Keybase was dead as soon as they took VC money.

Their original purpose — tying identities to keys — could have been a nice small non-profit. But there aren't fortunes to be made from managing GPG keys, so they had to pivot into shark jumping.

We have letsencrypt and permanent.org as non-profits. An idea of a identity and key non-profit sounds like another critical piece we would need for a free, open web

Is this functionality something that would make sense for LetsEncrypt to implement?

They have already massive infra in place. And are non-profit. Sort of 'natural' expansion. I would love to see it.

The problem with natural expansion is that it degenerates into feature creep. Is it natural to add a cryptocoin wallet later like Keybase did?

The advantage of following is that you get to cherry-pick what features actually got traction and skip over a lot of rat holes.

Seems a bit early to call 'permanent.org' a critical piece, even if it succeeds all it's doing is cloud storage.

That's fair. We'll see how well they execute their vision.

However, after playing with it, checking out their board of directors, and deconstructing their app design, their vision is not really "cloud storage", at least, not the way we typically think of it.

Their long-term mission is preserving a digital legacy, oriented around relationships, families, and organizations. You don't use permanent.org to store things in the cloud that people normally think as "cloud storage", not for the day-to-day stuff. The kind of things you want to store in there are the things you want the world and your descendents to have access to after you die. They won't have to (directly) pay upkeep to keep that legacy preserved. I think that is convincing enough for me to see it as a critical piece of free and open web, even if this doesn't seem obviously connected to the idea of preserving a legacy.

For example, an indie musician wouldn't have to rely on SoundCloud to keep their recorded music around. SoundCloud is not in the business of preserving the creative work; they are in the business of aggregating users and they use user content to do it. Placing those music files in permanent.org has a much better shot of preserving that creative legacy for future generations than leaving it on SoundCloud.

Linking to this is evidence that you don't understand the entire value of Keybase.

PGP sucks.

Why? PGP works. (That alone puts it above its supposed alternatives.) It has existed for 30 yrs. That's 30 years of being exploited and patched.

PGP (GnuPG at least) is lightweight. I don't need an Electron dependency or a multi-megabyte chat room in the same application (address space too?) that supposedly keeps my private keys safe.

PGP is spoken by everyone, every programming language, having implementations on even ancient operating systems and architectures. Every email client worth its salt can use PGP. Emacs can decrypt and encrypt GnuPG-encrypted files seamlessly; other editors have plugins to do the same.

It sucks because the UX is so bad that people don’t use it, even when their lives depend on it. [0]

Even when they do use it, it’s easy to mess up.

The biggest flaw though is that in person key signing parties were never a viable or realistic thing for identity verification and web of trust based on that works poorly as a result. The use of multiple signed public social media accounts for identity instead as a way to fix this was Keybase’s main innovation.

For UX, even Snowden couldn’t get Greenwald to set up PGP and after multiple attempts Snowden eventually gave up and tried Laura Poitras with better results, the burden on the user is too high.

[0] https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/

keyservers don't work as a root of trust. look at all the 'satoshi nakamoto' keys supposedly from 2004

https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=Satoshi+Nakamoto&op=in...

That doesn't tie identity to keys.

Not to mention it's notoriously slow and has been shown to be an insecure method of distributing keys (due to the fact that anybody can upload any key).

Anyone can upload a key to keybase dot com too. You should never trust a key belongs to someone unless you have verified the fingerprint by other means e.g. speaking to them. This is basic security we have known since the 80s. Keybase dot com is a step backwards if anything because of the false sense of security it creates, as if they don't have a giant attack surface.

You don't understand what Keybase does.

The whole point is that you don't just use it to upload a key. You link various verified identifies of yours across the web to your Keybase account so people know the PGP key there is the one of the verified person. It's a way to tie all your verified identifies together.

If someone would manage to compromise a bunch of identities of someone on the internet, and then create a Keybase account with them and then upload a compromised PGP key that would be a problem if you don't verify the key. But that's a bit of a stretch.

In reality: I used keybase for a while. When I allowed a domain to expire and the DNS record disappeared, keybase threw up warning both in cli and their website that my identity verification couldn't be completed. My only problems I ever had with keybase was related to the cloud storage they offer.

My real wish is that keybase supported ssh keys and would provide them as an agent.

You can revoke the DNS signature. I'll assume your keybase account name is the same as on HN.

I do agree on the ssh key feature being nice, and, here's a link: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-ssh-ca You could also just use the keybase file system to keep ssh keys around.

Please, please, use https://keys.openpgp.org/ instead!

See https://keys.openpgp.org/about for why.

this doesn't even have authenticated encryption

> So, yup, keybase is dead.

Well, shit.

Keybase had an amazing potential. I use it every day to ad-hoc securely share/store stuff. It will be sad to see it wither even more than it has. :(

Lucky for us it is open source? I was hoping to use it to replace Dropbox but they kept not taking my money... small wonder they went for the acquisition.

> it is open source

Not exactly. The clients are open source, but the central server isn't. See https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374. It might be possible to reverse engineer the server, but it would be a lot more involved than just forking the project.

That's unfortunate. I assume Zoom would have no interest in open sourcing the server software now that they've paid for the cryptographic expertise and code, but I think the previous owners might have been willing to... surprised they never did, maybe they decided they'd never get bought if they did.

A shame, it seemed to work really well. Maybe Zoom will be willing to take my money to be a DropBox end-to-end encrypted cloud sync service instead, they seem to be fairly on the ball with responding to complaints and that they decided it was worth buying Keybase to improve their service maybe they'll come out alright.

Wishful thinking maybe =)

The best scenario would be if this led to keybase open-sourcing the server as well. I have no idea how likely that is.

Is the server open source? I know that the client is, but I haven’t found sources for the backend.

It's not: https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374

What was the main difference with this a drop box though? It's encrypted?

The data is stored after encryption by client which are open source (and by using boring© crypto schemes).

While it's a cool tool, what exactly was the (commercial) potential Keybase had? I could never tell.

Ability to assign roles(groups) to heterogeneous users.

So imagine being able to add [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] to cool-dev-group and them being to instantly be able to access the relevant chat rooms, git repos, shared folders, etc. If password/secret management had been added, then access to that too could have been allowed. If SSO/Oauth had been added, then any service could be covered by this sort of role-based-access-control-for-anyone.

So no user has been created, they're using their existing identity to access new resources. With some extra coding, triggers and events could have been added to do things like auto-sign public keys.

Secure filesharing and chat, for starters. Secure digital wallets tied to identity. It was a wallet platform I'd actually be interested in.

Encrypted git repos with ties to team chat...

That's what I've been using it for lately, it was becoming my main Git platform. I'm sad that this looks like the end of that.

I don’t necessarily read it that way. Keybase is 100% functional and has worked well for a long time. Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software and chat if they want to compete with the Slacks and Teams, etc. You can’t even screen share on wayland... it’s that bad. If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?

Well, it's pretty clearly an aquihire. Zoom gets a team of highly skilled cryptographers and Internet protocol experts. Good for them. But that means the team that created Keybase as an innovate PKI store won't be working on that anymore. That's not Zoom's business, and probably won't be, as Keybase themselves never figured out how to turn it into a business.

It bothers me that they even tried, honestly.

Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid.

I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS replacement.

In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc. Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.

edit: https://keys.pub/ - though I will still miss KBFS

As someone who works at an open-source-focused business, I respectfully disagree. Unlike proprietary software, open source software doesn't depend on the broken window fallacy. As a result, it's really hard to make open source profitable. There's lots of different avenues to get there, and I don't like to fault someone for their efforts if the bulk of their work goes towards improving open source software, as I think Keybase did.

I didn't follow your reasoning about proprietary software depending on the broken window fallacy.

I don't see how Google's proprietary search engine or Facebook's proprietary interface to our social network rely on the broken window fallacy.

Would you mind elaborating?

Sure! The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their own clones of everyone else's software. To use your example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc are all developing their own search engines. Instead they could all be contributing to one search engine to push the state of search engine software forward, instead of all spinning their wheels re-doing what everyone else is doing. How many devs are employed doing what someone else in some other company has already done? That's the broken window: someone else has already done the work, but it must be wastefully re-done because of the license. There's a lot of room for profit in all that extra waste.

Aside from whether this matches the typical meaning of "broken window fallacy," I think the substance of what you're saying doesn't match reality.

Open source is famous for fostering a bunch of different approaches to the same problem, and slightly different forks of the same concept. That's the "bazaar" in the famous metaphor, as opposed to the "cathedral" of monolithic, hierarchical, linear proprietary development within a closed-source company.

"Everyone working on the same thing" only works well when there is broad agreement on what that thing should be, and strong governance to resolve disputes. National highway systems, militaries, and power grids are good examples.

I don't think search engines are a good example of where this would work; it's not clear in advance what will make a given search engine better. Thus we benefit from a variety of competing approaches, essentially to expand the space in which we're searching for the optimum.

That's not what the broken window fallacy is though. It references the idea that breaking a window generates economic activity which is good for everyone.

Open source software is (I would argue) even more driven to fragmentation by political, ideological, and personality conflict driven squabbles than proprietary software, as there is no profit motive to also satisfy.

Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.

You're describing the broken windows theory. The broken window fallacy is the claim that destruction or waste is good for the economy because the cleanup generates economic activity (with the attendant multipliers). It's a fallacy because it leaves out that the original spender (by the owner of the broken window), on average, displaced other economic activity.

While I'm no fan of these companies, I'm not convinced by that particular argument for FOSS either. Imagine the world where we would be always iterating on one lineage/model of refrigerator, each automobile type etc. instead of many companies rebuilding basic stuff. I don't believe we would be better off. Not all progress can be driven by consensus and iteration, some needs to be done by competition, divergence and outright discontinuing old approaches.

Thanks for the elaboration.

I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.

Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.

The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.

Well, in reality there wouldn't be one optimal product, there would be many, for the reason that you said -and for human reasons.

However they would still be able to borrow good bits from each other and gain insight on how things could be done differently, so arguably the end result would be a win. From a technical standpoint that is -I think where it gets messy is when we try to factor in the business implications.

Possibly, but in this case I didn't expect them to make Keybase profitable, if anything I expect the opposite. I expect Keybase to be a FOSS, foundation for profitable extensions that the company builds and sells.

Arguably I think they agree with me, about the extensions at least. As seen by their seemingly random directions of feature extensions that Keybase was prone to. My issue is not that they chose random features to try to make profitable, but rather that the core premise, a public keystore, was tied so closely to a for profit company.

It would be like losing Git because Github went under. (Though, terrible example because Git works without a centralized repo, but it's just the first company <-> FOSS relationship that came to mind lol.)

It's actually a pretty good example to be honest.

Keybase was a centralized key storage with value-add services such as file storage and chat.

That was absolutely comparable to github, as you could've just gone back to manually syncing pubkeys and encrypting msgs. If github went away, you'd be without a lot of value-add services as well such as wiki, issues user management etc

Realistically speaking, nobody is going to do that... And tbh, it was already dead in the water when they added crypto currencies... Just took a while for their money to run out.

The actual difference is that there are enough competing products for github, not for keybase however, as that is just too niche

Maybe "losing Ubuntu if Canonical went under" is a better analogy then?

I mean, there's a fatal flaw in the broken window fallacy anyway:

> It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.[1]

Capitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. money. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. The entire system is built to favour those people.

I think you're reading too much into it.

If you have to pay to replace a window that should have lasted, say, ten more years, that's money you now cannot spend on improving your factory somehow.

It is still economic activity (and the glazier doesn't mind the work) but it's remedial rather than generative. (The glazier that repairs the window could have been installing a new one in a new factory, eh?)

We're getting way off topic here, but you have a horribly misguided premise here. A typical shopkeeper is not in the .1% 'cash hoarding' class. Small businesses are mostly run by people with average resources, and their capital is typically spent on their business and personal needs.

That feels like strict oposit of the falacy claim, which would hold in case of perfectly stable and suppied currency is employed. Still would be rational to invest research, diversify against theft etc.

How was their product ever marketed that way? They have open source clients because that security table stakes. They’re a solution to crypto anarchy because they help link your crypto identities to your social ones. None of that has changed. You talk like all valid software is free of corporate ownership/sponsorship. Why is zoom’s money somehow worse than e.g. softbank’s.

Oh I didn't mean to imply it was, maybe my "walks talks" bit was unfair. Rather I merely meant that Keybase, like Keys.pub, seems like a great isolated tool for the internet. Something exceptionally well suited for a foundation.

keys.pub doesn't have the single most useful feature Keybase has: The ability to verifiably establish a secure channel with anyone given their Twitter/Github/whatever username.

Their homepage advertises 'keys pull username@github' as an example. Is the missing piece you describe here simply the command 'keys chat username@github'?

No, it's the cryptographic attestation so you know you are getting the right key.

They don't support it? That's weird (maybe a missing feature) given that it's quite easy to add to anything that has signed metadata, see e.g. this for OpenPGP: https://github.com/wiktor-k/openpgp-proofs#openpgp-proofs

I'm not very familiar with the service, but AFAIK they don't. It would be great if they added it.

EDIT: It looks like it might, from the front page, I will try it out to make sure. If it does, that'll be great!

EDIT 2: It sort of does, but it's on a per-key basis, not an entire identity. You can publish proof on Twitter/Github/whatever, but it's only for one specific key, and it's one key per service, which means you can't only have one identity and multiple services.

The biggest challenge with acquihiring is retention. Allowing the acquired team to continue what they were doing is the only somewhat foolproof strategy to deal with it. It's a question of pocket depth and expectations. How much will the new team contribute to the "home" product? If expectations are too high chances are that much of the team won't stay and the acquisition will turn out to be a waste of money. With lower expectations however, continuing to fund the project in question can be bargain for getting a pool of in-house consultants to occasionally tap into for the "home" product, if they are really as good.

And even if retention wasn't a problem at all, skilled people are not inherently skilled, they need to keep challenging themselves in their area of expertise to stay sharp. If the "home" product was failing to foster in-house expertise before then chances are high that it's a problem based on culture and priorities and experts injected from outside would quickly lose their edge. Keep them on the project they became experts on and they stay experts.

Retention isn’t going to be a problem in this market. Hiring in general has almost disappeared. And if you get hospitalized with coronavirus without health insurance, it will almost certainly lead to bankruptcy. It’s too risky not to have a job right now.

I don’t think hiring has disappeared - I got contacted by four recruiters just yesterday alone asking me to apply to vacancies they’re trying to hire for.

I wouldn’t quit my job (and I’m not looking anyway), but there’s plenty of hiring going on.

Relevant: https://dilbert.com/strip/2014-07-31

My experiences with acquihires have not been good.

People went to work for this company based on the domain, the people, or the culture. With the acquihire they change the domain first, and the culture about a year in. Then the people start to leave, and it's just a job, and one you didn't even apply for.

On my worst days it felt like I was sold like cattle, and I would have seen more upside by hiring on someplace else.

It doesn't seem certain that they won't dogfood in addition to using the expertise internally.

Who gives a fuck about Wayland, honestly? It seems like it was designed by people who didn't like the few good things about X and wanted something to further fracture the Linux desktop. Well, they got it.

> Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software

It's the best video client available on Windows / Mac and works acceptably on Linux, what exactly needs to be more "modern" about it? Slack's video call thing is way less featureful, and Teams is still the abortion that is Lync / Skype for Business under the hood which is and always will be shit-tier.

> chat

I don't want my video app to be my chat app. There's any number of reasons why separation there is a good thing. I can start a Zoom call from Slack in 1 second, what more do I really need on that front?

Wayland was designed by people who didn't like the features of X that almost nobody used (X forwarding, for example). And X is still around for those obscure use cases, while Wayland can serve almost everyone with a much simpler and cleaner system.

Now, why Canonical decided to go off and write Mir instead of collaborating on Wayland development, I have no idea.

> the features of X that almost nobody used (X forwarding, for example).

Plenty of people use this all the time. It's probably the single best thing about X.

> people who didn't like the few good things about X

Since these were also pretty much the only people who were putting effort into maintaining X, I think it's reasonable that they decided to replace it instead.

The history of X is a history of forks. But we've not seen another X fork appear to compete against Wayland. Instead we see the people who are writing Wayland continuing to retrofit the new technologies they're able to bring back, back to X.

If Keybase acquired Zoom (haha), then, sure. This is a PR move for a public company. They'll probably gut Keybase, move their Chinese server generated AES128 keys to AES256 keys generated by you and uploaded to their Chinese server, then call it a day.

I can't think of a single instance where acquisition of a smaller company like this resulted in an improved version of the original product. How many of us are running RHL? Skype is now close to Microsoft spyware that's impossible to remove from a Windows installation. Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.

It's pretty much always cheaper to gut the original product, ignore the problems with your software, and enjoy the enhanced price of your shares while effectively spending no more money than you had for the original acquisition. As far as I can tell, Keybase has never had a business model or constant source of revenue.

> Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.

Ia that the case? AFAIK WhatsApp gained proper end to end encryption after being bought by Facebook and pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.

Wikipedia writes:

> WhatsApp was initially criticized for its lack of encryption, sending information as plaintext. Encryption was first added in May 2012. In 2016, WhatsApp was widely praised for the addition of end-to-end encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

Whatsapp announced encryption to the world in 2012. OWS helped secure their app further after the 2014 acquisition by FB, but encryption was something stressed by Koum and Acton from the get-go. Integration of E2EE into Whatsapp/FB Messaging is one of the few examples of Zuck being on the right side of things.

Long term it ended up pretty good, with Koum and Acton taking their acquisition money bags and pouring them into FOSS projects like FreeBSD and the Signal Foundation. Maybe malgorithms will do the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_WhatsApp

> pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.

Yeah, I was incorrect. They backup to Google servers. Not sure if that's better or worse. :)

Since then, FB has offered willingness to cooperate with foreign governments to break encryption. I guess we will see what happens with the EARN IT Act.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-28/facebook-...

RHL might be a bad example too, since Fedora is still pretty prominent, even if not often used compared to debian or debian-based distros these days.

Anything positive can be called a PR move if you’re cynical enough.

Apple aquired NeXT and completely reinvented their organisation based on that.

They also replaced their CEO with NeXT's

I can. https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-connect/ https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-protect/

Zoom is actually one of the view applications that can screen share on Wayland

I believe it's only enabled for a few distros though

Zoom uses a proprietary gnome API / hack to do it I believe. It works on Gnome only. Note that with pipewire, wayland screensharing already works on Chrome/Firefox (for all of the video chat apps), and it will come to electron eventually. I imagine in a year or two screensharing on wayland will become seamless for most things.

If you know how to make that work I’m all ears. I run Debian testing, wayland, gnome. I tried to screen share yesterday and got a popup about how its not supported. Maybe mu zoom client is out-of-date?

What does "enabled for a few distros" mean?

Does it work with the browser version?

> If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?

If.

Is wayland support even a femto blip on Zoom's radar ?

They do keep saying "multiplatform", but I guess that's Windows/macOS/iOS/Android, not Linux.

They're not the only ones though, this is what most companies call "on any device".

Zoom works without a hitch on Ubuntu here. Even plays nicely with the tiling WM with multiple workspaces (somehow, a thumbnail window follows you through as you flip through workspaces).

Not even close to working properly on swaywm. Maybe you tiling WM does something special for Zoom?

Screen sharing only works on Xorg, and screen scaling doesn't work (so it's super blurry on hidpi).

I've never seen that thumbnail window either -- though I don complain on that item, I prefer not having something like that.

Zoom works great on Linux, it's a proper native app and the quality is excellent. Screensharing is notoriously tricky on Wayland and has been a shifting target that is just now starting to settle, I'm sure it'll eventually work.

> Zoom works great on Linux

And depends on iBus which breaks keyboard input for me.

Well, my personal experience running the zoom client on Ubuntu was very satisfying. It worked out of the box, just a deb to install. I am on kubuntu 18.04LTS X11 though, not wayland (which I am glad because on 16.04 I was often victim of that stupid copy/pasting bug freezing firefox or the whole gnome env.)

the problem is wayland. not linux with X11.

How can they be so obvlivious though? Their own blog post doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately.

A lot of people will stop developing integrations for Keybase because of this. It's sad.

They aren’t. They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for.

The post is actually refreshingly honest that keybase is now abandoned and will probably die at some point.

The idea that companies were stupid enough to place their internal identity on some random 3rd party is so incredibly stupid that it’s hard to feel too bad for anyone.

Congrats Keybase!

Thank you. Keybase had investors and I’m sure the premium Zoom offered was unbeatable. Zoom can effectively pay infinity with equity. Those investors knew that this was the best way they’d ever have to realize gains. That’s why they invested in the first place.

Well, when FB bought WhatsApp, its founders stayed on for a bit to vest his shares then founded Signal with his "screw you" money. Maybe some of Keybase's founders can do the same thing.

Founded ‘Signal Foundation‘ with Signal’s creator. Signal was around before FB bought WhatsApp.

> They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for.

I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good. It's like a 1%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in buying and selling the business and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy looking charts and eventually bait and switch consumers when it is sold to the highest bidder and the employees all eventually lose their jobs.

One day, VC funding will either be illegal or required. considering the flow of money in this exchange, I'm betting on the second.

> I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good

Uh when was this? For-profit businesses have always been created for the primary purpose of making money. Any side effect like employee well being happened to coincide with what maximized profits at the time or due to regulation.

Pre-1970 or so. Before Milton Friedman, there was a general sense that companies existed to fulfill some mission, with profit as a means. The CEO of Kellogg commented on this in an interview ca. 1980, that money for a business is like a gasoline for a road trip. You need it to get where you're going, but the point of a road trip is not to accumulate as much gasoline as possible.

Is this a joke? The bulk of the labor movement happened before 1970, and it was not because workers were so well-treated and well-compensated that they had a lot of free time on their hands.

I'm a big fan of business and entrepreneurship, but let's be clear here: there is a reason we invented government. There was never a time when we could 100% count on the beneficence of business leaders to advance social goals.

Edit to add: I'm not trying to demonize all business leaders here. There are some bad actors, but even business leaders who desire to do well have to succeed in the marketplace--even against bad actors. Unfortunately, doing bad things in business often confers the benefit of lowering costs, which is a competitive advantage. This is a known structural issue with a marketplace economy and why we need more than just business to have a good society.

Of course, there have always been bad businesses. The difference between pre-1970 and now, is that we've not only socially legitimized the maximization of profit, we've also all but legally mandated it. Now even "decent" business leaders like the CEO of Costco have to continually answer to their shareholders as to why they're not lowering wages and reducing benefit--and in Costco's case, the shareholders may try to take legal action to force them to lower costs, even though Costco the business is already quite profitable. Due to lack of labor regulation and the mantra that "business are required to maximize shareholder value", Costco's decency is fully dependent on its CEO's (unusual) fortitude to fend off those shareholder demands. When its leadership changes, its ability to care for its employees will likely revert to the mean, which as we see in today's environment is abysmal.

So really, it's not that "there are some bad actors", but that "the system strongly encourages businesses to install these so-called bad actors as their leaders". I agree with you, that we need strong government labor regulations to counter this mentality, but this mentality is why these regulations have deteriorated over the past 50 years.

> The difference between pre-1970 and now, is that we've not only socially legitimized the maximization of profit, we've also all but legally mandated it.

I'm sorry, but this is just not true. If it was legally mandated, then the Costco CEO would not have been able to resist such shareholder demands. Your example proves the opposite of what you think it does.

Nothing has changed in the legal structure of corporate governance since 1970. Do you think that investors never demanded greater returns from business leaders prior to 1970?

They can still demand all they want, but the law remains clear today that corporate directors and managers have the power to run the business as they see fit, and shareholders' sole remedy for their disappointment, in the absence of outright fraud or gross negligence, is to sell their stock.

In February 2014, Tim Cook was the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world. At Apple's shareholder meeting, he directly told his shareholders that he does not even consider ROI in some of his decisions. Legal consequences to Apple and Tim Cook for this statement? Zero. He's still CEO. Because there is no legal mandate to maximize corporate profits.

Honestly, by buying into this myth that the law changed in the 1970s, you're lending power to a fake idea that you seem to be opposed to. There is a group of people who wish such a mandate existed, and by acting like they're right, you're kind of helping them.

Business leaders might make anti-social decisions because they feel competitive pressure to succeed in a marketplace where customers are free to choose and are price-sensitive. That's not nearly the same thing as saying that corporate governance law forces them to make such decisions. It doesn't.

The expression "all but" means "almost but not quite".

I know, that's what I'm trying to say: it's not true that CEOs are "almost but not quite" legally mandated to maximize profit or shareholder value. The law says plainly that they are not.

"All but" is handy phrasing if you're trying to create the impression that something you prefer is true. If you don't prefer it, I think that using that phrase is like shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically.

I think it's more constructive to point out that such a mandate does not exist (regardless of what some shareholders seem to believe), and there are good reasons it doesn't.

Your idea is not an inevitability but actually from the late 20th century, and became very popular starting in the 80s.

Here is a link that showed up in google for me when I tried to find support of this claim: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...

Sure, and here is a counterexample from the 1600-1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Literally they bought an army and took over India for money.

Need to keep in mind we now remember this endeavor as ethically challenged, but was it literally 100% for money or did want of these goods play a role:

> cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium.

Surely access to those provides some benefit other than making money, which it also did for them.

Also worth noting that not every company is ... that one.

> was it literally 100% for money or did want of these goods play a role: > cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium. Surely access to those provides some benefit other than making money, which it also did for them.

This is an utterly meaningless distinction. Money is fungible with all of those goods.

I am not sure you are using fungibility completely correctly because the goods have a condition, are perishable, they can be bartered or traded or maybe are fungible with respect to each other but are not literal money and literally interchangeable with money.

Anyway, if you want to go down that path you can easily conclude that literally any good or activity is just money, that you live a money-dominated life and we all exist for money all the time and while useful in some contexts I don't think it's particularly apt, but I hope you enjoy it.

> literally any good or activity is just money

In the grand context of life, no (despite the vast majority of large scale events that we learn about in history being usually a result of conflict over money/power) , but in the context of business, as this thread is, yes in a for-profit business literally every good and activity is about money.

Some businesses may choose to sacrifice money for things like employee well-being or community contribution, but that's a choice they make, or more likely are forced to make.

Yes, that's exactly the point...it's meaningless to say (as you did) that the EIC wasn't motivated by money but instead motivated by goods. Even leaving aside that they sold those goods for money....the distinction is meaningless, as money is just a store of value and lubricant for the exchange of goods (and services).

It's not a meaningless distinction. The goods are consumable. The British public didn't want access to spices as an investment vehicle. Using them was a quality of life improvement.

Prior to the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value

No, when businesses were owned primarily by single individuals, their priorities were much more aligned with the goals of a single individual. The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community, influence over politics, etc. and made choices that today’s publicly traded companies would and do not.

> The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community

I think you need to read a little more history. People haven't changed their core nature in the past 40 years. Look at Carpetbaggers, the Triangle Shirtwaist company, and William Hearst for relatively recent examples. Further back you can look at The Dutch East India Company, the Knights Templar, and the various and sundry monopolies that have arisen throughout history.

People are driven to acquire capital initially to meet their own needs, then for power. There always have been people and groups of people who strive for the latter, not being satisfied with the former. Romanticizing long dead business owners may play well in movies and books, but it isn't reflective of human nature.

I miss the days when businesses existed not just to support free users but also their revenue model and profits. It's like the 0%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in building and marketing the userbase and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy MAU charts and eventually bait and switch free users when it is sold to the highest bidder and the free users all eventually lose their service.

One day, revenue models will either be illegal or required. Considering the outflow of users in this exchange, I'm betting on the second.

Software exists for its users business exist for its owners more precisely its stakeholder, further divide stakeholders into the various rights, control, claims on cash flow, claims on assets, give users the first then watch what happens.

I think you have a rose-tinted view of what old-timey businesses looked like. We moved past mom-and-pop subsistence industry like 400 years ago. No one ever said “I’m going to create a sheet metal production company for the common good.”

> No one ever said “I’m going to create a sheet metal production company for the common good.”

Look up Joseph Rowntree[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rowntree_(philanthropis...

Could you point to examples that support the existence of this alternate history of which I've never heard of?

To be clear, you are asking for examples of historical companies that were profit motivated?

No you’re confused. He’s asking for a history in which there is no company motivated by anything other than profit. Since there exist many companies motivated by things other than profit, no such history can be provided. Hence the GP is wrong. Hence the irrelevance of downvotes on this cunty website

You’re very wrong.

Unless I imagined it, they previously said publicly that they were unlikely to pursue a sell like this because they had succeeded at previous companies and cared more about the impact this product could make than the profit they could make from selling it. I based my decision to agree to the terms of Keybase around this statement which I can conveniently no longer find. I suspect it was in one of their airdrop announcements, and conveniently those links don't work in the Wayback Machine.

You are referring to this Github Issue: https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/788

"Yes, we sold our previous 2 businesses. But I want to point out that (1) neither of those sales ever hurt (and arguably both sales greatly helped) our users, (2) Keybase deserves special consideration which we are aware of, and (3) both Max and I are happy in a world where we never try to sell a company again, and only build things we like."

I feel silly for falling for it too. Even very wealthy people enjoy extra money.

They’re not oblivious but two things; you don’t bite the hand that feeds and it’s easier to get someone to see your side of things when you agree with them. Confrontation will not help to fix Zoom’s culture of insecurity.

Zoom is publicly traded. Assume their blog post had to be approved by Zoom's press department.

>How can they be so obvlivious though? Their own blog post doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately

I'd say, don't overestimate the tarnished reputation (= some news stories for a while, most didn't read or care about -- including corporate users).

And of course they wouldn't get into it in a press release/blog post for an unrelated to the issue acquisition! Doesn't make sense to sabotage themselves this way...

Sure, the reputation might be tarnished, but to it seems like they have hired recently to ensure people that they are taking measures to change that.

This seems like an extension of that. If anyone has thought a lot about multi-party encrypted communication it is the keybase folks.

That's probably why Zoom is buying them, to double down on security and repair their reputation. They genuinely seem to be putting all their focus on improving security. Seems like a smart buy to me.

There hasn't been enough time since the noise about Zoom's security, for a company to inspect the goods, audit the books, negotiate, draft paperwork, share cocktails and all other stuff that come before announcing an acquisition. Especially in the middle of a disruptive situation. The process must had started many months ago.

> doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately

I'm interested to know if you thought keybase doing the whole unsolicited Initial Coin Offering was a reputation tarnishing or polishing event for that company. (I'm circumspect about both of these outfits to be honest.)

I remember thinking they were neat a few years ago, I made an account and tried out exchanging some keys. It’s slick but I don’t see how it was ever going to be a mainstream product for non technical users who mostly don’t even understand what encryption is. Haven’t heard anything about them since, I kinda already assumed they were dead.

It doesn’t have to be mainstream. A niche product can be viable.

Unless you begin to accept investors money who want an exponential growth at all cost. But if that’s what you want as an investor, no idea why you would invest in Keybase.

You can also have investors that buy into a company because it is counterproductive to their goals. Not all investments are meant to produce financial profit.

Isn't getting bought and there being no plans for your business bonkers? Or at least, it's a bonkers/highly-unusual admission that it's an acqui-hire.

Bonkers how? Zoom gave them money, they took the money.

Sounds like good timing that https://keys.pub has become usable recently. :)

Why would it be?

,,helping to make Zoom even more secure. ''

Wow, this means that keybase stuff thinks that Zoom is secure already. Zoom should have hired people who don't think that way.

Keybase product and engineering do not think this way. Corporate PR thinks this way. Don't get it twisted.

Come on, the engineers at Keybase are serious crypto nuts. Give them some more credit