[jonknee]

I suppose it's all relative, but it should be pretty easy to judge his code and how he operates a business--MtGox was by all measures poorly coded and that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being damaged financially.

He may have a high IQ, but he is not fit to run a giant financial exchange. I'm not sure any single person is, this is why large financial organizations have tons of people with different areas of expertise (development, security, law, finance, risk, etc etc). He rode "internet freedom" all the way to being way over his head and took everyone else down with him.

[bennyg]

He built an MVP and then kept going by iterating on the same codebase. This is literally the mentality HN tries to collectively push forward. If he had gotten the security/crypto right the tables would be turned and we'd be reading an article about how a guy bootstrapped the largest crypto currency exchange and how many people thought they could do it too and lost everybody's money collectively trying.

I'm beginning to think that the only constant in security/crypto is that people fuck it up.

[jonknee]

That's one way to look at it, another is that it wasn't minimally viable at all because it did the worst thing that an exchange can possibly do--lost everyone's money.

Coding aside, I don't think anyone at HN tries to push the mentality that you should try a financial startup without any accountants or a compliance department.