Binance lays off over 1k Employees | Hacker News Reader

Binance lays off over 1k Employees

wsj.com

218 pointsjason_zig219 comments

> It was not easy saying no to Super bowl ads, stadium naming rights, large sponsor deals a few months ago, but we did. Today, we are hiring for 2000 open positions for #Binance.

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1537013824666095617

Jun 2022, didn't age well.

> Jun 2022, didn't age well.

A public statement lasting a year in the Wild West that is crypto isn’t the worst.

Though that’s primarily due to the lowness of the bar.

Knew someone who worked at Binance, as support. I'm sure he's competent enough at his job, but he has no special skills or anything. He made more money than I did as a senior software dev at the time. It seems not only did they hire a lot of people, they also paid them an ungodly amount of money.

Probably mitigates the risk of whistleblowers, if you can keep it up.

I guess that's a possibility, ut my bet is they just had more money flowing around than sense.

Typically it's more growth than money/sense.

Growth without proper management papers over a lot of stupid hiring decisions, 'because we need more people ASAP'.

It sounds like he didn't make that much money for long. Better to have a real career where you're making good money every year, year after year.

I don’t think those exist. It is much, much better to continually hop when the raises are 20% or more for doing so.

Huh? You don't think real careers making good money exist? I don't know what to tell you.

But the main issue here is that someone without any special skills ended up making a shitload of money as a fluke by working at Binance for a short period of time. It's very unlikely they're going to be able to get another job even nearly that good, let alone more jobs 20% better, because they don't actually have real marketable skills and it was just a fluke.

>Huh? You don't think real careers making good money exist? I don't know what to tell you.

They were talking about how wages at most jobs stagnate if you are a long-term employee. Which I find to be true as well.

My annual comp increases at FAANG are not 20%, but they have been consistent increases of roughly $45,000 a year, for little effort. I suppose it is a trap, but I am still content.

Humble brag

Doing a support role on a titanic is just as much potential beginnings of a good career that pays forever. I've known plenty of devs and bar passing lawyers that got nowhere in their career and plenty of support engineers that followed roughly the same user base across multiple bankrupt software companies.

High salaries are part of the grift.

Makes you look really successful (they pay a lot, so they must be super profitable!) and helps, at least partially, select employees who won’t be asking questions, just do their job and collect paychecks.

This comment reminds me of the movie Boiler room and now that I think of it reminds me of this whole crypto industry imo.

Cash comp or was he also compensated in tokens?

Important point — many of these employees were “paid” at least half of their salary in the company’s own scrip, a shitcoin, and with extra social pressure to not convert it to real money.

Isn’t that like any startup? Options in early stage companies are basically shitcoins, and you’re discouraged from selling them.

Knowing myself I probably asked if he got paid in real money or monopoly money, but I don't recall the answer. It's a friend of a friend I've spoken to a few times over the last ten years, and the last time was a little over a year ago (when we talked about his job, among other things).

Hope for their sake they were paid in actual money.

They did pay their bonus in some Binance crypto coin, but at least their base salary was relatively high.

Right. so Binance over-hired and over-paid for roles just like the rest of the tech industry in 2021 - 2022 then, as the free money and zero interest rate mania came to an end.

Did they really pay him a high salary, or did he take his salary in BNB which then massively increased in price?

Aged not too bad I would say

> saying no to ... stadium naming rights

That has actually aged well.

I haven’t paid any serious attention to crypto-type markets in a while but historically BTC/USDT was a pretty good number to look at if you could only look at one and it’s (glances)…whoa back above 30k? That’s not like peak tulip or even close but historically like, high-ish I think. I don’t particularly feel like reading the entrails of the crypto chicken at the moment so I’m going to assume that the crypto market (including the perpetual futures and stuff where Binance makes the big bucks) isn’t lying in ruins. I’m sure someone will let me know if that’s way off.

8 thousand people is not a lot for a company doing trillions of dollars of transactions in dozens of countries most which have at least some regulation. That would be a lot if they were all engineers and quants, but even there, an electronic stock market is a tricky little devil to build and operate.

So is this a bad outlook for crypto, a serious setback in the various regulatory battles, or just another brick in the wall of what is increasing looking like Don’t Poach Gate 2.0? (Sorry Bond Villains, the kids were going to hear about that eventually.)

number is one thing, but volume is through the floor

How much is it down % wise compared to what period previously?

solid numbers are sometimes not so easy to find - you should presume that any number in crypto that could be faked is being faked - but there's clearly been a serious decline.

Coinbase reveals in 10-K and 10-Q filings how it's lost over 75% of retail customers, i.e. the guys who supply the scarce actual dollars to crypto.

CoinDesk has been running regular articles on how it's down, e.g.

* https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/07/05/crypto-trading-v... - "Still, spot trading volumes remain at historically low levels. Spot trading volume in the second quarter was the lowest since Q4 2019, according to the report."

* https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/06/15/crypto-trading-v... - "Average daily volumes for the second quarter of 2023 were $10 billion for the top 10 tokens (excluding stablecoins), compared to $18 billion average daily volumes in the first quarter of the year."

this is important, because a thin market means the price is more easily fakeable. The TrueUSD stablecoin seems to have lost its backing recently, but simultaneously with that Binance somehow printed $2b worth of TrueUSD. What could you do to the bitcoin price if you had $2b of fake money to do it with?

Hi David! I love your blog and your twitter

The price of all crypto is managed. All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices, and insiders with giant ownership stakes manipulate markets. All exchanges are either a scam, or 'implicitly colluding' with shady things.

BTC is ironically not a very free market in that sense, moreover, because nobody needs it for anything, it has a buy-hold characteristic.

If people needed BTC for things (which would force some liquidity ops) then we'd see a price that reflected something.

Crypto markets are essentially 'schemes' of one kind or another, they serve no purpose other than to be a hustle.

If people want to play dumb games, that's fine, as long as they are doing it legally and it doesn't rope in a lot of external players.

Precisely this. It's like being pleased about the value of your Madoff holdings. Looks great, on paper, until too many people try to cash out at once.

I mean you could say that about any stock or bank. If everyone tries to cash out it goes to 0.

Banks shouldn't ... in principle.

Fractional reserve banks (which is all modern banks) should in principle.

The whole point of fractional reserve banking is to leverage people's trust in banks to try to generate faster growth and profits.

There's substantial difference between a bank run and a Ponzi collapsing.

In both cases current assets < current liabilities. Both require getting a loan to pay out the depositors. Both make no sense to loan money to as they will have no way to afford the payments to be worth loaning to over someone else.

> In both cases current assets < current liabilities.

That there are some things the same does not make them the same. You and I are both humans, but we are not the same person.

In a Ponzi collapse, all assets are typically < even current liabilities, let alone all of them. Unlike a bank run involving temporary liquidity issues, a Ponzi is never going to be able to pay everyone out.

To the customer it's the same. People don't want to be told that they will get their funds in a few years, they want it now. Liquidating all your assets is going to reduce the total value of all of your assets to potentially below your liabilities. If it doesn't good job, that means the bank is safe against bank runs, but if not they aren't.

That’s an absurd assertion. No, to a customer, a bank run is rapidly dealt with via the FDIC; we just had a great example of this with SVB. Madoff’s victims were not so lucky.

>we just had a great example of this with SVB.

They were acquired by another bank. Someone could similarly acquire a Ponzi scheme and pay out the people who wished to withdraw.

The FDIC made that happen. SVB became illiquid which triggered FDIC intervention. The bank was shut down by the FDIC and the assets were sold off to First Citizens bank. Executed without a hitch and no customer assets lost. The only ones who lost money were investors in the bank.

The FDIC would never make someone acquire a Ponzi scheme. Someone could in theory do it, but why would they? It's just throwing away money.

Stocks have value because they are cash flow generating assets, so if you sell low enough it will make economic sense for someone to buy, except for some liquidity catastrophe.

What about commodities then, like oil?

It was not too long ago that the price for a barrel of oil was negative $40.

Oil is a regular good that is priced according to supply and demand expectations.

Goods can have negative prices due sharp drops in demand (a lot of X was produced, but no one wants to buy x and you are paying to store it).

One thing though is that is unlikely that everyone would cash out below a certain price for a stock can be sold for parts. There would be at least some people realizing that they might as well hold, liquidate the company and make a profit out of it. So in practice there's a floor for the stock price (as long as assets > liabilities or similar).

That's not the case of BTC. Its value is completely depends on confidence. At no price can you be sure that you'll make a profit, you can only guess that it'll go back up, so there's no such floor.

Behind a stock you've got a company with cash flow and assets. If nothing else you can sell off the office furniture. Crypto is backed by ... a prime number written on a piece of paper (minus the paper)?

That's not really true, assuming it's a real company/bank with assets and revenue. If the stock is based on something with actual value there will many parties willing to buy the stock even if all of the current shareholders want to sell.

> All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices

Even "knowing this" (I mean, none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at and... the same things happens in the S&P500 with high frequency trading algorithms/bots trading back and forth, hedge funds, institutional investors, etc.) I don't feel like I can confidently explain who/how many people really dollar cost average into Bitcoin that can prop it up to $10k, $20k, $30k, etc.

Where/who are the buyers? How many people across the world are actively STILL investing directly into BTC to the point where it's up 80-90% YTD?

Finance is extremely regulated even if there are shenanigans, Crypto is just an excuse to do finance without oversight, which means it's mostly shady.

Every attempt to peel away the onion layer reveals mass problems.

It's like saying 'we have no hard proof that all this Mafia gangs revenue came from illegal activity!'.

What I'm saying is, the point of crypto is hustle, there is no real economy, and the players are all shady as can be.

Literally nobody knows where the Binance guy even is!

Why would the Binance guy want to hide from global authorities?

Regular bank CEO's don't.

It's mafia-adjacent the whole way down, with a lot of small dupes and kids playing with some amount of money.

There is no 'there there' in the value creating sense that we might want to see.

If you told me BTC was 95% regular people using it for business and 5% shady, I'd say we need to work on that problem. But it's only 5% 'useful' and the rest is just layers of scam and fraud.

We need to dump crypto, and if we want to try that experiment again - because I think there might be value there - we can give it a new name and keep it clean from the start.

> none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at

True, but there was an exchange a few months ago that turned off trading for customers for whatever reason, but the exchange forgot to turn of its bot and you could see a perfectly-formed, gradually-increasing, stair-stepping pattern in it's price chart.

Interesting, do you have a link where I can read about this?

bitcoin and crypto have long since parted ways, they are different things now. even from a regulatory perspective bitcoin is the only one that has clarity being defined as a commodity and not a security, everything else is in a grey area

This isn't accurate.

BTC has the best legal argument for being treated as a commodity, but there has been no legislative decision on this.

The CTFC sees BTC and ETH as commodities. Gensler pre-SEC said BTC, ETC, and LTC are commodities. The SEC and Gensler post-SEC says they are all securities, except maybe BTC.

The Ripple decision (Yesterday) says that unless a crypto is contractually sold to an investor (e.g. not directly listed via an exchange) then its doesn't fall under the Howey test.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-says-sec-lawsuit-vs-r...

thanks for clearing that up

The SEC just lost its case against Ripple, so I don’t know what’s happening on the regulatory front.

It didn't lose the whole case, it lost certain summary judgement issues, and prevailed on others, the real case there is still to come.

It was overall a bit of a win for ripple but far from the end of the game.

The ruling published yesterday was just summary judgements which can be appealed. The actual trial hasn't even happened yet.

The trial isn’t interesting. The summary judgment says it’s legal to sell cryptocurrencies if you do so anonymously on retail exchanges, and the tokens also are not securities. Very interesting outcome. The appeals are likely to fail from my reading of various analyses.

> The summary judgment says it’s legal to sell cryptocurrencies if you do so anonymously on retail exchanges, and the tokens also are not securities.

This is a misrepresentation. The ruling says some specific XRP sales by Ripple via exchanges were not investment contracts. It does not say they are not securities, nor does it say that it is broadly "legal to sell cryptocurrencies" on exchanges.

Head of legal for Coinbase disagrees with you:

https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1679962578808709122...

Everything you need to know about crypto today can be found at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

> and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.

This is actually a worry i have about in regards to crypto, the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power.

Ai is next of my power hungry worry list.

> the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power

Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.

This article is basically like arguing: “Sure, using the Infant-Chipper 9000 results in the deaths of infants. But it’s a rounding error if you consider how many infants die in the world every year!”

Bitcoin purposefully wastes lots of energy to provide something of extremely dubious value.

It's literally an infant chipper insofar as it enables the sale of (and thus the production of) CSAM.

Yet obviously, some people find it useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives?

Maybe you should stop flying on airplanes for the rest of your life?

“Some people find the infant-chipper useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives?”

The people finding it useful are overwhelmingly moving money illegally, such as how you can peg BTC shifts to Xi's anti-corruption crackdowns in China, or MBS in Saudi. Or moving drugs. Or hyping something to sell more made up money to rubes.

When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life.

I'll tell lots of other people how you live your life is hypocritically contributing to a massive increase of financial leverage on the part of "rationally self interested" sociopaths and criminals at everyone else's expense( in direct opposition to its putative purpose of undermining predatory central bankers, yet is simply shifting the power to predatory anon-ish ransomware purveyors and sex traffickers and bullshit gambling token insta-twit "influencers" seeking to exploit the naivety of children for their own financial gain), and generally promoting the enshittification of everything that touches the internet, and should be mocked and discouraged at every opportunity.

You don't like the free market of ideas when it turns against you? tough.

"When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life."

This is no defense of Bitcoin/crypto, but the above paragraph relatively concisely describes how I feel as part of the underclasses in the traditional world. Except that all the fears it encapsulates have already occurred for my family, generations back.

There are people in this thread who get a yearly payrise (which translates to increased selfish expenditure on plastic toys and air flights and fancy petrol burning machines) that's greater than my entire household's income, and I'm just an ordinary person in a western country. How many household bitcoin miners does that equal, environmentally speaking? For that one person?

The hypocrisy embedded in fervent hatred of crypto, as though extravagant & hugely unbalanced wastage of resources wasn't practiced by us all daily, implies a moral distance that, imo, barely exists. Bitcoin and crypto are mere reflections of the wastage that we as a species have normalised, and still do, via our lifestyles.

It's "industry" and "business" that have fucked this world.

I'm not advocating for the "industry" side as if it's a dichotomic industry against crypto, or banking against bitcoin. I'm specifically criticizing crypto and especially Bitcoin because the entire ideological mission of the project is to disrupt and disintermediate all of these well-known predatory Industries, when it has done none of this whatsoever. In fact has actually contributed both to incumbent disproportionate inequality of wealth, as well as creating new classes of disproportionate and malignant, aggressively unaccontable wealth. It has backfired in the worst possible way and all the fallout is on the people that was supposed to benefit.

And the and the relative handful of people at the center of the so-called decentralized crypto world are well aware of this and don't give a flying f**.

I wonder that we couldn't say similar about the TCP/IP protocol.

It's the human behaviour, what our species turns the protocol to, that we're really complaining about.

The tcp/ip protocol didn't have a white paper and accompanying ideological promotion and narrative expressly stating the purpose was to wrest power to create money from sovereign central governmental authorities that had ostensibly abused it, back to regular people in a decentralized manner. And instead resulted in a cartelified cabal of people who go out of their way to be unaccountable by obscuring their identities, which is actually a step down from people who you can at least in theory remove from power or hold accountable through democratic means.

It sure doesn't help that the earliest adopters went on the social media of the time crowing about how they were the new wealthy elite.

The (admittedly slow) progress of regulation represents the 'democratic means' you speak of.

What exactly does it provide?

So far it seems that Bitcoin mainstream use is to create speculative markets. Any other intended objective is a drop in the bucket.

If your country's money and banking works for you I don't think I can explain to you why bitcoin is useful, you simply have no use for it. That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.

Give me a ballpark for the relative market share of "bitcoin as speculation" vs "bitcoin as currency".

I'd estimate it as...oh...98% speculation, and I think I'm being generous.

What is your estimate about Gold? I say Bitcoin and Gold serve roughly the same purpose.

Looks like gold mined gets diverted to:

47% investment and central1 banks

45% jewellery

7% tech/industrial applications

See https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... and https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/mi... - don't exactly agree, but close.

(and, importantly, it doesn't require terawatt-hours to maintain gold once you've mined it).

So basically, 92% of gold is purely due to social conditioning and invented belief.

> (and, importantly, it doesn't require terawatt-hours to maintain gold once you've mined it).

I am pretty sure collective security spent on gold worldwide exceeds terawatt hours once you account for all the physical security as well.

I would like to hear more about those use cases.

Because I cannot fathom a system where either currency or banking does not work, and the preferable alternative is to rely on a highly volatile asset that requires vast amounts of energy and time to work.

> That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.

We are not in 2011 anymore. Bitcoin did not become a widespread vehicle for commercial transactions. Countries with defenestrated economies did not find an alternative in Bitcoin. Instead, we have whales, among them large banks and corporations, controlling over a third of the market, and most transactions are made in exchanges with arbitrage or speculation purposes.

Suffice to say, I don't consider JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs my "peers".

> I would like to hear more about those use cases.

Here you go, I have compiled some examples for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

> Because I cannot fathom a system where either currency or banking does not work, and the preferable alternative is to rely on a highly volatile asset that requires vast amounts of energy and time to work.

May I ask you where you were born and raised? A lot of people do actually have to face shitty systems where Bitcoin is a godsend.

When that list reaches the length of https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1, a great point will have been made.

Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with web3, so you provided an empty list.

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ is already a great counter-list to your list.

Btw, lumping Bitcoin with web3 is as pointless as lumping penny stocks with AAPL or BRK.A.

> Here you go, I have compiled some examples for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

Isn't it a bit disingenuous to think that common people have moved $50bn in Bitcoin out of China? Or have moved ~$2.4bn worth of Bitcoin in Nigeria in a single month?

> A lot of people do actually have to face shitty systems where Bitcoin is a godsend.

I would say that a handful of examples, of which some are highly questionable, constitute anecdotal evidence, at best. Some of these scenarios are indistinguishable from using any other stable foreign currency, or even commodities, with the added difficulty of requiring certain technology literacy most people don't have.

> May I ask you where you were born and raised?

I could ask the same, because I haven't found many ardent defenders of cryptocurrency outside the tech circles of the so called developed world.

> I could ask the same, because I haven't found many ardent defenders of cryptocurrency outside the tech circles of the so called developed world.

Not surprising, you live in a media bubble filled with people from the "developed world".

You would be sorely disappointed.

> a handful of examples

Well, Bitcoin price is still 30K USD and the market cap is almost 600B USD. That is a very good macro proof that people value Bitcoin.

> I could ask the same

I was born in a third world country where the leader decided to demonetize 87% of currency in circulation on a whim. And the society doesn't trust government at all - people buy gold or land as soon as they can. Where are you from?

> I haven't found many ardent defenders of cryptocurrency outside the tech circles of the so called developed world.

Have you actually bothered to talk to anyone? I have had in-person conversations with people from multiple despotic or shitty regimes (Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Iran) to understand how and why they use Bitcoin. You talk to them, understand how it is used and you will also realize that Bitcoin is here to stay and grow.

> Well, Bitcoin price is still 30K USD and the market cap is almost 600B USD. That is a very good macro proof that people value Bitcoin.

Let’s not forget that Bitcoin price averages a volatility of ~4% daily. With Bitcoin, any given individual could have sold goods or services and make a profit one day, and lose pretty much everything in a week.

If that is not a sign of Bitcoin being used as a vehicle for speculative markets, I don’t know what it is.

> Have you actually bothered to talk to anyone? I have had in-person conversations with people from multiple despotic or shitty regimes (Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Iran) to understand how and why they use Bitcoin.

Using Bitcoin properly requires a certain level of tech and financial literacy most people just don’t have. It also relies on expensive infrastructure that is highly dependent on mining being profitable. Again, this is not 2011 anymore, nowadays only the very wealthy can expect to profit from Bitcoin mining.

I guess the question is, what is so different between a crappy hyper inflated currency, controlled by an authoritarian government, and a crappy volatile cryptocurrency, controlled by a few wealthy individuals?

On that regard, If I were to call any friend from Venezuela and ask them about starting to use Bitcoin right now, they would surely get some 2014 vibes.

> Using Bitcoin properly requires a certain level of tech and financial literacy most people just don’t have. It also relies on expensive infrastructure that is highly dependent on mining being profitable. Again, this is not 2011 anymore, nowadays only the very wealthy can expect to profit from Bitcoin mining.

But most of the users don't mine - they just buy and hold. It is pretty simple and is as complicated (or simple) as buying and holding gold.

> a crappy volatile cryptocurrency, controlled by a few wealthy individuals

No idea how that is relevant since we are discussing Bitcoin :-p. In seriousness, that is where the social belief comes from. If people believe Bitcoin to be controlled by a few wealthy individuals, then either they will stay away. If they believe Bitcoin to be a truly decentralized store of value not controlled by any single government or entity, they will flock to it. If they are right, they will be rewarded with an asset which will appreciate in the long run. If they are wrong, they will get burned.

So far, believers in Bitcoin seem to be getting rewarded handsomely and naysayers are proven wrong multiple times (https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/).

> If I were to call any friend from Venezuela and ask them about starting to use Bitcoin right now, they would surely get some 2014 vibes.

I met a Venezuelan last week and he regularly sends Bitcoin back home to help his family. Fiat exchange rate is artificially suppressed so his family would receive less if he sends USD. Gold is hard to send from the US to Venezuela. No one can stop Bitcoin transfers though and it is more trusted than the local currency.

No, the price is 30K USDT, which has very dubious backing, part of which is BTC. They've never been audited and thus nothing points to them being solvent. It's believed that a lot of the backing is in Chinese real estate papers which took quite a big fall with Evergrandes' troubles.

> the price is 30K USDT

You can literally sell one Bitcoin on Coinbase right now and get >30K USD back (minus commission). No idea how USDT is relevant here.

If you really believe that something that is 1 million times less efficient than Visa/MasterCard for a fraction of the service, and that miners really use residential energy when they are active 24/7 and thus by definition a continuous strain on the grid, I have so many scams^W interesting products to sell you

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Comparing Bitcoin network to Visa/MasterCard is as pointless as comparing Gold mining to those cc networks. Fair comparison would be Bitcoin network vs Gold mining/storage/securing/transfer activities.

The convertibility between money and gold has stopped in the 70s.

Bitcoin allows for instant money transfer, and so does Visa.

The fact that bitcoin has no collateral is a whole other topic.

Instant?

Bitcoin allows for instant Bitcoin transfer. The fact that it can be converted for money is a separate angle.

> The fact that bitcoin has no collateral is a whole other topic.

That's actually the main topic. Both Gold and Bitcoin are valuable because we as a society decided that they are valuable.

All that electricity so that 3 to 7 people a second can buy some drugs.

> This is actually a worry i have about in regards to crypto, the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power.

Crypto has alternative consensus methods available today and a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) was able to cut their emissions by 99.9% by moving to a efficient alternative with Proof-of-Stake. For crypto it is possible.

AI (Deep Learning) on the other hand has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference and continues to waste tons of water and consume more resources.

> Ai is next of my power hungry worry list

It should be the main concern. The top of your list even, hence the aforementioned points today. Deep Learning has no efficient solutions to its energy problem which remains to this day after decades of its existence.

That site focuses on the bad stuff but crypto goes on. Maybe check https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ for balance.

I know this is tongue in cheek, but there's a lot more to crypto than the scams and failed projects exposed on web3isgoinggreat.

One example is all the amazing new research in zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, FHE, and modern cryptography in general, that is motivated and funded by cryptocurrency projects.

How much do these ideas depend upon the concept of blockchain?

They don't depend on the blockchain, but the fact is that most recent research on these topics has come from the blockchain/cryptocurrency space.

One interpretation is that crypto companies need security and privacy, while big tech doesn't seem to care all that much.

uh... so you're saying hypothetical coinbase cares more about security than hypothetical robinhood or fidelity, or even the good ol' google/apple?

(i'm having a hard time thinking of a successful "crypto" company other than a handful of exchanges, of which coinbase will probably be the only one that survives, at least in the US)

I don’t know if “cares about” is the right phrasing, but financial transactions are a “simple” use case for ZK algorithms. So practicality if implementation definitely affects how much a group or company cares.

Yes, I'll acknowledge that there may be a handful of capable researchers who are able to progress on some basic science by accepting free money from a scam industry which is indiscriminately shoveling it at anything that might appear to legitimize itself.

Just as, in days of old, those who wished to do legitimate (and costly) science had frame their research as supporting alchemical beliefs leading to discovery of immortality, or means to make gold from lead.

and astronomers who wished to build an observatory had to go along with some highly flimsy justification about how it could serve as a means to prognosticate the birth of an heir or victory in battle for some petty murderous strongman.

From my view there is room for sustainable crypto businesses but they get crowed out by the big unsustainable crypto businesses that were entirely relying on huge gains in price.

That being said whatever practical uses there are for crypto is entirely detached from the value of crypto.

The biggest practical use for crypto (specifically Bitcoin, as a store of value) is entirely dependent on the value of crypto.

Just speculating, but I imagine BTC does well because there's way less competition sloshing around in the crypto world these days. The NFT craze is over, 20 ultra-hyped crypto coins aren't being launched every second, there's fewer (illegal) securities floating around. So if you want to be in crypto, but things are scary, and you're looking for something safe? It's Bitcoin.

It's bizarre to me too. I think there must be some seriously big holders doing wash trading to prop things up on paper.

Anecdotally, all of the normies I know of who were really "into crypto" during the pandemic are coming around to thinking of the whole thing as a shark pit full of scams. There can't be that much new blood out there left to recruit to the pyramid at this point.

There’s been a lot of advancements during this bear market (which is the longest bear market in crypto history). Most of the interesting advances have been along the decentralized application front, although there’s also been a lot of more fundamental advances as well. For instance Bitcoin now has ordinals that allow the inscription of altcoins and nfts on the chain. The more interesting applications are not on Bitcoin since the block time is too slow and expense is too high for the general public.

Applications that have seen major technical advancements since 2020 include identity, gaming, money markets, trade routing, anti fraud, derivatives, concentrated liquidity, token launchpads, smart nfts, social media, and cross chain communication.

My opinion is that of these blockchain gaming will likely be the most successful in the next bull cycle. Axie and cryptokitties from the previous cycle were extremely limited and unfun, with axie also having issues with design centralization that led to the huge North Korean hack. These issues will probably still exist but there are now technical solutions.

The article says a spokesperson said they "need to focus on talent density." Talent density is a new buzz word to me!

are they bashing people they laid off, assuming that 1k people were less talented than the rest?

Sound like that's exactly what they're doing.

yes

No offence, but that's usually how capitalism works, the least talented are the first to go - unless we're talking about Twitter and then it's about showing off at the office.

I highly doubt that's true. It may be what you want in an ideal world, but in reality, very few, if any, companies of this size have any internal ranking system that can accurately identify the 1000 least talented people company-wide. More likely, they're laying off the last 1000 hired if they want to optimize for losing the least institutional knowledge, the first 1000 hired if they want to optimize for immediate labor cost savings, or just laying off all the people that are part of teams working on projects that got scrapped, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Never in any layoff I've been a part of, have the least talented workers been let go first. It's usually by category: contractors, age (early-retirement), department, or job description.

I've seen some layoffs and the first to go where the people the most "unproductive". So, there were sale people (which were actually pretty decent, but they "cost" money and had to go), and then there were also people who were just "less" good. Less senior, more junior and could not do things autonomously.

But I can agree that it's always very subjective and of course the one who is friend with the boss ABC will have more chance despite maybe performing less good...

This is the fundamental conceit of stack-ranking layoffs, which Microsoft did annually for many years.

You can do early-retirement by age but if you do lay-offs by age that's going to be an age-discrimination problem if you target >40.

Don't forget "most talented people who accept the severance pay and get another job" from the pre-layoff voluntary departure.

I have seen a lot of layoffs over the years and I would put the main targets into here buckets:

1. People with bad relationships with he boss and bosses boss. 2. People with higher salaries. 3. Unlucky folks where an entire line of business or corporate department is shut down.

Number 1 is the vast majority of the cases. Make sure your boss smiles when they see you and you can sleep well at night.

In larger companies, for some values of “talented” that comprises non-technical factors like political acumen, yes. If the “talented” label is meant as a shorthand for some kind of meritocratic scale, then I have my doubts about that.

I’ve long since lost my astonishment at the revealed preferences in layoff selection criteria. It isn’t a complete Machiavellian free-for-all, but merit and fine-grained logic usually don’t prevail at the top of the criteria list in the trenches.

I've heard people claim this, but I've never actually seen it happen in practice.

If your statement is true, then the inverse must also hold: hiring is based on merit, which we all know to be untrue.

Implying you'd have to be pretty dense to work at Binance.

Only the densest talent available made the cut. Part of this new talent push was upgrading the chairs, to handle the increased talent density. Our people are 90% tungsten and it's something we are really proud of.

Stalionstatues.. Each and every ounce.

The next big crypto scandal headline:

”Authorities Investigating <DeFi Corp> as Evidence that Depleted Uranium Propped Up Dense Talent, Actually Empty Inside”

Osmium devs are the new 10x devs.

sounds like they need smaller offices.

Man, that seems like a heck of a send-off for those employees.

There's no fig-leaf such as "they killed entire projects" or "they pivoted".

Just the spokesperson saying that, if you're one of the laid-off employees, it's because you lacked talent.

Not sure that's a company I'd want to work for.

I worked for a large fintech firm that used this as reasoning to layoff 700-some employees years ago. They cited their changing needs and the talent of those engineers juxtaposed to their needs changing. I had seven friends among those engineers, only one of which I would consider in a grey area with respect to the skills he possessed that were relevant to the times. The company refused to release a full list of employees that were let go so we used Slack to create a list of users deactivated between certain time periods (this gets tricky with EU). What we learned is that most of them were tenured employees with higher wages. Their wages (likely) predated a movement that caused average wages at the company to go down so that everyone on every team with the same title made the same amount. These were basically the people left over who didn't quit but stopped getting raises because they were above pay bands for their level.

Sounds like something straight out of the end of Margin Call.

Seems like easy to optimize for it - just keep only the best 1 talent and fire everyone else!

Congrats to the most talented. You're now doing the work of 5 people.

> Binance had a global staff of 8,000

A 12.5% reduction. Also, they are way larger than I thought with 8k employees. I don't know what's involved with running an exchange but they must be into lots of things with that many folks.

In some corporate cultures, headcount is its own reward.

To be fair, exchanges are pretty complicated. That said, it seems like a pretty high number.

They have around 100M registered users, so approximately 1 employee for every 100k users seems reasonable.

Yes, totally. They probably have tons of support, sales, etc. I'd imagine they have tons of contractors too with that many users. Makes sense now.

That figure seems implausibly high. 1 in 80 humans on Earth are not only participating in crypto but specifically have an account on Binance? It certainly cannot be the number of active users.

If its indeed true, the gap between onchain and offchain users is even more immense.

On chain, there are not more than 100k users across chains daily. Real users across all EVM chains is probably around 20k/day. Major airdrops like Optimism and Arbitrum went out to like 600k wallets (and most have multiple wallets). OpenSea has like a few thousand daily active users.

Which makes you wonder - all these billions in funding for serving just…100k real users? Because if its not onchain, it might as well be a database.

It has been reported that CZ had 300 accounts himself, so like most things in crypto the 100M number is to be taken with a grain of salt.

you need a lot of operations people like customer service for an exchange. not really surprising.

I don't know if I'm just naive, but I'm always confused when I see such a high headcount for companies with such simple tech, the staff of Twitter (even after mass layoffs) confuses me also.

I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.

True sign of the arrogant software engineer, believing they can single-handedly recreate an entire company just because they went to school in one subject for 4 years.

Such vitriol! It's safer to assume they're inexperienced than arrogant.

Pretty much the definition of arrogance, being inexperienced and still thinking they can do the work of a hundred people

I work at one such company and I still think most of us aren't needed. I swear it's 90% red tape and BS holding everyone back. I know I can build things 30x faster outside of work, but I will also confess that it might not meet at the accessibility guidelines and i18n and be user tested and so forth.

every profession does this. Have you ever spoken to marketers about how important marketing is? or accountants? most people have a massively outsized idea of their own role to the point they wonder what other people even do.

The only difference with engineers is they can believe at least in theory they could create the backbone of some services, so they could have a shoddy mvp made in a few days which they assume just needs a "little" work to top it off, whereas others can't start without tech help, but massively underestimate how much tech work is required for their ideas.

If you dont believe me, hang around a startup space and see how people talk about trying to find technical cofounders

I mean feel free to make the next Twitter with a single Engineer if you think it is possible.

Twitter is a weird example. The next Twitter has to be at least as good as Twitter without the growing pains. The initial product didn't scale well and probably was written quickly by very few people.

The author didn't say "early Twitter" they said Twitter.

They claimed you don't need more than one Engineer to run a product like Twitter in their post so I said they should try.

An exchange is not simple tech. It isn't a simple problem.

Isn't it "an exchange at scale is not simple tech". I'd imagine I could build an exchange to handle 100 users pretty quickly.

Simple tech at scale rarely stays simple.

There are dozens of protocols they need to integrate with and keep up to date. Plus, those protocols change constantly. And there are also new ones, and those which disappear... And then, there is their whole infrastructure.

The support must be massive too. And the legal aspect must also keep people busy from having to enforce various regulations to having to answer to various governments...

So let's take a comparison: - facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years? So yes, there is probably some support, the content enforcement of course must keep a lot of people busy, but then?..

- snapchat: 5k employee. Well, for a social media platform which is not changing at all and actually losing in revenue, that's a big number

> facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years?

What do you mean? Facebook changes literally every day. Every single day a piece of UI randomly stops working.

You're assuming (in both the Binance and Facebook cases) that the majority of headcount comes from product development teams. Not true. The majority of that 8k/50k figure comes from areas like sales, compliance, finance, HR and management.

NYSE has around 2000 employees. So I think this is more than they need.

OTOH NYSE operates in NY and US jurisdictions right? Binance tries to operate everywhere.

> Binance tries to operate everywhere.

Under which legal jurisdiction does Binance operate? It's not "all of them". I'm not sure that it's "any of them".

Fair cop, haha. It has designs on operating aboveboard I think everywhere on earth right?

And I have designs on flying to the moon by flapping my arms.

> As we prepare for the next major bull cycle, it has become clear that we need to focus on talent density across the organization to ensure we remain nimble and dynamic. This is not a case of rightsizing, but rather, re-evaluating whether we have the right talent and expertise in critical roles.

This is some next level PR "major bull" right here. Not only are they claiming with a straight face that these are not layoffs, but they're saying it's happening because crypto is about to rocket to the moon! (As opposed to, say, Binance being currently raked over the coals by every financial regulator on the planet.)

Off topic, but Binance UI and onboarding is a complete tipster fire.

A binance user asked me to pay USD40 using binance: I went through the process of signing up - it was incredibly difficult with significant roadblocks at every step - horrific UI choices.

A company that fails to onboard a paying user is not going to do well.

The only reason I made it through the onboarding was that I was very stubborn and I have sufficient knowledge to eventually work past the worst UI blocks. It was an extremely frustrating and confusing process.

Even once I had passed the KYC compliance and got money deposited (more nightmare), the UI is still a shitfest of unclear usability. So many obvious failures at every step.

Also they had an incentive system to refer someone, but it appears to be completely broken so even their signup incentives are a failure.

I have never had such a poor experience trying to give a company some money.

Their trading platform used to be awesome though although I haven't been on it since they banned US users 5 or 6 years ago. It was very well done in my opinion.

It's pretty insane that they have this many employees to start with.

> Before the layoffs, Binance had a global staff of 8,000.

The whole thing is self-evidently a massive scam! There are still 7,000 people working there!

Binance is a crypto exchange. Where's the scam?

Interesting I recall them mentioning how they were resistant to the market turmoil that caused Coinbase to conduct their layoffs

Well, they're also being sued by the SEC...

I deleted my Binance account last month but still get service email (because I'm a 'client') without the ability to unsubscribe or turn it off (I have no account). All contact is ignored. Great company.

I remember getting an interview opportunity a couple of months ago. And the hiring manager said they are going fine. Didn't age well

How did they have 1000 people in the first place?

The article saysthat they had 8000 before layoffs started... What are all these people doing at an exchange? Maybe they work with orders on paper in the background? :D

They operate in 100 countries, have 30m users, support trading in 360 coins PLUS a load of derivatives on top and process $15bn of trades per day. And they are not just "an exchange". They are also custody, clearing and settlements. Frankly I am amazed they are only 8,000.

Idk...throwing around big numbers, implying confidence does not convince me. Also your numbers are mostly not neccessarily related to the amount of workforce needed.

For example my blog/website operates theoretically in all countries on the world ...still it's only me needed. I think you get the point.

I think a measure like active users is more related to the size than number of countries and coins/tokens ...

But it is true I focused a too much on the platform itself etc. They have a lot stuff going on around it for legal, kyc, regulations, Marketing etc ... The operation of the platform itself is probably not the biggest part of their business anymore.

But coinbase for example, does it with less than 5000 ... But probably not so easy to compare

Companies don't hire people.

Managers do.

If I am a Director of Engineering with 5 reports and you are a Director of Engineering with 10 reports then you are going for the VP of Eng role on next promotion.

Like it or hate it that's why every company bloats up over time.

Company pays salaries.

And you enlarge your status.

We just need a law that bans cryptographic exchanges and transfers in the USA. They are not assets, they provide no real utility, they are just speculative devices that no longer function as originally intended; as a replacement for fiat currency. So, it simply needs to be outlawed and all the money repatriated into whatever currency it came from; most of it dollars.

This seems pretty out of touch. They're the first challenger to fiat currencies ever. Outlawing them will stifle any innovation that arises from their development.

> the first challenger to fiat currencies ever

Except they fail at that. Any further innovation will be more of the same: grift.

> They're the first challenger to fiat currencies ever.

Direct commodity and commodity-representational currencies were the first challengers to fiat currencies, and for about the first millenium after the first know fiat was introduced, generally won.

Cryptocurrency is not the “first challenger to fiat currency ever”.

Nothing is ever "won". The world remains as dynamic as ever. Pride comes before fall, as they say.

Also, until the 70s, USD was backed by gold.

> Nothing is ever "won".

Yes, the simple past (“for the first millenium after the 10th century introduction of fiat, commodity currency alternatives mostly won”) has different meaning than the past perfect (“commodity currencies have won the battle with fiat currencies”), and I choose which one I used for the exact meaning intended.

> Also, until the 70s, USD was backed by gold.

Yes, the US dollar until recently was most of the time a commodity (either direct in coins traded for their metalli1a13@c value, or representational in redeemable notes) currency, part of the millenium of triumph of commodity over fiat.

Hey, quick question dragonwriter.

Previously, you tried to say that FB was going to, I don't know, Sue startups who use LLAMA or something, due to them not yet releasing a commerical license, with a permissive license?

Do you still stand by this statement, now that FB has commercially released a large language model?

And then question 2 would be, what possible argument could someone say to you, to have convinced you that your previous argument was not justified, given that new evidence has proven that to be the case?

> Previously, you tried to say that FB was going to, I don't know, Sue startups who use LLAMA or something, due to them not yet releasing a commerical license, with a permissive license?

I’m not certain how to parse the last part of that sentence, but I'm fairly certain that I didn’t ever try to say that Facebook was going to sue LLaMa users, startups or otherwise.

I may have argued that the license terms created sufficient legal risk that most firms would be loathe to build on top of it, but that’s very much not the same thing.

> Do you still stand by this statement, now that FB has commercially released a large language model?

As far as I know, they have announced plans to release an LLM (which may or may not be LLaMa) with a commercially-usable (maybe open source) license in the near future, but have not yet done so.

But since I don’t recall making the claim (and have very clear reasons why I would have been unlikely to have), I won't stand by it even without the new information you indicate (which seems premature, AFAICT.)

>Outlawing them will stifle any innovation that arises from their development.

This seems pretty out of touch.

I own some crypto. Mostly BTC, some ETH and even a bit of XRP I've held onto. I can see the utility, maybe. But, what innovation is happening in this space? It's mostly scam after scam.

There are literally thousands of coins on CoinMarketCap. What are they all doing?

The only notable innovation to come from cryptocurrencies is the rise of ransomware, a drain on the global economy that funds terrorists and dictatorships.

There was ransomware in the 90s. For small amounts, they often requested prepaid gift cards or for you to call premium phone numbers. For larger amounts, wire transfers to countries with weak law enforcement.

Cyberextortion rings still operate out of countries with weak law enforcement or tacit approval of their governments, so I don't know if disappearance of cryptocurrency would hurt them much.

Outlawing Cryptographic exchanges and transfers are not outlawing distributed ledger technology nor networks with tokens not denominated or traded in US dollars.

The federal courts disagree with your opinion today https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-13/what-d...

No, they didn't. They disagreed with a federal agency's attempt to regulate. They didn't overturn a law banning cryptocurrencies.

There’s gotta be a compelling government interest like health or safety, right? I don’t think “crypto is useless junk” will hold up to strict scrutiny.

Seems like a knee-jerk reaction. Why is the opinion always to ban or abolish a broken system instead of improving it?

That’s the opposite direction the federal government has moved.

You’re currently spewing nonsense.

how would you get the money back? Wouldn't that tank the price of everything? Not saying I'm categorically opposed to that but you'd essentially be confiscating the crypto since it'd be impossible to sell it for anything close to what you paid, right?

It would be a US law so they can get their money back in foreign currencies since its cryptographic and can be transferred to other exchanges internationally, and if they want dollars they can exchange it on the open market. Thankfully, that would increase the demand for dollars and continue to strengthen a currency weakened by a massive speculative market primed through international drug trafficking.

I see I read exchanges not as "marketplaces" but as "transfers of crypto in exchange for money" like you were going to have the government forcibly compel everyone in the US holding crypto to sell it for a flat USD value and thusly divest themselves. So your idea would be that they can keep holding crypto or they can sell it for otherd-than-USD-fiat in non-US exchanges. Makes sense.

First provide me with a universal, legal definition of asset, before we argue about whether or not something is an asset. Nevermind that I'm sure if I pried into the particulars of your life, I would find something cryptographic or digital that belongs to you, which you would be disappointed to live without, even if it's meaningless to most people. And as a lover of liberty, I would never wish to deprive you of the right to own it and transfer it to whomever you wish under whatever acceptable terms you both come to.

First, provide me with a universal definition of liberty. I would hate for you to infringe on other peoples and so would need you to clarify a valid and sound method for determining in all cases where yours begins and others ends. Then, apply it to the functions and limitations of a democratic system for determining those boundaries and from there we can begin to unravel the complexity of bad faith arguments and red herrings.

You can have my cryptokitties.

> I would find something cryptographic or digital that belongs to you, which you would be disappointed to live without

That "or digital" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You are effectively claiming that crypto has to be allowed or digital photos with friends are right behind.

stop running code I don't like :(((

Stop exchanging code for dollars and pretending it provides any social or economic utility.

This isn't outlandish. Many things are illegal to run on your computer.

> we just need a law

Who is “we”? How would this “law” be compatible with the US constitution? How would this “law” be enforced? This must be the most naive take in this entire thread.

Most cryptocurrencies are designed to survive exactly this situation. An attenpted USA ban on crypto has been expected from the very beginning, since blockchains transfer power from the elites like you to everyone else.

Not even a whole month since the last layoff...

Contractors on the Death Star.

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