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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

with no dog in this fight, I see this as some enforcement grudge match from NY capital old-school on California capital new-school, triggered by zero tolerance for crypto.

IMO - almost all the leveraged finance in the last 20 years is already over-the-top and mostly "fake money".. who gets the axe first is politics. Supporting statement to this heresy? When the "real economy" tanked due to covid-19 lockdown, the paper tigers of Bloomberg continued to gain wealth, not a little, a lot. Where does that come from? ad sales alone? Oil and Gas Arab cash leveraged out into a hundred counter-parties with big names? Whatever the "technical" explanation.. lots of musical chairs games are up today. cheers

edit cannot help but pile on here.. Roku (who I have never heard of as a consumer) had two Billion USD in cash ? wtf

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It's hard to take your analysis seriously with no knowledge of Roku, a major brand who has existed for a very long time.

> Roku (who I have never heard of as a consumer)

Roku's been around for a very long time building decent streaming boxes for TVs that don't cost too much. I've been a customer since Netflix started streaming.

I only know about Roku for three reasons.

I had to work on third party software supporting their boxes nearly eight years ago.

They were a meme stock for a bit. I made a small profit since I bought a few shares after I first learned about them.

And some eng director there randomly added me on LinkedIn years ago.

I would have never encountered them as a regular consumer, because I don't watch TV or use any streaming services.

> Roku (who I have never heard of as a consumer)

You have commented in threads that reference Roku many times over (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29338658) so you will forgive me for not believing you.

I must have missed it due to 'Chainsaw-Wielding, Wooden Samurai Stop Motion Film' distraction ?

The fact that you've never heard of Roku doesn't really say much other than you either living in a country where Roku is not available, or living under a rock.

Roku tends to get a lot of retail space, so if you've walked through any walmart electronic section, or bestbuy, or whatever you're guaranteed to see them.

Before smart TVs took off there was only Apple TV and Roku. No Chromecasts or Fire Sticks. Meaning if you couldn't pay the Apple tax, you went with Roku to get your Netflix.

> Roku (who I have never heard of as a consumer) had two Billion USD in cash ? wtf

This is arrogant. There are many billion-dollar businesses you haven't heard of, most of them in boring industries. For instance, have you heard of Vitol? Likely not...but they made $279bn in revenue in 2021.

https://www.vitol.com/vitol-2021-volumes-and-review/

There's always been money in streaming when you're doing it with pipelines, ships, and barges.

Sure it takes decades but this was a startup financed by a small family loan, rather than true venture capital that could more realistically be considered "Other People's Money".

So they get to be private, start their exponential growth from a much more retarded point, and have to leverage other people's pipelines, ships, and barges or it wouldn't work.

Even in a capitalist market, enough strength can sometimes be built without other people's money, that it can be an unfair advantage compared to the capital-bound operators making up the majority of the market itself.

Entrepreneurialism != Capitalism.

With Roku I heard of it here and it turns out I had a pretty good idea about their streaming. But no further interest other than to see how they do financially over the years, as a spectator.

I'm hardly a consumer at all.

So definitely didn't find out about Roku as a consumer.

But before I knew it my brother got one, he consumes that stuff and now I'm more familiar than I wanted to be.

I would actually call it kind of boring myself.

Why? Why don’t you see it as a financial institution taking on a bunch of risk and a regulator attempting to mitigate that risk, then when that risk materializes the public has to step in anyway?

It’s the archetypical story of financial history for thousands of years. You can tell that’s the case because we even have FDIC and it is able to shut down a bank on Friday and open it back up on Monday. Literally the oldest story in the book!

> with no dog in this fight, I see this as some enforcement grudge match from NY capital old-school on California capital new-school, triggered by zero tolerance for crypto

I dont know why they are downvoting you. Part of what has been happening for a while is precisely that - East coast 'old money' capital waging one on everyone else and also trying to take out the West coast 'new money' capital as a competitor in the process...

SVB was an incompetently run bank whose major business model relied on outright cronyism. they deserve everything they get.

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