[liberationtech] getting past that first turtle

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 09/06/2013 12:26 PM, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 2:08 AM, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> For example, if it turns out that Bitcoin has a backdoor in it, a
>> lot of people (some on this list) would take a big reputation hit.
> That's most certainly not what would happen in that case. People will
> just find excuses — see e.g. people defending Veracode after it failed
> to detect basic incompetence in Cryptocat code.

You're shifting the argument so that it suits what you want to say.

The proper comparison with my imagined Bitcoin scenario in this
case would be to Cryptocat and its dev, not Veracode. The core
developer of Cryptocat as well as the software itself has most
certainly taken a reputation hit.

But I have no doubt that in my imagined scenario many companies
who promote and market Bitcoin wouldn't take much of a reputation
hit.  Human affairs are a complex thing.

-Jonathan

> The reason is that
> those who are most equipped to affect someone's reputation are also
> those most likely to have professional relationships with affected
> people / companies. The thread continued from [1] clearly illustrates
> that — there is no lack of people who can professionally criticize
> Veracode's failure, yet they carefully avoid that. Reputation might
> suffer, of course, but you would not be aware of that from laymen
> discussions.
>
> [1] https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-July/009774.html
>