort of odd to read reactions to this by people who are completely outside the game industry.

This isn't sarcasm. This is a parody.

Every line is one that game designers who advocate for games about social dynamics have heard in response. That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation. The "Gorytron" reference refers to "Erasmatron", a computer system that tried to model story more abstractly than interactive fiction games.

It's basically just one long in-joke for those of us who are tired of the sheer quantity of games easily reducible to violent conflict resolutions.

<comment><USER5> "That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation."

I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas?

Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with.

So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue.

At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.)

When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.

<comment><USER9> Some games manage to do both, and do it well. The Borderlands 2 Tiny Tina DLC is a perfect example. It's a gung-ho adventure with explosions and dragons and guns and blood and death! It's also the touching story of a mentally-ill thirteen year old girl dealing with the murder of her adoptive father, after having had to deal with the deaths of her natural parents in a Goebbels-like experiment. It's about the rules of morality, and about how people break the rules in desperate circumstances, often to their own detriment.

It's not a friendly, fun social discussion, but it is a social discussion, and it's very well done. It manages to use the spectacle as a tool to tell a heartbreaking story, and is all the more impressive due to the contrast with the rest of the series.

<comment><USER8> What kind of gameplay covers the "touching story"? Who do you play? How do you interact with others, mechanically? Do you have any real say in the outcome of the story?

I mean, if you had cited Deus Ex or Witcher, you _might_ have something, but... what you described doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly non-linear book to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A solider once told me that boredom is one of the most mentally challenging aspects of war. Because you can go long stretches without running into anyone, let alone your enemies, the moments when you do clash are especially intense. It's like someone switching the radio dial from a low static sound to hardcore metal.

The games that try to juxtapose conflict with stretches of non-action are usually the most successful at conveying the experience of combat. The new Tomb Raider comes to mind. You can travel awhile without fighting because there's a lot to see and do in the environment. When you do encounter adversaries, they're usually in small numbers. They'll speak to each other and respond to your attacks with unique dialogue.

On the other hand, games like Call of Duty, which overwhelm the player with hundreds of enemies at all times, fail to convey the experience of war. The key is to provide contrast between action and non-action, and to provoke suspense by limiting the scope of the conflicts so they can be felt and comprehended more easily.

<comment><USER11> There is a saying I've heard a few times in regards to aviation that seems to apply here, not sure who it should be attributed to: "Flying is hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of stark terror." On the gaming front, I think the closest I've ever seen to this was playing Eve Online, it certainly seemed to fit this description and the 'stark terror' parts were great, but I haven't played in years, I just don't have time for the 'hours of boredom' part anymore.

<comment><USER10> I love that quote! It captures what I was trying to say in a more succinct way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article rightly points out that violence isn't actually much simpler to simulate than social interaction; it's just that players accept crude simulation because it's still fun. Space Invaders is essentially a game of Breakout with reskinned sprites, but just providing those skins lets the player imagine the details of an alien invasion.

Maybe a similarly crude level of simulation could work for social games, if the artwork allows players to get immersed in the game and fill in details with their imagination. Japanese relationship games and dating sims get part of the way there; since they're "visual novels," they can convey subtleties of character through narration, instead of having to come up with game mechanics for everything. The actual mechanics are little more than a single love/hate score for each girl, with the player successfully dating one when their score gets high enough (and getting a "bad end" if all are low -- or if too many are high).

Chris Crawford on Game Design mentioned that for the game Gossip, he simulated relationships as a network of springs. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29)) The closer Alice is to Bob, the more she can influence his opinion of (distance from) Carol. Another spring-based AI by Michael Heasell (Wizard Dude) won CodeCombat's programming tournament. ([http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion- stateme...](http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-statement- programming-war-between-545-wizards)) This "system of springs" could be the core of a social game the way "collision detection" is the core of shooters.

I suspect that one could create a relationship simulator with an emergent storyline by modeling the characters' relations towards each other (not just having a love/hate counter for their relations with the protagonist), and by having a skilled writer create dramatic scenarios triggered on certain conditions and "everyday" scenarios to move the plot along and provide chances to adjust the relationships. The standard plot tree of a dating sim would become a plot graph. It's still a far cry from real human interaction, but Call of Duty is far from real warfare and it sells anyway. The hard part is modeling just the interesting parts and making an entire playthrough be "fun."

<comment><USER13> I thought the same thing about Japanese games & VNs when I read

> Think about it. When modelling a conversation between two people, there's a > limited number of variables in play. How much do they like each other, and > in what way? Given a few basic ways of manipulating the interaction, how > does that change the relationship? These are all simple systems to simulate, > so much so that we have a long history of unimaginative, sappy romance games > made by genre-obsessed, cookie-cutter developers. Physical positioning can > be pre-scripted, movements can be automated, and emotions are a well- > understood programming domain.

Indeed. Just so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Violence simulations are easier to /fake/ than social simulations because few of us have routine experience with violence in our daily lives. We have little to compare the simulation against, so even though it's clunky, the violence seems plausible enough.

But since we have social interactions every day, we have sophisticated intuitive expectations about what's a reasonable reaction in a given situation. So social simulations are judged very harshly, because they have a lot more to live up to.

</comment><comment><USER15> i don't get the point - but entertaining read.

i don't think we have violent games dominating for some random fluke of what was made first and what the creators wanted.

its just supply and demand. although this is also why other, much more popular, casual games have completely eclipsed the 'core gamer' focused 'AAA' industry with their reach and money making power... now that computing has become ubiquitous demand is coming from everywhere and not just the traditional early adopters.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure the author is being sarcastic.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure it's sarcasm. I just have a hard time understanding what the point it's trying to make is.

<comment><USER5> And the two responses to my comment so far perfectly illustrate my confusion, I think:

> I believe his point is that we have violent games because it's a no-brainer. > You don't have to be creative, you don't have to sweat to find an appealing > game mechanic, and it sells.

AND

> All of the things mentioned in the article have been justifications used to > explain why games about social dynamics haven't happened.

Is the author's premise that games focused on social dynamics are just as easy to make as games focused on violence, and that we have to back-fit justifications to fit it? Or is it that games focused on social dynamics really are harder?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be fair, it _is_ a lot easier to make violent games than games about people because of existing infrastructure. You can make an FPS in a day with the unity game engine, using free art assets, the built in physics engine, a tiny bit of scripting, and even the built in netcode. I know next to nothing about other game engines targeted at such games, but I'm sure Source, Unreal and Cryengine all make it just as easy. This means that essentially all the money that big AAA developers throw at these games goes to making them the most refined experiences possible.

But beyond that, every way of simulating human interaction short of advanced AI will feel awkward because it's too fundamental a part of human nature. Games like _Long Live the Queen_ feel like spreadsheets and dating sims are just a genre of point and click adventure. The best game focused on human interaction that I can think of is the recent _Papers Please_ (disclaimer: I haven't played it, but it's on my list). Its modes of interaction are restricted, and it's not really a game in the strict sense, but rather a story told interactively. Interpersonal games need to move more towards the story telling if they want to be successful.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have to imagine the arguments or excuses that the author is parodying. I guess they are excuses that there are more violent games because violent interactions are easier to simulate than non-violent interactions.

Rather than do a parody, I'd just point out that excuses about simulation are crappy because games hardly _simulate_ anything. Outside of rigid-body physics, game logic is just a nonsense of magical rules. Why can't I blast open this door? Why do all the light switches still work after I've released several grenades in the room and decaled all the walls? It's all happily absurd.

So if it's a standard in games that stepping over a medkit can cure you of the shotgun blast you took to the face, in some ridiculous simulacrum of first- aid, then why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of infatuation.

It's a nice parody argument. But I'd rather have a history of how games got where they got. Maybe we can blame it all on Dungeons and Dragons. That game had HP.

<comment><USER19> > why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower > makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of > infatuation

Actually, it is. Try giving a porkchop to a wolf in minecraft :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The game I liked for violence was Age of Empires and Age of Nations. I use to build custom maps with obscenely large armies maintained level peace till the enemery ran out of resources and then use to starve them to death. Eventually use to nuke the enemies.

After destroying enemies I use to destroy my allies in the game.

</comment><comment><USER21> This needs a (2011) tag but other than that it's funny.

</comment><comment><USER22> Gotta be fixed [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tff9eN7XAI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tff9eN7XAI)

</comment><comment><USER23> Jonathan Swift is slow-clapping somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are you familiar with "Sniper Elite"? (Slowmo murder porn) Do you know the stories they build into Battlefield games these days? (nuking iran, america fuck yeah)

Games are horrible... and mainly made for kids.

<comment><USER19> whoosh</comment></comment>


Mesh Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-isp <comment><USER3> It seems like there's been another surge of interest of late in mesh networks. Last time this happened, I wrote up a piece explaining why mesh networks are really a poor solution for circumventing censorship: [http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks- wo...](http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wont-save-us- from-censorship). Since then, some of my colleagues and I at Berkeley wrote a more academic version of this blog post. The talk is available here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ) and you can grab the paper too if you're interested: [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf). The short version is mesh networks have fundamental scaling limitations that make them a poor choice for building alternative infrastructures like the ones discussed in this article; for example, a result from 2000 showed that capacity available to each node in a mesh network actually _decreases_ as the mesh grows.

The other thing I'd note is that this article is referring to "mesh networks", when it really means "community networks": networks run by a community, regardless of whether the network is a mesh or not. I don't know about the Athens network in particular, but I know that the Freifunk and Guifi networks are rather hierarchically structured (i.e., are not true mesh networks). This is necessary for building a wireless network with reasonable performance due to the aforementioned fundamental scaling limitations of mesh networks.

I love the enthusiasm of everyone working on mesh networks, but I think it's valuable to keep a critical perspective and not get carried away with that enthusiasm, if for no other reason than to stay honest about the technical challenges involved.

<comment><USER4> I'm wondering if software defined radio has anything to contribute here. Ultra wideband could help to mask the radio signals. Software defined antenna's could help with the directionality problem. This stuff is expensive today, but maybe not in a few years..

I'm really surprised that P2P doesn't scale on a mesh and would like to understand this better. I do research on message passing algorithms and obviously trees (hierarchies) are great, meshes are not... I can see that the overhead of routing messages is going to grow (like n^2?) with the mesh size, but i'm surprised there is no way around this.

<comment><USER5> In general, the market has overtaken hobbyist hacking by a wide margin. Any technique you are considering has already been considered and either adopted or abandoned by the Broadcoms of the world. Basically all radios are now SDR- ish but their firmware only contains a highly-optimized implementation of a single protocol (e.g. 802.11). Sure, a spinal code PHY with a mesh MAC will beat 802.11 by some percentage, but it costs 10x more because it's an FPGA instead of an ASIC so you end up switching back to Atheros/Broadcom radios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this becomes a bigger trend, but if we're going to do this _again_ , then I hope we do it right this time, and we make it as secure, as uncontrollable by governments, and as anonymous as possible (if you so make that decision on it).

The US government/NSA is ruining the old Internet, so I hope the new one will be very resistant to such attempts in the future. I would watch out especially for hardware-level backdoors for such an Internet.

If they can't spy on the network directly because it's P2P they will try to force either the OS vendors or the hardware vendors to implement backdoors and keyloggers for them. So at the very least the focus should be on open source operating systems with _open source firmware_ (and possibly even open source hardware in the future). Such hardware should be given _extreme preference_ for the mesh networks.

<comment><USER7> The TOR project has been doing some work on deterministic builds to deal with exactly that issue. [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds- part-o...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one- cyberwar-and-global-compromise)

I never thought that the whole "trusting trust" essay would become a practical reality and an everyday danger that must be mitigated. But welcome to the 21st century. No flying cars, but lots of dystopian cyber punks eager to get in your business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I saw an article about this a little while ago. If anywhere in the world could support a wide scale mesh network, it would have to be the Bay Area. It would be a really cool experiment to blanket a part of the Valley in mesh wifi: I imagine it would be very doable to raise $100K and send 1,500 mesh routers to people in Palo Alto or SOMA. Open Mesh has some really cool low-cost ($50 - $75) hardware that seems to _just work_ : [http://www.open- mesh.com/](http://www.open-mesh.com/). Some might be plugged into an upstream link, but if most were only powered on as relays it would still work.

<comment><USER9> And yet another mesh network, from HacDC hackerspace in Washington.

[http://project-byzantium.org/](http://project-byzantium.org/)

<comment><USER10> "The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hoc wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites often used for this purpose, such as Twitter and IRC." \- from [http://project-byzantium.org/about/](http://project-byzantium.org/about/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While this is a great solution for places without easy last-mile connections, it seems to me this would still be vulnerable, as one compromised connection would essentially allow the same kind of snooping that we've got going on now.

Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like this to stay secure.

<comment><USER12> A sort of invitation only controlled by social relations? not perfect but at least, misbehaving people can be trackable..

should be based in social connections and trust.. the old school policy

<comment><USER13> That creates an active _incentive_ to physically lean on people to roll up networks.

cjdns works by requiring people to exchange keys with someone out of band to get access to their mesh, and to me that just seems as fundamentally defeating the purpose.

Yes, that means you need to build a system where bad guys are hard to impossible to track down and throw off the mesh. The problem is if you create a system where misbehaving people are trackable, then good guys can be tracked too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A couple comments mentioned wanting to build this in the Bay Area. I've been wondering for awhile why there's not an active group here.

Let's meet up to discuss more, how about a Google group to organize? [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf- meshnet](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-meshnet)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you wanted to start a mesh network in your town, is there advice on how to protect yourself from legal liability in case someone does something clearly illegal with it?

Do mesh operators have the same "safe harbor" protections?

What if the FBI shows up on your doorstep and says "give us access or go to prison" ?

<comment><USER16> What do you do if your ISP says 'shut it down'?

<comment><USER5> The mesh itself should probably be an ISP. For whatever reason I get the impression that ISPs give downstream ISPs much more benefit of the doubt than they give end customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Similar thing exists in Melbourne, Australia: [http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/](http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/)

<comment><USER18> There used to be one in Brisbane in the mid 2000s (BrisMesh), but it seems to be dead now.

<comment><USER19> Most capital cities in Australia had a wireless mesh project during that era. wireless.org[1] was (and still is?) the toplevel website.

Melbourne and Perth seem to be the only ones left with active nodes? Canberra (air.net) used to be strong. Sydney lives on in the form of a website[2] and nodedb[3], a world wide map of mesh network nodes, started by "evilbunny" (Duane Groth).

The servers are still live, but the content is well out of date. The projects are dead, but all the infrastructure seems to still be there, if interest ever revives.

[1] [http://www.wireless.org.au/](http://www.wireless.org.au/)

[1] [http://www.sydneywireless.com/](http://www.sydneywireless.com/)

[2] [http://www.nodedb.com/](http://www.nodedb.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who own a connection. "And right now, you and me don't own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it," Wilder says."

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess it makes sense that the future could be dominated by multiple, parallel internets of varying degrees of freedom. The corporate controlled internet we know today is just the mainstream realm of YouTube and email, while darker DIY internets pop up that are the realm of torrents, bitcoin and various hackery. Kind of seems obvious this would happen eventually

</comment><comment><USER21> Im quite surprised that noone mentioned AirJaldi - which has to be some of the most pioneering work in this area, over some of the most inhospitable terrain.

It was built to connect the Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India using modified, off the shelf hardware and custom software at some of the hardest mountainous terrain where such equipment can be deployed.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi

<comment><USER22> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't worry, if this idea gets adopted then they will quickly label it as a 'terrorist network' ; no problem.

<comment><USER24> Besides I think since it would be quite local networks, it could be easily jammed by few NSA stations in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_netw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region)

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a huge community around wireless community networks in Germany. Checkout [http://start.freifunk.net/](http://start.freifunk.net/)

Don't miss the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks ([http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/](http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/)).

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?page...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?pagewanted=all)

For best UX, set your "Referrer:" header to google.com

Also, I think Cisco paid over a billion for one mesh community network's project. I think a YC cofounder may have been involved in that project. Not sure. Its Cisco brand name is Meraki.

It appears portable autonomous networks (i.e. no telco needed) are useful and valuable for many, diverse reasons. I posit that if you can build your "no telco required" network from affordable parts and can get it to work consistently, then it has value, irrespective of whatever "intended uses" for it you might have in mind.

Of course, I could be wrong.

<comment><USER5> _Also, I think Cisco paid over a billion for one mesh community network 's project._

Meraki was worth $1B because they almost completely pivoted away from mesh towards more conventional networking.

<comment><USER27> Almost.

If I build a better LAN, it might be used by companies with high maintenance corporate networks, or it might be used by high scoring gamers at LAN parties. The LAN technology does not fundamentally change, only the usage.

However, your point is well taken. As far as buzzwords go, "mesh network" is not in the same league as "cloud computing". You will not see "mesh network" in Cisco's marketing.

But was this really a "pivot"? Or is this a case of a use (corporate LAN) that differs from the original one (community LAN): what I would call an "unintended use".

My idea of a "pivot" is something like when some young developers want to start a company that takes orders for food delivery over the web but then, after consulting with the older folks who would provide funding, decide instead to build a news commentary blog that functions like a forum. That sounds like more than a change of usage. It sounds like an entirely different program. But maybe not. Maybe the system they create for taking orders is more or less the same one they use for taking comments on news items.

Anyway, it's an interesting story and regardless of how the stuff is being used now, it was originally used for creating "mesh networks", a type of portable network that could run with a telco. Now it is used, by Cisco customers, for creating "distributed networks".

<comment><USER5> My point is that newer Meraki products don't use mesh technology at all, so it's not just a different use case.

<comment><USER27> But, for example, Meraki products are used to create LAN's that have an OOB control plane. Correct? That sounds a lot like "supernodes", where Cisco runs the supernodes. Is that "traditional networking"?

I'm not clear on the exact definition of "mesh networking", but I think it implies forwarding data traffic. If so, that disqualifies Meraki. But I'm not sure of the purpose of your point (with which I agree) because I never used the terms "mesh networking" or "mesh technology".

For the record, I used the words "portable" and "no telco needed". In my mind, this encompasses more than just "mesh networks".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's just a lot that has to be rethought for mesh networks to work as "show up with an antenna and you're on the internet/ are the internet". IP layer, I'm looking at you.

I remember being told about research being done on multi-core processing in the 70's, but no headway there could outpace the standard of shrinking the technology and increasing the clock rate. Now we may as well assume n-cores. It's my hope (because mesh networks sound way more democratized and just "seem" like the next logical way of scaling the internet) that antennas become cheaper at a faster rate than wired infrastructure (given the fairly inelastic cost of digging shit up) and mesh networks start to make sense.

</comment><comment><USER29> This seems something like the Serval Project ([http://www.servalproject.org/](http://www.servalproject.org/)). Difference being that Serval is for mobile telecommunications meshes, rather than fixed(-ish) data connections.

<comment><USER6> Or the Project Meshnet:

[https://projectmeshnet.org/](https://projectmeshnet.org/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan](http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could someone build this into DD-WRT or Tomato and then build this on top of WIFI / WLAN? In a built-up conurbation, you have a high concentration of WIFI routers that have a short range but with such a large concentration, maybe it doesn't matter?

</comment><comment><USER31> We've also got the same thing going on in Montreal :) [http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca](http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca) (we're trying to figure out how to have a bilingual wiki...)

</comment><comment><USER32> I live in the mountains (Central Arizona) and I have garnered some interest of other people in my community to set up a local mesh network. Really good in emergencies (e.g., east coast during Hurricane Sandy).

</comment><comment><USER33> If you live in Seattle and you're curious about mesh networking, I highly recommend checking out [http://seattlewireless.net/](http://seattlewireless.net/)

They've been at it since 2000, have various nodes throughout the city and some impressive long distance directional links. (Seattle's topography provides some interesting challenges.) When I lived there in about 2005 there were regular wireless hack nights. Find Matt Westervelt or Rob Flickenger.

</comment><comment><USER34> Submitted by me 2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765)

</comment><comment><USER35> What backbone protocol is largely used for these projects? I only ask because the range of even 802.11ac would be a limiting factor in these sorts of networks.

<comment><USER36> In densely populated areas, WiFi can suffice due to the mesh topology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> We should definitely do this in america, God we need this!

<comment><USER38> This is awesome, however, municipalities have put _fear_ into people wishing to do this over _legal_ issues arising from what someone _might_ do on your connection. Who is to blame when something illegal (mp3 download, etc) happens? That whole issue needs to be put to rest so we as a society can create our own Internet without fear of suppression.

<comment><USER32> +1 great point. I sometimes leave my wifi open (I live in a small town, if that means anything) but then I consider the legal implications and lock it up for a while. ...then repeat...

The best solution would be allowing people to risk free run grid networks (which would be, I think, very low bandwidth) and have communities also supply separtae low bandwidth Internet connected wifi for free. We would then use a paid for service for anything for more than text or other low bandwidth uses. No one would download large mp3s, watch Netflix, etc. from the very low bandwidth community wifi, and the separate grid network would be local and likely not have anything to attract "Imperial interest" (sorry about the Star Wars metaphor :-)

Local grid networks could be part of support for local libraries, community centers, etc.

<comment><USER39> Having an open wifi should leave you free of any charges in the same way that an ISP is. Maybe it should be not culpable modulo keeping logs of everything for up to three months so that law enforcement can attempt to find anyone committing a crime once they have a warrant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is excellent! The Internet actually was supposed to be one InterNetwork of many. How is this different than a LAN though?

<comment><USER41> The Internet _is_ an inter-network of many.

Also the "L" in LAN, stands for "Local".

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I had been a member of the AWMN for some years. You can see a map of the nodes here: [http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap](http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap)

I remember AWMN had experienced a boost when the ADSL's were out but very expensive, so many people used to buy one and share it alltogether.

It has come a long way since.

</comment><comment><USER43> Seems a stretch to say its untouchable. A policeman. An always show up and ask you to attach some hardware to the machine.

<comment><USER44> Or an antenna could just listen in on the signals.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of the packet networks that we hams used to build back in the BBS days. Most of the stations went off air with wide spread commercial internet service and operator turn over, but there's a renewed interest with newer, cheaper, radio gear come out.

Also there's many cities with a first responders mesh network.

<comment><USER46> There's been a renewed interest in this lately among hams, actually. [http://www.hsmm-mesh.org/](http://www.hsmm-mesh.org/)

I'm a little disappointed, though, that at least local to me most of the interest centers around hacking the old WRT-54G rather than more modern and powerful gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm surprised noone has linked to the FNF before. They seem to be one of the more organized mesh efforts in the US.

[http://thefnf.org](http://thefnf.org)

</comment><comment><USER48> Anyone interested in getting a private mesh network set up in Silicon Valley? Seems like it would be a fun and educational project if nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER49> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net)

</comment><comment><USER50> What caught me was the localism - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I crazy or did the URL of the submission change? I've never seen that done on HN before.

<comment><USER51> I've seen it happen on rare occasion when the original submission was content- free blogspam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Again, the sudden title change of submissions suck.

<comment><USER52> Update: Thanks for changing it back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Meshing has always been the end goal.</comment>


Yankees Who Brought Science to the BBQ World - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yankees-who-brought-science-to-the-bbq-world-1535119032 <comment><USER2> Is there a video of how their smoker works?

<comment><USER3> I don't think so, but if you're curious about the "CPU connected to the smoker" bit in the article, that's a relatively popular COTS part and you can find videos of it ("digiq dx2") easily. I'm not in love with that thing, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, found it

I don't need another hobby, but they keep coming!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a screen grab.

[https://i.imgur.com/VsLb7Zc.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/VsLb7Zc.jpg)

Just a reminder, to bypass the pay wall just do a search for the title and then click on it. WSJ lets you read articles if your referral URL is DuckDuckGo or Google or whatever.

<comment><USER5> [https://web.archive.org/web/20180826011726/https://www.wsj.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180826011726/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the- yankees-who-brought-science-to-the-bbq-world-1535119032)

<comment><USER6> Also: [http://archive.is/oAymy](http://archive.is/oAymy)</comment></comment></comment>


Startups That Rejected $100M Offers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/startups-that-rejected-100-million-offers-2013-5 <comment><USER2> What an astounding lack of mathematical understanding.

First, if you raise $36M, getting acquired for $100M could very well mean next to nothing for common stock holders.

The odds of a venture-backed startup failing may be 75%, but the odds of a company that's looking at a $100M offer failing are probably more like 10% for real "failure", a high likelihood of not quite being able to match that offer later, and a good chance of a higher exit at some point in the future.

"99.99% of entrepreneurs" include all those companies that never get the first customer, and never get a buyout offer. I can think of a handful of companies that have been successful after turning down an offer. So now I challenge the author of this piece to come up with the tens of thousands of companies he implies got a buyout offer, turned it down and regretted it.

<comment><USER3> > First, if you raise $36M, getting acquired for $100M could very well mean > next to nothing for common stock holders.

The operative word here is "could". It also "could" mean they make $60M.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a finance guy, are you saying that the funders of the $36MM could have done so for a basically even money return on exit?

<comment><USER3> The terms could be literally anything. The grandparent was assuming that the VCs have 3x participating preferred. I won't say that's unlikely, since I've never seen a Series B or C term sheet, but those are gone from decent Seed Term sheets and I believe good Series A term sheets.

So you have to ask, how could a sale happen for $100M with a $36M investment. There are two options: the VCs agreed, or they didn't need the VC's permission. In the latter case, the common would almost certainly do well. But there are situations where the former could happen too: if the company was worth much less and they just felt now was the time to sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once you reach a certain point money simply doesn't matter. They mentioned Groupon: Andrew Mason knew that whatever happened he was never going to have to worry about money again. When you have that luxury, you go with your heart, and it usually isn't with the money. Even after he was fired he made out like a bandit.

The same thing goes for a lot of these founders. When you get a substantial buyout offer, you've done something very few people have. Even if you blow it, odds are someone else will fund your next startup. Either way you probably won't have to worry about money. Once a startup is funded, the founder isn't rich but the company usually pays the bills so he can focus squarely on work.

I don't think we should reject the allure of money, it goes against human nature. But the ultimate motivation is freedom. That's what money gives you; freedom to do what you love. If what you love is building a startup the money becomes insignificant, but having enough to let you pursue your passion comfortably is very important.

<comment><USER6> This is why joining a startup as an early employee may not be a good idea. The founders' goals and your goals may be divergent.

At some point, the founders are already rich, or are guaranteed to be rich, and are looking for self-actualization or ego. To achieve that, they'll gamble your guaranteed payout by not selling--either because they want to remain "in charge" or they want to shoot for the moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Money is just money. It can be squandered, mal-invested, taxed, or simply inflated away. However, the guts that all of those founders showed will forever be a reference point for their careers. Many can claim they would turn down 100M, but few have actually done it.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad this is the first comment. We should be giving those who reject such offers MASSIVE KUDOS for having the gumption to turn down mere money for their dreams. Do you want to get rich or actually change this world? I hope we still remember why we tell each other tech is world changing - not just "life changing"

<comment><USER9> 'Change the World'? They were holding out on the 100 million offers mostly because they thought they could become billion dollar companies, if the article is to be believed.

<comment><USER10> I think it goes both ways. Some founders actually believe in their companies and their vision, whereas others are just holding out for a bigger payday. While it is nice to hear stories about founders cashing out, we should also celebrate those who are actually trying to make a long lasting impact, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mark Zuckerberg was offered $1 billion dollars from Yahoo. After offered the money Mark and Peter Thiel (investor) had a talk about the offer. Marks comment was "obviously we're not going to sell here." Peter didn't feel the same way. Today Peter is very grateful Mark didn't sell. Mark had a vision for FB that Yahoo didn't, and he knew that if he sold he would never see his vision come true.

<comment><USER12> It's pretty incredible. I can't imagine many 22 year olds turning down one hundred million, let alone one billion.

<comment><USER13> I actually think it's the other way around. When you're 22 it doesn't take a lot of money to feel like "man, I already have all the money I could ever need." You're living cheap, you're probably single, you're probably healthy, you're probably not thinking too hard about retirement. So money's not as big a pressure point in your life as it is when you're (say) 42, with a house payment and two kids you want to send to college someday and an underperforming 401(k). When you've got those worries, I have to think it would be harder to turn away $100mm in hopes of making a billion later on.

<comment><USER14> So true, 22 yo don't have wives who will skin them off if they reject that much money :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meh. On $100 million the common employees aren't going to see much anyway. Maybe for #1 and #2 it'll be a big deal, but for #10 with his 0.002 of the company, that's going to be a nice bonus and not much else. So I can understand the founders deciding to shoot for the moon.

<comment><USER16> That's still $200,000 if I did my math right. That's a little bit more than "a nice bonus" but definitely not "FU Money". But it might just be enough cushion for somebody to quit and self-fund their own startup for a year or so. That's not a bad thing to have, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

<comment><USER15> 200k over four years, less taxes, which will be maxed because you'll realize all of the earnings as income in one year. So around 30k a year take-home. Maybe slightly more than the standard 10-15% salary bonus of an intermediate engineer at BigCo, but it's not _why_ the guy is working at the startup, or at least I hope it isn't for his sake.

<comment><USER16> Sure, I definitely agree that - in general - "employee number 10" and later aren't going to get rich from their startups. And hopefully they aren't expecting to. Better, yet, hopefully the company goes public are more like a billion dollar valuation, so that they _do_ get rich even if they only own 0.002 worth. :-)

<comment><USER15> Yep, and good on 'em if so. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a false dichotomy. If someone's willing to pay $X for your company, you can do a secondary sale at ~.75*$X pre-money valuation to give key employees some liquidity. No, it's not the same, but it's still real money, and certainly alleviates the $100M->zero risk.

And if it's a real business whose value is based on, say, an EBITDA multiple, there's even less reason to sell, unless you think earnings are going to tank. (Presumably you will have significant visibility into the factors that determine your revenue and EBITDA growth, and what might cause those to change.)

But if you made a little photo-sharing app that earns no money, and someone wants to buy it for a truckload of money, sell. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Business Insider Sucks. I think they hire teenagers from a local high school newspaper to pump this shit out in 60 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER19> In Dodgeball/Foursquare's case, how do deals like this work? I assume when you sell a company you also sign a non-compete agreement.

For example, Instagram couldn't have just sold to facebook for $1B then turn around and make the same thing again. Obviously they no longer have rights to the code, but re-creating it wouldn't be _that_ hard if you already did it once. It could be like forking an open source project, except you make a bunch of money.

Is that that in the Dodgeball/Foursquare example, the non-compete was apparently incredibly specific, and this allowed them to make a different location-aware social network?

<comment> brown9-2 Those agreements usually are for a certain number of years, not forever. According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare>, Dodgeball was acquired in 2005 and Foursquare was started in 2009, the same year Google shut down Dodgeball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was surprised not to see Digg on this list. Was it ever offered $100+ million?

<comment><USER21> Digg accepted a $200 million offer from Google. But during due diligence Google chew Digg up and spit them out on the floor. Digg became tainted goods after that.

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/26/google-walks-away-from- digg...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/26/google-walks-away-from-digg-deal/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While raising $100M sounds awesome, its really hard to increase the value of your company. This means unless you raise an even bigger round next time, you are risk de-valuing your company in the future by raising so much money right now (called a downround in VCs).

Raising so much money also runs the risk of ownership dilution and if you have a downround in the future, your ownership will probably get diluted even more to maintain the % ownership of previous investors.

</comment><comment><USER23> What a negative article. I disagree that any founder is "stupid" for not jumping on their first chance at life-changing money. By BusinessInsider logic, Facebook should have been bought out by Friendster or Microsoft. Dropbox should have been acquired by Apple. There are other examples. This approach just encourages a "get rich quick" mentality, which is probably not the best way to create unique and impactful products.

<comment><USER24> I found it well balanced. They included several examples of people like Zuckerberg who turned down large amounts of money and were later proven correct.

<comment><USER25> I found that it cast those cases as extremely rare, and that you shouldn't look to them as inspiration to turn down an offer.

<comment><USER26> The chance that you are 'Facebook' good is slim, even if you have a $100M offer. If you're ever in the position of deciding to accept/decline a $100M offer on your company, then you probably want to be realistic about your options, even if you decide to go with your heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think you cant have an ideology going into your venture whether it be "holdout for the biggest offer" or "shoot for the moon". You should take things as the come and do what you think is right. I also think there is a price that everyone will sell at and thats not a bad thing. Money is very important and they people who downplay its importance often have alot of it

</comment><comment><USER28> What happened to those who didn't turn down a $100M offer. They are now sitting in their luxury home and watching TV.

</comment><comment><USER29> The spirit of this article is very negative - more "expected value-maximizing" than entrepreneurial.

Its logic is also questionable - you do not retroactively assess the correctness of a decision by looking at its outcome.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yahoo! turned down an offer of 60M from AOL in early days of internet boom. Facebook turned down Yahoo!'s 1B offer. Google turned down Yahoo!'s 3B offer.

<comment><USER31> When IBM was melting down at the beginning of the 1990s, they used Thomas Watson Jr. to reach out to Bill Gates and offer to buy Microsoft and make Bill President / CEO of IBM.

At the time Microsoft's market cap was around $10 billion (with IBM around $30 billion).

Gates would have lost out on upwards of a hundred billion dollars plausibly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know its vague but, how about 500 million? If your company is worth more, would you cash out for 500 ?</comment>


EU commission proposes simpler rules for cookies - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-16_en.htm <comment><AUTHOR> The so-called "EU cookie law" is at best seen as an annoyance by Web developers. Shouldn't have privacy expectations have merit on the web?</comment>


New $100 Bill tomorrow with extra security features - <AUTHOR> http://www.newmoney.gov/uscurrency/redesigned100.htm

<comment><USER2> Critique it as a startup rollout:

1) We had the same bills from my grandpas age till mine, and suddenly over the past 20 years we're up to revision 4.0 or so. Confusing the endusers to no end. Although the API has remained constant what you get per bill has dropped quite a bit over those 20 years. Maybe the new 4.0 version should get me more groceries for my $100 rather than less each revision.

2) Same spokesman for each revision confuses upgraders. You got Franklin? Yeah I'm using Franklin. No dude thats the old version of Franklin, has some security bugs, you gotta upgrade before the economy gets powned. Can't they put something contemporary on it, like the Miley Cyrus bill or the 'Bama Bill? Or embed the year, like I got me an "2013 buck" because it has 2013 written in big ole automotive style letters?

3) They're doing a great job at rollout of focusing on the new features, but ignoring the old features. I need to know the API to verify the new bills are legit. A smart counterfeiter would focus solely on the new features and just print on toilet paper or something, half the public would probably buy it. A REALLY smart counterfeiter would start producing a run on version 5.0 $20 bills and most of the public would assume its actually upstream's product, seeing as upstream ships a new version about as often as Detroit ships a new model car now.

4) I'm not kidding around here, why do they use sequential serial numbers when a pub-key crypto signed serial number with a VERY private key would let us look at a bill and verify its a genuine signed serial number? Maybe not prove the bill is legit and uncopied, but at least you'd know its a copy of a good signed bill. They could publish a list of destroyed currency and rotate aggressively such that counterfeits would only circulate for awhile.. Unless of course the destroyed currency was the counterfeit and the cancelled one in your hand is the legit one... maybe thats why they don't do this.

5) As far as .coms go this startup needs a new art director. I'm not asking for kittens but lose the eye in the pyramid and flowery decorations and inkwells and eagles and try a QR code in one corner for vending machines (hey when the 70s stagflation hits and you want to buy a condom for $100 from the local vending machine, you'll be sorry...).

6) This seems to be the only branch that hasn't sold out naming rights. I halfway expect to see "Larry Ellison Bucks" and "HP 20s" at some point in my life. The "3com three dollar bill". As a startup they're leaving money on the table by not selling naming rights. At the bankruptcy Oracle will probably pick up the product for pennies on the dollar and freak out the GPL linux guys who'll fork into a bitcoin implementation on mariadb.

7) I don't think they're getting the tech news buzz they need. They need to send out fat stack of free samples to hacker news readers like me to create buzz. They should send out so many free samples that I can freely share them with friends.

8) Open source the code to generate? Why can't I print some at home to pay my debts, just like .gov does? Information just wants to be free. Speaking of which it needs a license I'm guessing not BSD or GPL not some CC:SA variety?

9) Is the new API compatible with existing players like "wheresgeorge.com" (are they still around?)</comment>


Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-15/coinbase-wants-wall-street-to-resolve-its-bitcoin-trust-issues <comment><USER2> Coinbase should solve it's coinbase trust issue. I bought a small amount of litecoin almost 2 weeks ago, i'm well past my "delivery by" date, my funds left my bank account over 10 days ago, yet I still don't have my coins in my account.

<comment><USER3> To counter anecdote with anecdote, I've had no issues with coinbase and have found them pleasant to use. That includes transferring to gdax/selling/withdrawing, etc.

<comment><USER4> I've never had a single problem with Coinbase either. Most complaints seem to be from brand new signups getting delayed, people failing the AML/KYC checks.

My USD withdrawals always show up in my bank account 2 days later.

<comment><USER2> My account is over 3 months old. They took my money and successfully gave me my tiny bit of ETH and BTC, but for some reason my litecoin transaction is stuck in the ether.

<comment><USER4> That's annoying then, maybe the run up in LTC triggered a new tier of verification or they really are that far behind. I'm sure you'll get it eventually but if you're looking to flip it now you can't yet.

If you're not buying with the intent to hold, I recommend depositing USD to their exchange GDAX. Fees are lower and you can sell/withdraw immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Until the situation with bitfinex pumping billions of unbacked tether into the ecosystem is resolved, doing anything involving bitcoin right now is insane.

They've released almost $200 million worth of tether in the last _day_.

<comment><USER6> My theory on tether is their goal is to absorb as much downward (selling) pressure as possible on the BTC/USD market and encourage only upward movement of BTC (equally applies to any other crypto)

1) Someone who wants to sell $1M USD of BTC may be happy to take $1M USDT instead for legal/tax purposes. This transaction would have zero impact on the BTC/USD price.

2) Tether receives $1M worth of BTC they can slowly disperse back into the market via their own exchange (since Bitfinex owns Tether) in a controlled manner that doesn't push the price down.

3) With USD in hand they can either put it into their reserves (assuming we trust them) or they could also use the cash to further eliminate any selling pressure on the exchange (with a large buy order "wall") or even generate upward pressure.

4) BTC price becomes stable or only moves upward and attracts more outside money and speculation. Repeat the cycle.

<comment><USER7> > Someone who wants to sell $1M USD of BTC may be happy to take $1M USDT > instead for legal/tax purposes.

This sounds extremely foolish. Why would anyone intentionally wish to hold such a large amount of a token that all evidence points towards being actually worthless? (Tethers can only be used to purchase cryptocoins in Bitfinex, which is most likely insolvent -- it is not possible to redeem them for USD).

> 4) BTC price becomes stable or only moves upward and attracts more outside > money and speculation. Repeat the cycle.

I think this is the most likely explanation for Bitfinex's behavior. They know that there will inevitably be a bank run when Bitcoin's prices show a sign of going down and that will unravel the scam they have been running so at this point the only thing they can do is continue to push up the price at all costs.

<comment><USER8> > This sounds extremely foolish. Why would anyone intentionally wish to hold > such a large amount of a token that all evidence points towards being > actually worthless

Yep. Which makes the "institutional investors are handing Bitfinex hundreds of millions of real dollars in exchange for Tether" claims people are pushing even more ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm confused by this bit:

> "But first, Coinbase...needs to legitimize itself -- and bring in > revenue..."

Like it doesn't have revenue? It's daily volumes of BTC are around 30k. Sometimes _a lot_ more. Plus ETH. Plus LTC. They must be making at least a million per day in trading fees. They're a money printing machine at this point.

<comment><USER10> On Dec 9, LTC's creator posted that GDAX/Coinbase made $2MM in fees on LTC alone that day: [https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/939476331397390336](https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/939476331397390336)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Their website is often down, can't properly scale up and they expect trust? If you're Canadian, you can buy but can't sell cryptos, that's a red flag anywhere regarding investments.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's interesting the negativity I read about Coinbase in this thread. Makes me wonder if those who do complain tried other exchanges? I've tried Kraken (down much more often), Bittrex (worst trading UI ever), CAvirtex (they are shutdown) ... Coinbase/ GDAX I have had a much better experience. If you want a fast money wire, pay the price for same day processing (30$), I always do and it usually takes a 2 hours.

<comment><USER13> The fact that other exchanges are worse doesn't make Coinbase any better though, that's the problem. It'd be interesting to see what % of coins is held by them. While I don't really care about Coinbase per se, I think that it could hurt the public perception of the whole crypto ecosystem if something went wrong and people were locked out of their accounts, lost funds, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Coinbase has been one of the more poorly constructed sites I've used in the past couple years. I don't just mean the inability to handle volume.

I saw it riddled with HTML errors, there were buttons that didn't do anything, I got (html) responses that were false, which I only knew was the case because I looked directly at the API response.

I remember I 'sold' some litecoin on Coinbase that never sold. Took me to a couple days just to know it wasn't going to mysteriously disappear.

I find the fact that they want to add new coins even though they haven't solved any of their current issues very alarming.

<comment><USER15> I remember the problem they had a few years ago using MongoDB to do their financial transactions, people reported lots of double and triple withdrawals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> __EDIT __

Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I 'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job.

Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues.

I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. They'll be fine, they're just learning how to deal with alot of hard issues all at once.

The question was posed, what do you need to do to get institutional money and I answered.

To clarify...

Coinbase , atleast from a hedge funds perspective has 2 tasks.

1) prime broker or custodian, from this perspective you just can't be hacked and loose anyone's bitcoins.

Not sure how a hedge fund would tell its clients that they lost any amount of their funds due to an exchange being hacked, this is just so foreign to the way the markets currently work. I don't think the funds clients would be too accepting of a loss of any amount due to this.

2) as an exchange, This is probably easy for people to understand. When the volume picks up that's when you make your money. If Volume causes the exchange to go down, you can't make money.

Again this is very rare for most markets now to go down to volume and when it does it doesn't really matter too much because the concept of having your shares with an exchange doesn't really make sense in the equities market.

You'd just start trading at another exchange and none of your shares are actually held with the exchange, nor do you need to send shares to an exchange to trade, you just trade and settle at the end of the day.

 __EDIT END __

I 'll preface this by saying, what I'm asking for is hard, very hard, but being a grown up is hard..... You can't just ask people to invest billions of other peoples money and then claim "best efforts" if your exchange crashes under load.

Well what institutional investors want is pretty simple to understand, though very hard to implement.

1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf.

A hedge fund can't just go to their clients and say sorry, lost all our money, coinbase got hacked, the hedge fund itself and its principles would be sued into oblivion.

I mean if the Nasdaq, NYSE or prime broker ever got hacked, no one would expect to suddenly loose all their shares, or cash held with their prime broker.

2) The exchange can't go down, like at all. Once a year for 5 minutes is fine, or every day at midnight for 10 minutes is fine, but during regular trading hours you can't just throw your hand up and say "hey, best efforts here there just alot of volume right now, we'll be up in a few minutes"

Hedge funds make their money on volatility, which means the more volatile and busy the exchange is the more they'll want to trade. Going down when times are busy is just can't happen.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf.

Coinbase is insured by AON Insurance for their hot wallet balance. However, we won't know how Coinbase/AON will handle that until it happens.

I believe any fiat balance is also insured by the FDIC, but I'm less sure about that.

>2) The exchange can't go down, like at all.

Yep. Crypto trades 24/7\. It's really surprising they don't have regular planned downtime to address this.

<comment><USER17> There's a deeper problem. Bitcoin is very deflationary and strictly limited in supply. What happens if Coinbase cannot obtain replacement bitcoins at a price near what the insurance pays out?

They can refund in fiat of course, but that's the point. If fiat didn't exist then this would be a potentially insurmountable problem if the theft were large enough.

Now what happens if the thief panics or screws up and deletes their keys. Those Bitcoins are now lost forever. The money supply just went down permanently.

... or ... a really smart thief with enough money behind them might not even need to steal any Bitcoins. They could just destroy cold wallet keys in a very stealthy way and profit from the appreciation of coins they hold elsewhere.

This whole system is just not ready for prime time.

<comment> FLUX-YOU >What happens if Coinbase cannot obtain replacement bitcoins at a price near what the insurance pays out?

People lose their bitcoins. It's as simple as that. That's a risk everyone should understand before buying.

They might be compensated in some other way, like fiat, and then the insurance company either picks up the bill or goes under. Then it's just business as usual as far as bankruptcy goes.

So yes, you have every reason to be wary of exchange solvency because of how new they are and how little support is provided to them by government and law enforcement compared to the banks. Every investor should understand that as critically as they understand how important their wallets are.

>This whole system is just not ready for prime time.

Yeah, it's one big experiment. I'm sure these problems were encountered before in economic history, but it seems like they are repeating a bunch of blunders within a short time frame, which to me, smells of manipulation (Satoshi probably didn't invent it to just manipulate people)

<comment><USER18> > They might be compensated in some other way Like how Mt Gox returnedt > peoples coins...

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is not easy to build a company/service like Coinbase; having said that, I think that Coinbase in its current state is slightly better than a joke, starting from their customer support.

<comment><USER20> Contacted their support 13 days ago about my account somehow being restricted (can't buy or sell). Not a peep besides the automated response. 13 days and counting...

Wonder if anyone has an outstanding ticket being ignored that's longer than that

<comment><USER21> Don't expect to get an answer. I had an issue as well, hasn't been resolved after 3 months. Their phone support is even a bigger joke. 2 hours of waiting and no answer then they just hang you up. GDAX (owned by Coinbase) is the same, I wasn't able to download the statements because login was suspended for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like this article, "Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be":

[https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the- thin...](https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it- was-supposed-to-be)

Bitcoin can't operate as a currency without having exchanges between it and other currencies, and those exchanges strip all the benefits of bitcoin.

Edit: show title of article.

<comment><USER23> A few years ago, it was easy to say "well, all the issues are at the BTC <-> USD (or other fiat currency) boundaries". But today's bitcoin is nearly unusable even just within the confines of the bitcoin network. For small amount of bitcoin (less then $15) it is incredible impractical to make a single transaction. Fees are around $5 and often much higher, with confirmation times sometimes reaching 6+ hours.

Maybe there is hope with Bitcoin Cash (BCH), because it can piggyback on the existing bitcoin integration infrastructure. Or maybe Ethereum or Monero or some other altcoin will take the place of Bitcoin. But more and more, it's looking like the original cryptocurrency has failed to innovate and solve fundamental scaling issues and it's first-mover advantage won't last. If these altcoins can scale better than bitcoin, they only need to match bitcoin's integrations with the existing financial system to win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want coinbase to resolve its segwit issues.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. Considering the volume of transactions going to and from Coinbase, their adoption of Segwit would go a long way towards alleviating the current mempool situation, which would bring lower fees for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A good currency is fungible: It has a stable value and allows rapid exchange. Bitcoin does not meet these basic requirements. So many people forget that the original paper clearly states that Bitcoin is an experiment.

<comment><USER27> > So many people forget that the original paper clearly states that Bitcoin is > an experiment.

Where exactly in the white paper does it state this? I've just looked it up, and don't see any reference to Bitcoin being an experiment.

<comment><USER26> The beginning

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This may be a stupid question but I dont understand every aspect of bitcoin so bear with me.

Is Bitcoin access coupled with one private key or multiple?

Say someone has 10 bitcoin on their computer and a private key so its only accessible from that computer. That computer holds a lot of value. If the computer gets stolen theyve stolen all the bitcoins with it? Given that the secret to the private key can be broken at some point in the future.

Or is there a way for the user to claim back his/ger bitcoin by creating a new key with same secret?

<comment><USER29> The private key is the secret. Someone who steals it does not have to break anything.

In this case it is similar to a physical lock on a safe: if you lose the key to the safe you just have to accept that you no longer can access the contents of the safe.

You can have wallets that are protected by multiple keys, but there is not a whole lot of wallet software that does this in an easy to use way right now.

<comment><USER30> [https://copay.io/](https://copay.io/)

An open source wallet by bitpay with good support for multi-sig transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > In traditional finance, custody banks like State Street Corp. hold > securities, keep records and provide other services for investment advisers. > A lack of similar offerings in the cryptocurrency world has kept many > institutions on the sidelines.

>Coinbase has offered a solution: crypto custodial services, slated to roll out next year. Called Coinbase Custody, it'll be available to investors with at least $10 million in deposits.

Honestly, WTF?

<comment><USER32> What about this is WTF?

Please explain, in detail, how somebody with $10M in BTC should store it.

<comment><USER33> I think the WTF is that the original point of cryptocurrency was that it was supposed to be _decentralized_ , with no big institutions that you must trust. Coinbase Custody is essentially reinventing the exact institutions that bitcoin was supposed to cut out of the loop.

You're supposed to store $10M in BTC on the blockchain, which - after all - records ownership of every bitcoin ever mined. And keep access to it in a paper wallet; control of those $10M lies in access to a private key, so if you keep the key secret, nobody can access them (like with Satoshi's $40B or so in Bitcoin).

That people don't seem to want to do this is perhaps a lesson in human nature that crypto-anarchists and other aficionados of "trustless completely- distributed systems" should perhaps heed. This same dynamic comes up over and over again, from open-source to the Internet to P2P and now to cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER34> Very well put. It is sort of funny, isn't it.

Bitcoin maximalist: "Bitcoin, no need to trust evil centralised institutions!"

Actual Bitcoin users: "Oh, hey, could you take care of my Bitcoin balance for me, please? And you have password recovery, right?"

<comment><USER35> What I think is sort of funny is that you've just described two poles, but seemingly can't grasp the infinite gradient in between those poles where people with different risk tolerances and security requirements can exist.

<comment><USER36> What he's describing is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people (who are supposed to replace fiat with ctypto in the future) reside on one end of the pole. The end with all the real-life, non-ideologically-constrained usability.

<comment><USER35> This is akin to assuming that internet users are a bunch of neckbeards and grad students who like to muck about configuring routers, just because that was where it started.

Who knows what will wind up being the dominant use case in the future, or who will be the dominant user population. Maybe the ones who drive early adoption, and who govern the philosophical and technical direction, will turn into a tiny faction of stakeholders in the end, but maybe they continue to dominate technical development because they are the best stewards of the idea. Or maybe they're overthrown and it turns into something else, run by small business owners. Or the governments of third world countries.

The point is that nobody knows how it will shake out. Acting like the current state of things is somehow 'wrong' is arrogant and historically uninformed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think most of you don't realise at what scale Coinbase work. You just have to watch the trade history on GDAX for a few seconds to understand the sheer volume of what is actually happening. The GDAX web socket is very very robust. It's very rarely down for me, and have not been down at all since they did whatever upgrade/maintenance they had to a few days ago.

<comment><USER38> Do you realise the scale at which wall street/nasdaq/nyse all work? Have you ever looked at trading volume in large brokerage tools like TD Ameritrade. GDAX isn't there.

I think the point most people here are making is–this is the big leagues and if you want to be taken seriously, suspending trading mid-day is unacceptable (happened this week).

Nothing to do with web sockets IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been trying to log into my account for over 3 weeks with no response from Coinbase. They need to handle their own support issue better if they want consumer trust.

<comment><USER40> In my case, I sent some ETH to "my" ETH wallet at Coinbase, received an email from Coinbase alerting me of the incoming transfer, and then - nothing, that ETH is nowhere to be found except on the blockchain (it's not showing in my ETH Coinbase account, and it's not shown under transactions).

Frankly, this (misplacing a transaction) is more concerning to me than delays or verification issues. Losing a transfer like that puts their whole transactional integrity into question.

Again, delays (something showing as "pending", etc) I could live with, considering their recent spike in usage. But, when a transaction is simply missing, while the ones before and after it are showing in Coinbase, is scary.

I agree with you that they need to handle their support much much better. The bulk of their cases (judging by the publicly visible mentions of @CoinbaseSupport on Twitter) can be handled by simply explaining the situation and telling people to wait. There are only 5 or 6 issue types that can be categorized and routed programmatically even. Instead, they are currently only responding to 0.5% (not a typo) of Support requests on Twitter (not counting DMs). I think that may be the lowest response rate I've ever seen from a company, especially a tech one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> their ID system had not worked for MONTHs. [https://status.coinbase.com/](https://status.coinbase.com/) i cant buy or sell while traveling outside the USA.

<comment><USER42> Why do you use the worst service available? There are way better players in this market than Coinbase imo.

<comment><USER41> who do u recommend? i need to connect a US bank account but i dont have a US cel or US driver's iD...just a US Passport. everyone seems to ask for a Driver's ID or Cel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> what is coinbase's stance on the future of cryptographic hash functions?

are they just trying to cash in as much as possible, like many of the investors, before the math is settled

or do they publicly state that they believe.. meaning without proof.. that p!=np?

are they resting their future, and the futures of all of their users.. and here apparently the economy writ large.. on faith?

</comment><comment><USER44> Coinbase.Gov

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm sure you all have very insightful comments about why bitcoin is in a bubble and will fail.

Meanwhile, I ignored your comments years ago and I'm very, very comfortably retired now.

But please, do go on with your smart insightful comments.

<comment><USER46> Most of the comments here aren't about Bitcoin being in a bubble and falling, they're about Coinbase and varying aspects of their growing pains (security, scalability, lack of insurance and so forth).

Maybe becoming very, very comfortably retired as a bazillionaire has a deleterious effect on reading and attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Bitcoin "community" seems to try very hard to prevent that from happening, even if you ignore all of the shady activity various exchanges are engaged in.

<comment><USER8> Do the downvoters care to explain themselves instead of just trying to bury my post? Do you guys think the constant forks, obvious coordinated market manipulation, constantly changing story about what Bitcoin is supposed to be, and general obnoxiousness and ridiculous behavior of the majority of Bitcoin cultists makes Bitcoin look good to outsiders?

As someone who has been involved with and supportive of Bitcoin for several years (I started mining in 2011), the fact that it's impossible to point out any of the negative aspects of Bitcoin and the community surrounding it without just being downvoted or accused of "not holding any Bitcoin and being jealous" is starting to become incredibly tiresome. Denying the negative aspects of this sector is just going to encourage those negatives to continue. You guys are your own worst enemy.

I know a number of people who won't touch Bitcoin with a 500ft pole because of this shit. These are people with large sums of money that could be flowing into the sector, who are being chased away by the stupidity and shysterish behavior of the Bitcoin community and shady exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 1) Wallstreet is pretty corrupt, so getting them to help you with trust issues is odd to me. I get that Wallstreet has "legitimacy credentials", so that you will get more old money and institutions investing in you if they saw it's safe.

I completely disagree with that. Wallstreet and big banks have lost trillions of dollars investing in "Safe" stuff before.

2) Coinbase needs to make sure they deliver what they say they can deliver. No hacking. No delivery issues. Minor to none technical issues.

That's how you build trust long term. Honestly, Wallstreet won't matter if your goal is to be around in 10 or 20 years.

3) This brings me to my last point, if you really are trying to do this thing long term, why would even care about Wallstreet? Asking them for help just screams to me, "We want to make a shit ton of money right now before everything falls apart"

I am seriously worried about the large exchanges ability to handle the amount and size of the transactions. Especially the growth.

<comment><USER48> > why would even care about Wallstreet?

> I am seriously worried about the large exchanges ability to handle the > amount and size of the transactions.

One approach to solving hard problems is to enlist the help of people who have a great deal of experience in solving the same hard problems.

You don't have to, of course. It's possible that having a table tennis table is sufficient to help one muddle on through.

But it sounds like Coinbase are taking a more pragmatic path. In the circumstances, that's probably prudent. Unfortunate but prudent.</comment></comment>


Startup to IPO: Part 2: Obstacles - <AUTHOR> http://scale.cc/2009/07/15/startup-to-ipo-why-few-companies-make-the-leap-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them-part-2/

<comment><USER2> We'd be out of business now if we had gotten VC in 2005. From the VC-funded companies I've been in before, getting VC seems like getting shot out of a cannon. There are no course corrections that don't involve big splotches of blood and viscera. You better be aimed correctly.

We didn't know enough in '05. We've watched 5 other companies launch the product we were planning to launch. One of them eventually took in over $80MM (!) in funding. The market hasn't panned out. We got to watch that all play out, see what worked and didn't work, and retool, all while building up a profitable line of business.

Just another reason, besides "it makes you work really hard", why not getting VC can be a win.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I wonder what your competitor did with that $80MM!

<comment><USER2> Presumably:

* Several million dollars in inventory

* A 20 region global direct sales team, likely each consisting of a 130k base account manager and 2 90k-100k SE's

* Several million dollars a year in "marketing", including 20-50k/mo in PR firms (note: we got more press hits over the last 4 years than they did), 100k+ in Gartner subscriptions, magazine ads, and 4-5 $100k+ conference visits a year.

* 4-5 120k+ overhead head count for middle management, like a VP/Marketing, Director/Marketing, and Sr Mgr/Marketing, or 3 layers of engineering management.

* A ridiculously outsized engineering department with 1:1 or worse dev/QA.

I'm sure I'm missing some other ludicrous VC-funded-company expense than a 50+MM funded company goes through (I've been through that firsthand), but all I'll say here is, there's nothing I think they spent that money on that I want for my company now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really convinced VistaPrint is the best example to learn from. Allegedly, they do some pretty shady things with their customer data[1][2]. Something about signing people up for some useless service with recurring monthly fees without their explicit consent.

I guess that's one way to compensate for not getting outside investment, but it seems pretty shortsighted to me. It certainly was enough to scare me off when I was ordering business cards a little while back...

[1] <http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5174090> [2] <http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/vistaprint.html>

<comment><USER4> While I didn't know anything about those useless service, I don't think Vistaprint becomes a $1.9B company just because they do shady things. As an entrepreneur, I would love to learn about how others build their companies but it doesn't mean we have to agree all of their moves.

I don't want to argue about the ethical issues here. But I believe every company has done something in the gray area. Do you think all those Google ads on domain parking pages are click scam? I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been offered angel investment a few times and whilst I can definitely see the benefit in small areas of financing, doing it off your own back with all the blood, sweat and tears that come with it leave you with a pretty awesome set of abilities.

Leaping over tall buildings in a single bound is one of them I don't think I'll get round to, but there are times when the things you do pull off are superhuman by comparison to most people's lives.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have always encouraged people to bootstrap.

Nothing sharpens your financial judgment like limited resources.

BTW I just love your cannon/viscera analogy!

<comment><USER7> offtopic: your profile sounds interesting. what's your bike website?

<comment><USER6> Hi, it's at organicengines.com

<comment><USER7> Looks awesome! I once built the dutch Juan with a bunch of friends. It was so much fun to build and to ride. Keep up the good work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>