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.
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".
Currency is the most useful when it changes hands constantly. I have mattresses. You have cookies. He has milk. I buy cookies and milk. You buy milk and mattresses. He buys mattresses and cookies. That's better than all of us in a standoff because we don't want to use our currency. Horrible analogy.
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.
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.
Value is in the eye of the beholder, as you clearly understand. The commenter is not familiar with how trade works. Personally, for such I transaction I will need to audit to ensure the projected value is accurate.
Also, do you have a sample of said squirrel drawing? I have a squirrel book that might pair nice with it.
The feature of a deflationary currency is much better than constant money printing. But, as I have learned through light studying of currencies, a huge negative aspect is its encouragement to horde.
I find the best use of chatbots re: software engineering is more of an office hours with the professor than it is a fellow colleague; Use it for specifics. Throwing things over the fence to it often causes a reach into the bag of garbage spaghetti code that is half the internet content.