Coinabul - 10 Questions With Zhou Tong (Bitcoinica's Founder)

On the Coinabul blog is a fantastic interview with teenage college student and entrepreneur (including being the founder of Bitcoinca) Zhou Tong.  Excerpts:

Zhou: Up to the age of 12, I had no pocket money at all because my family pretty much decided everything for me. The only thing that I had to concentrate on was studying. I was not good at anything else, basically.

Zhou: I still think the cloud was what made Bitcoinica lean. I started on Heroku and spent less than $100 a month to handle million of page requests every month. I outsourced sysadmin, security, banking and everything I couldn’t handle to third parties.

Zhou: Cloud computing enabled Bitcoinica to be started at zero capital and grow up quickly with a very high up-time. I couldn’t really afford a powerful dedicated server when I started running the service.

Zhou: If you seriously want to improve the ideas while having a capability of perfect execution, [don't use or agree to NDAs and] share it with the world and the real high-calibre people will care.

Zhou: Bitcoin will last forever. It’s the first currency or commodity or whatever that relies on Math. Math is all about making general assumptions and proving logically. It never fails under the assumptions.

[Editor's note: Zhou had sold his equity in Bitcoinica to investors prior to the latest hacking incident which has temporarily (hopefully) shuttered the service while it faces some severe challeges.]