mircea_popescu: punkman "''a giant theft machine,'' moving billions illegally around the world, engaged in financing the heroin trade, tax fraud and wound up bilking innocent investors of at least $50 million." << the substance of unsubstantiated journalism.

mircea_popescu: davout: never heard about it, but apparently they're putting bs&t to shame with a $400mn loss, sounds doubtful << yeah srsly, sounds like pure bs.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i had some toast earlier, the toaster:~$ said :L)

mircea_popescu: and he is learning about his company from obscure $300 an article trade rags.

mircea_popescu: kakobrekla: >Stripe and Facebook are going to sponsor @gnupg development with $50k/year each. << the only important point in the ruckus being, now we know gpg 1.x is perfectly fine and 2.x not entirely broken, and that there's absolutely no need to expect usable 3.x

mircea_popescu: en especially will heart it. It'll work for a handful of well publicized people pictured above the caption, "$100 billion! You could be next!"-- followed immediately by a story about how worthless the business turned out to be, so of course the goal for you is to sell out ASAP; but the vast majority who have aligned their psychology with this vector will pursue an impossible fantasy at the expense of their labor an

mircea_popescu: assbot: Bonafide Raises $850k to Build Reputation System for Bitcoin << pics! http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bonafide-1.jpg http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bonafide-2.jpg

mircea_popescu: decimation: from $67,300 in 2014 to $61,287 this << remember the lulzy "need immigration to maintain geniusness of industree" paul graham nonsense ?

mircea_popescu: then, should your inheritor sell it when it's $10`000, usg wants further capital gains tax. not on 9k, but on $9990

mircea_popescu: specifically : if you bought 1k btc at $10, and you die when it's $1000, usg wants about 400`000, in usd.

mircea_popescu: "I'd suggest you go research existing high-value-payment networks and see what typical fees are for multi-million dollar transactions. FEDWIRE is running at 6 transactions per second, average transaction value over $6million, with fees per transaction UNDER ONE DOLLAR.

mircea_popescu: About a week after Fenwick’s announcement, and the resulting Infirmation.com message board “explosion,” Wilson, a Fenwick competitor, announced they were paying summers $2,400. Each of the other Silicon Valley firms quickly fell in line after that, including Fenwick.

mircea_popescu: I was unhappy with this, so I immediately posted this info on the Infirmation.com Silicon Valley/SF Greedy Associate board, and then, using four or five different anonymous screen names, proceeded to have a thread discussion on how horrible this was, how Fenwick was insulting it’s summers, how no one was going to accept their offers because the firm was so cheap it wouldn’t fork over the extra $300 a week, etc, etc

mircea_popescu: nced at $2,100, which was below NY salaries.

mircea_popescu: How does this relate to the story? The summer salaries had already been announced in New York at $2,400, and everyone was waiting for the Silicon Valley firms to announce their summer salaries [Fenwick had four major competitors in Silicon Valley at the time: Cooley, Wilson, and Brobeck (these are abbreviated names of law firms)]. Fenwick was the first to announce; they did so sometime around late April, and they annou

mircea_popescu: ith each other about salary, benefits, work conditions, anything they choose. One of the sparking events was when Gunderson, a relatively small firm in Silicon Valley, raised their starting associate salaries from somewhere around the industry average of $100,000 to $125,000. One of the first places this information was posted and disseminated was the messages boards on Infirmation.com, and from that event, as well as

mircea_popescu: What does this have to do with anything? Well, I was almost single-handedly responsible for Fenwick, and basically every other Silicon Valley firm, raising their summer associate salary from $2,100 to 2,400. How is that possible, you ask? The beauty of the internet, and the influence of an amazing website called Infirmation.com.

mircea_popescu: During the spring, Fenwick announced that they were going to pay summer associates only $2,100, which was below the $2,400 that most big firms in New York, LA and Chicago were paying their summers. Yet, right before we arrived in Palo Alto, Fenwick, along with every other Silicon Valley firm, announced that they were going to pay summers $2,400, commensurate with the big firms in other major cities.

mircea_popescu: er. All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500 to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per cent. of its intrinsic value."

mircea_popescu: e was traceable clear across the deserts of the Territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freights over that hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads. One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid $10,000 a month freightage. In the winter the freights were much high

mircea_popescu: well no, borrow $50 mn

mircea_popescu: $conference