Of mice and men, revisited

The last discussion of the play-pretend Bitcoin "devteam" ended up with the unchallenged conclusion that we're discussing mice rather than men. Let's revisit this point, starting from the following quote :

To put that into context : Asicminer runs a mining farm based on proprietary chips. In the scamspace of ASIC mining they're probably the more respectable, at least so farⁱ and consequently they gathered a lot of (well deserved) attention and interest. My own early estimates were showing that if listed in a proper venue they could gather as much as a quarter to half million BTC, anchoring them firmly among the serious BTC companies (if smaller than both S.MPOE and S.DICE certainly in the same league).

They never got there. This wasn't the result of operational failure (which is the failure mode of most Bitcoin entreprises - take bAsic for a fine example) but of thoroughly botchingⁱⁱ their IPO. This was accomplished by the following very common, if very stupid approach :

1. Think that MPEx does things a certain way not because MP is smarter than you and that's the right way, but because MP is an asshole and that's just some arbitrary way invented to humiliate the good people of this world and crimp their creative style.
2. Consequently, eschew the numerous benefits of listing there. Those aren't just access to liquidity, in the sense that ~90% of Bitcoin finance happens there. Those are also access to the one true scarce resource in Bitcoin, which is to say non-coding competence. To put it simply : the difference between me saying something looks ok and you thinking something looks ok is that I know what I'm talking about.
3. Consequently, brashly declare you plan to reinvent the wheel.ⁱⁱⁱ
4. Consequently, fail at it (which is the case here), and never mention it again (which also is the case here) - god forbid you might learn something from your failure.

So what now ? You'll never guess. O, yes you will, you have the quote above. That's right, failedev team is offering to... do... more... coding. Review the borkt codebase they already have ? Sorry, too busy for that. Do some - gasp! - testing ? Sorry, no time. Let us instead start work on a new project.

Why ? Because these aren't men, and these aren't developers. They're children, and as such spend their time chasing "sexy" projects. They wish do to anything or nothing at all just as long as they can claim - even should that claim be only superficially convincing - some sort of involvement in whatever gathers a lot of attention currently. They're glitzevs, not devs, and you can't really say glitz without glich.

For the record, I have a lot of respect for people who work the testnet (like BlueMatt say) and very, very little respect for retarded children that "code". Any monkey can code poorly. Any idiot can "migrate" to "a proper" database system like Hearn did and then fuck up the entire product, and then explain how "it wasn't his fault, the old codebase was broken". This is entry level stuff, I fire twentysomethings of his particular school of mental retardation at the rate of dozens a year. And they go on to think I was wrong and an asshole and they were right and will conquer the world. And then they don't conquer the world. And then nothing happens. The end.

And in conclusion : grow the fuck up already. Nobody cares what five thousand retarded monkeys applaud on some online forum somewhere. Nobody cared what the mobile vulgus applauded three thousand years ago. Forget this glitzy bullshit, do something useful with your time.

Nobody respects actors. Nobody. Everybody respects producers. Everybody. Including the actors. Starting with the actors.

Figure it out already, it's becoming Bitcoin's chief embarassment.

1. To quote my own pr :

   Which brings to the fore the following issue: two Chinese brothers were born the same day. One, AbelMiner, came to the community, took 20k BTC worth of equity which was called equity, built miners, faced all sorts of challenges, troubles and problems but eventually got about 6 Gh online. The other, Caivalon, came to the community, took 20k BTC worth of equity which was called "pre-orders", built miners, faced all sorts of challenges, troubles and problems but eventually delivered about 6 Gh worth of units to shareholders and then walked away from the deal under the guise of a broken pricing model.

   Granted, this isn't quite as much of a scam as BFL. It's more of a scam than Asicminer (at least so far) and I would say on the scale these things are normally judged it counts as a scam. That the sheeple aren't quite immediately aware this is the case...well...this is how Bitcoin mining "ventures" go, isn't it? Gigavps launched bonds, paid 3-40 cents to the coin to date (but you can dilute that if you wish to "upgrade", of course); hashking launched "investments", paid 30 cents or less; amazingrando idem, this is the story since day one.

   [↩]

2. Mar 22 03:34:46 mircea_popescu !ticker havelock vtx

   Mar 22 03:34:48 assbot [HAVELOCK:VTX] 1D: 0.38280000 / 0.39283695 / 0.43320000 (6898 shares, 2709.78930000 BTC), 7D: 0.38280000 / 0.39375433 / 0.46140000 (7022 shares, 2764.94290000 BTC), 30D: 0.38280000 / 0.39375433 / 0.46140000 (7022 shares, 2764.94290000 BTC)

   Mar 22 03:34:51 mircea_popescu !ticker btct asicminer-pt

   Mar 22 03:34:53 assbot [BTCT:ASICMINER-PT] 1D: 0.832 / 0.87807 / 0.93 (269 shares, 236.2 BTC), 7D: 0.769995 / 0.85241 / 0.9489 (1434 shares, 1222.4 BTC), 30D: 0.65 / 0.76435 / 1 (3497 shares, 2672.9 BTC)

   Mar 22 03:34:56 mircea_popescu Ahem. Cavirtex owns Asicminer. Cavirtex got more in a day than Asicminer in two weeks. This is what a blown IPO looks like. [↩]

3. To quote my own pr again.

   It's by now impractical for any serious company contemplating being listed in BTC to forego the significant capital available on MPEx in order to favor a different venue (in fact, the cost of doing so can be calculated on the basis of the volume difference, and is in any case significant) for a variety of reasons, and certainly such an attempt would imply the modification of said company to include "being an exchange", which requires rare and valuable skills (programming notably NOT being one of them) and other human capital. Such an effort necessarily spells a movement away from said corp's core mission, whatever it may be.

   A willingness to move away from the core mission, a cavalier attitude towards incurring costs and foregoing benefits all work together to paint a very unflattering picture in the eye of the discerning investor (If these people have any confidence in their business, why are they working on moving away from it to do something else? If they have the capital to pursue reinventing the wheel, why do they need my investment? If they're not interested in cashing in now why should I expect they ever will get my shares dividends?) and rapidly the convergence effects become very strong indeed.

   [↩]