It is quite common to find a good hire, and then be very interested in who they would recommend. Or the people left behind ask about this new opportunity the hire left for, become interested, and ask to have their resumes forwards. I have seen a number of hires that come in such clusters of 3 or 4 in Valley, and I am not a well connect or a highly knowledgeable person on this topic. Even the "cluster" is spread out over a few months, it can feel like "unfair" poaching if a certain key group is denuded.

Someone named rossulbricht@gmail.com revealed himself as one of the first people who knew about Silk Road. Item #4 in TFA. (Could be lying/misinformation, but it is a plausible explanation.)

Yup. The real secret to not being caught by Columbo is not, as would be geniuses tend to think, by having a "full proof" scheme by which Columbo will never be able to prove you did it. It is by never showing up on Columbo's suspect list in the first place. Ulbricht's post that reveals his email was probably his doom, putting him on a select list of mere hundreds of people who knew about Silk Road early in the game. Then it becomes a numbers game, and the list shortens and shortens until the Dread Pirate has made one too many small errors.

Without bank-like entities with a hoard of bitcoins, there cannot be effective cross currency exchanges. Without exchanges there is very limited liquidity. Without liquidity, bitcoin will always vacillate wildly. A currency that vacillates wildly is a toy currency for the very wealthy to use for a bit of "pin money", something the 99% should avoid like the plague.

The reason is it easy to pay a small fee for this escrow handling for things like houses is because we have reliable banks for the USD currency. Such a service would be a natural business for an bitcoin bank/exchange to be involved in. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges seem to vaporize due to inside jobs. I am 99.99999999% certain that a title company that happens to be handling the escrow account working with the loan agent from my personal bank is not going to walk away with my money or will be able to stand behind statements about funds being on hand, because there are layers of law and protections. How assured to the customers of MtGox feel about this kind of thing?

I think that is rubycodez's point -- ex-military might have hands on experience with many kinds of fairly "advanced" stuff (at least from a pedestrian civilian's POV).

Of course, not even the most brain dead conservatives believe that nonsense. If it were true, then successful businesses would soon enough succeed to roughly the same level, regardless of whether the profits were taxed 10% or 20% or 40% or 60%.

Mortars are not going to disappear because they are useful, but there are many known practical countermeasures to mortars, including mortar counter fire.

Drones offer a special new kind of threat because it is easy to imagine them having the intelligence to home in from many locales miles away and create an overwhelming & lethal swarm in a particular area. The ability to mass firepower is a basic combat strategy. Drones offer new ways to mass firepower quicker than ever from disparate military units spread over 100 square miles or 1000 square miles or 10000 square miles.

I do not think anybody particularly cares about cash found next to the evidence of an overtly prosecutable crime. The problem is when the cash itself seems to be the target, in the absence of any apparent crime. The examples the made the news were things like driving 64 mph in a 55 mph zone with $5000 cash on hand -- here is your speeding ticket and the police keep the $5000 cash.

Personally, I think bitcoin will always be pointless to the average consumer, because hyperinflation AND hyperdeflation are the kinds of things that normal people would be wise to avoid. But I can imagine that someone might use bitcoin or similar technology as their secret sauce to back a new kind of normal-ish credit card. If the merchants had to pay, say, 1% off the top instead of 3%, they might be open minded to new technology and new risks...

An exchange (or some kind of moral equivalent) is a logical necessity to have sufficient liquidity for bitcoin to be a currency for normal grownups. Mind you, failing to accomplish such does not necessarily mean that bitcoin is not a "success" by some rational definition, only that it is not really "money".

(FYI: I would bet a large amount of money that MtGox will eventually prove to be an inside job.)

It some ways, I think Mayer's is a great fit for the job. But in others, well, the NYTImes article painted a very unfavorable picture of her ability to hire or manage compensation policy. The other problem is that, as TFA article points out, the core Yahoo business has shrunk to a 5-10 billion dollar company in a mature industry and zero prospects for rapid growth. Yet she was hired wave a magic "reinvent" wand and return the company to 100 billion dollar glory -- that is not a problem with Mayer, but the Board.

According to the NYTimes article, she has had two years and the prospects for the stock look flat. Two years is a long honeymoon for a CEO. Is it long enough? Probably not. But if she cannot point to a reason for gross revenues to do better than flat in the near term, then two years or four years, it hardly matters.

Weird as it sounds, you might be able to count yourself lucky. At least this company described here is re-setting expectations in a drastic and somewhat realistic manner halfway through the quarterly debacle. Instead, the management could hold steady 75% of the way through, then squeeze the developers for 90 hour weeks for three months "because you all are behind, and we have to make good on commitments, even if late".

Cryptocurrency exchanges seem to have a much higher risk of catastrophic implosion than a random 19th century bank. People who romanticize unregulated Wild West capitalism now have their opportunity to experience it first hand, on steroids. I am not going to say they deserve to be ripped off, but post-MtGox, they need to factor in some "special" risks of exchanges.