Topic: [COMMUNITY] Taaki, never tell anyone you are involved with Bitcoin ever again. (Read 10037 times)

Absolutely. 

D&T.  Clear and concise and not overly complicated.  You should contribute to the wicki.  Seems that even other bitcoin business have trouble simply explaining to the laymen what it is that we do.

THAT'S A PROBLEM.

It isn't that hard to explain and can be done without any low level explanation of cryptographic functions.  Here is an example. If the Q&A is at the end of a presentation which explains transaction processing this explanation can be simplified further.  Then again if you go up there with a single slide which provides no useful details then you are setting yourself up to fail.

"Where does the supply come from?"

Honestly I don't understand this criticism. Making good answer to that question is _very_ difficult. When I try to explain it, I usually fail, even when the counterparty is total programmer nerd. Then I resort to "you have to research it yourself from internet, start with the wikipedia article" or something. I usually ask if concepts such as cryptographic hash function and public-key crypto is known, and rarely even this is the case.

And usually these finance people tend not to be very math/crypto-heavy, so trying to explain it would have been only distraction.

"Where does supply come from?"

"Mathematics yeah"

Seriously, never speak in public again.

But thx for the laugh

AlexWaters

There is a link to a youtube video in here somewhere.

While I don't condone the extremes called for in this thread, that fact remains that Amir's presentation was unfortunate for both him personally and for bitcoin generally. Especially considering the the other bitcoin disasters with which Amir has been personally involved.

Even some of the statement made in the Macau video are unfortunate.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1413467


Again, my point here is to stress that bitcoin should (and actually does have to a degree [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Public_relations] ) have  generally available talking points.  Anyone involved in bitcoin who speaks with the media would do well to review these points before making statments that end up reflecting on us all.

The OP's original statement might hold more water if there was audio to accompany the transcript. I can't judge Amir for what could be a bad speech, or angry transcript writer. Adding commentary that people should off themselves or excommunicate someone - doesn't service your presentation. If you don't like what he has to say, either don't listen to it - or take up public speaking yourself.

Who's great idea was it to hold the second conference in a banking center of the world to begin with? fail

I didn't see his entire performance yet because my stomach couldn't handle it.

But I agree that this unwanted diversion may be beneficial. What does Bitcoin have to gain from the banking world? The whole point is to escape from the their monopolies. The longer Bitcoin has time to grow underground, the stronger it will be when it has to fight the inevitable opposition in the future.

If you want to invite an expert on Bitcoin to such a conference these days you can easily find a wide range of people from different fields with different perspectives and different competences. Financial experts from the traditional system could have invited business-oriented financial experts from the Bitcoin economy.

These people chose a young enthusiastic idealist raving hacker living in hackspaces all over the continent and they got just what they ordered.

THEY heard what THEY wanted to hear otherwise THEY would have invited someone else.

Now the question is what do WE want THEM to hear?

Honestly: when I look at this group of bankers and hear that they want to find out something about Bitcoin my first reaction is like 'oh, no, give Bitcoin a little more time before you take it seriously please!'. I see no point in attracting the banking world to this technology nor in making them understand it's potential danger for their monopolies. The longer this takes, the better.

And in this respect Amir's performance was the best thing that could have happened there.

I don't know what Amir's intention was. In case he wanted to attract them to Bitcoin he probably partied too much the night before the talk. In case he wanted to distract them then this might as well have been a brilliant social hack.

Joe

WTF ?!!  On the other hand there's no such thing as "bad publicity" or marketing... (except your own obituary) 

I understand you anger... Amir Taaki is really fucked up:

He's given better interviews in the past. Looking at another recent video of his, he seems very preoccupied with other things on his mind. Not surprising given the current ongoing lawsuits and potential personal liability.

Just to be clear, I didn't come to defend him, but mainly complained that the criticism was way too dramatic for me to take seriously.  Fortunately, others have stepped in to solve that problem.  Consider drawing a distinction between those disagreeing with the message versus those disagreeing with the presentation.

If that's the case, then you both need to contact the author and ask for corrections to be made to the article.  You've been a businessman long enough to know that you don't let those kinds of inaccuracies stand in articles the community is hailing as "huge" or "awesome".

The problem is that if someone who's not a year+ veteran of BTC does a background check it would seem like Amir is respectable, precisely because nobody makes threads such as these, precisely because pretty much everyone would rather circlejerk than speak the usually uncomfortable truths, mostly because if anyone does there's a ciuciu barrage + a "you're just a competitor" barrage + all the rest of the idiocy. Speaking of which, I'm surprised nobody's yet come up with the "Amir Taaki is a competitor to MPEx so therefore". Oh no, wait, actually...that's what the entire "where's YOUR presentation" talk is all about, huh. A well.


It's funny how when shit hit the fan GLBSE turned out to no longer have been a corp (oh, we had papers but "nobody signed them"), which is the exact same thing claimed by Bitcoinica which in general puts into light a very clear pattern. And then people come in here to defend the muppets. It boggles.

Response here:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1391832

That's because they had nothing to do with Bitcoinica.

Remember; Zhou was *not* an employee and the Intersango trio where *not* partners. Everyone was just hanging out. They are all experts so don't worry, it's cool.

What's a shame is the people organizing this conference didn't do any background check before allowing him to speak.

Notice how nobody from Amir, Donald, or Patrick Strateman has made any meaningful comment about Britannica fiasco in about 5 months.

They allowed thefts totaling almost a million $ worth of bitcoin and they can't find the time to at least try explaining their actions. ...
 Occam's razor point to incompetence, carelessness, then collusion and theft.

I've known Jesse for 15+ years and I highly doubt Jesse actually said any of those things.

The author also misrepresented many of the things I said as well.