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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Comments like this are ludicrous. Do you really think the SEC doesn't understand distributed ledgers or ethereum contracts? Second, do you think anyone has technical staff that are capable of writing safe contracts in Solidity (Parity wallet would suggest not...).

In short, the idea that people must be incompetent because they're in the government is pretty ludicrous. The SEC is consistently one of the best technical organizations despite the fact everyone lobbies for them to have the fewest resources with which to do their job.

If you think all ICOs pass the smell test, maybe you haven't been fleeced enough in your life to appreciate scams when you see them?

Source: I run a crypto hedge fund and have spent a lot of time evaluating ICOs. Some of them are legitimate, philosophically sound ideas looking for funding and some of them are outright scams.

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How is it "ludicrous" for memossy to ask a question?

In short, the idea that people must be incompetent because they're in the government is pretty ludicrous.

The comment did not express that. It was mainly about transparency and communication.

Is your hedge fund registered with the SEC? What's the name of it? I've been thinking about crypto hedge funds lately and am genuinely curious.

From HN profile

> General Partner, Crypto Lotus. > Cryptolotus.com

First google result for "crypyolotus sec" is an apparent SEC filing: https://goo.gl/txKA3t

Actually hung out with a JP Morgan Chase banker the other day. Big into crypto. He said the SEC had no clue what was going on. They leave at 5 PM, and head home to wife's and kids, and mortgages.

While the "kids" are hacking, micro-dosing, and working 100 weeks. And they are all of 17.

It's not in their world. A 55 year old banker is not hacking solidity contracts at 3 AM. No way.

It's not in their world. A 55 year old banker is not hacking solidity contracts at 3 AM. No way.

Fucking awesome. Nobody should be doing that.

Given the source, I might take that with a grain of salt.

Being competent is not exclusive with leaving at 5pm, having a wife, kids, and a mortgage. Nor is being 17, micro-dosing on psychoactive drugs, working 100-hour weeks or hacking at 3am.

In fact, I would argue that the correlation swings in the opposite direction.

Because the 55 year old is too smart to! It's not like those "kids'" are doing anything good at 3am either; their work seems to be flaky and fraud-prone. See: the DAO hack and recent Ethereum smart contract thefts to name just a couple.

Why should one believe a 17 year old, working 100 hour weeks and micro-dosing (really, what does this have to do with anything?) knows or is more capable than a 55 year old?

For that matter, I'd be skeptical about what any bank employee says about the SEC lol. My mom had worked at a big bank for decades and is not always saying nice stuff... (But in context it's cus they make her life harder)

This is the point that made me really chuckle.

While there's probably something to the motivated young weirdo hacker theory (it was William Burroughs who said "only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long"), I would also very skeptical what a JP Morgan banker has to say about the SEC. It's like asking a bank robber what he thinks of the police (hyperbole, I know. Bear with me). There's a bit of a natural bias there.

That said, JP Morgan has launched their own Ethereum fork and is working closely with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and (to my knowledge) Vitalik Buterin. It seems they're sincerely chasing this tech (dragon?) for better intentions or for worse.

Ah, the classic SV "he or she has a real adult life, and thus cannot understand my h4xx0r skillz" chestnut.

Real adult activities and hacking are extremely opposed endeavors.

One can make time for both, but the prior probability is quite low that a person with a real adult life will also be on the cutting edge of technology.

If being on the cutting edge is microdosing and working 100 hours a week, to hell with that. Takes a rare person to prefer that to human interpersonal relationships and contact. Solidity contracts aren't going to love you back.

Not when it's one job to be on that cutting edge, and it's the SEC's job to be on the cutting edge of securities technology.

There are occasionally brilliant coders at 17 who produce things of beauty. It's wonderful to behold. They are rare.

Sometimes the fire of youth produces fantastic ideas that change our world. Their initial efforts, though raw and non-optimal, show a beautiful gleam that - through effort by more seasoned developers - is polished into something beautiful. These are more common, but still rare.

Most 17 year old coders however produce well intentioned awfulness that is technically poor, non-optimal, has security holes, and if it handles edge cases at all does so poorly - and that's the good stuff.

The kids work is valuable but mostly to them - they're still learning.. usually still learning the basics too.

I have been coding since I was 8. At 17, I had roughly 9 years experience. I built some really cool things with neural nets/genetic algorithms at 17, and they worked pretty well. However, I look back at the code I wrote and it almost brings me to tears how awful it is.

Right, exactly - I've been coding in some form since I was 5 (in BASIC and PEEK and POKES) but the stuff I did as a teenager was fun exploration play.

It's important to do that! That's great for a programmer and it will likely have some cool ideas... and hell, maybe a product or something will come from it.

But the original post was just naive.

Maybe if they had a few of those 55year olds with kids who know how to write a goddamn language interpreter without it being a train wreck, the DAO wouldn't have been the crisis that it became.

This veneration of the church of conspicuous effort is not a new idea. It's lead many people astray. Be careful.

The SEC has been dipping into crypto regulation since at least 2013 when they shut down BTCT for running an exchange that traded shares in various bitcoin mining companies. There are people there who have been working in the field for years now and understand it quite well.

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