HN is very, very bitter about being there at the beginning of an interesting, fun, and promising technology that could have easily enriched them. Bitcoin and crypto is very on topic, but pricing not so much.
My understanding: As rstuart4133 mentioned, the rules were changed to 1) allow a partial IPO, 2) forego proving several positive quarters beforehand, 3) allow weird as hell lockout rules such as pre-IPOers to exit after 1 day.
Maybe it's all innocent, or it's an intentional transfer of wealth.
I think they're selling because they're raising money for dividends and such. The word "quantum" isn't even mentioned in the article, nor has anything to do with MSTR selling btc.
There is no singular mind to bitcoin. Watch CNBC for 1 week and you will see stonks trade a 40x their worth and rise and fall for no reason anyone knows. It's not that much different than assets that are traded on speculation far more than any factual tangible worth.
Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate).
And then Bing gets a pretty big upgrade: ChatGPT. And here we are.
Not for the amount of money they are spending to get there. Spending Money you’ll be paying back for decades to be a middling contender, without a significant moat, for something without any clearly-defined, real practical, sustainable business use cases is absolutely terrible.
The BTC was worth some 500 large quid when it got tossed. Claude will tell him to be more careful of all of his belongings. I personally have every hard drive I've ever owned, but this guy insisted on throwing that one in the "tip".
The article states it's just a fork, AKA a separate coin that copy/pastes the current Bitcoin ledger. Even if every dev wants this, that is a "hard fork" (not backwards compatible), and creates a new version of the coin. Ex: if you want to add a smiley face to some Bitcoin log output, you 1) make the change, and 2) nothing happens until 3) miners agree to use that new version.
Look into "Bitcoin Cash", a near identical coin except it has a larger block size. Completely different token and therefore has 0 effect on Bitcoin.
Might be more illuminating to look at Ethereum Classic.
How’s that doing after the fork led by the central owners of a decentralized blockchain, initiated to reallocate a big pile of money that the devs didn’t think was in the right spot?
Heck no. There was this app "Bump" that exchanged info between 2 bumping phones. Google bought it and immediately buried it forever. There's ZERO reason exchanging info is still a chore. There are currently bumping features baked in to the OSs, so there is value.
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