favflam

The only cash flows into the ecosystem have been from ICOs. The SEC is cracking down on such activities.

Besides investment cash flow, I don't think there have been any revenue generating ventures that cater to customers outside the Web3 ecosystem.

The true web3 players will be traditional finance companies upgrading their settlement systems.

I am curious how people will answer your second question.

Yes, this feature. It seems like a cheap way to put a bunch of servers between yourself and connecting users with built-in rate limiting.

Has anyone tried using TOR as a replacement for Cloudflare DDOS protection? There is a single hop mode on hidden services.

Regulations mandate a surveillance module attached to the trading system to detect suspicious trading patterns, and I guess also check the stability of the overall market place. Regulators get visibility into a trading platform through these mechanisms.

Unregistered crypto-firms do not have to allow SEC access.

This thinking does not apply to decentralized exchanges, only CEXs.

IMO TLDR: Expensive=return on assets from the perspective of the city. Low ROA=unhappy citizens.

Cities requires a minimum tax-revenue per square mile to pay for city services, including schools. Revenue comes in many forms (property/sales/income taxes), but are physically constrained by density (not just space).

The more spaced out a city is, the more expensive it is for cities to cover everyone with services (police, schools, etc need to travel farther).

"More profit" means happier citizens. Cities constantly in the red go into death spirals. Cities in the black have a better better schools, better police with less taxes, less debt.

So, the US pre-1950s.

Regarding socialization, suburbs are anti-social. There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers.

Even small countryside towns are more social b/c there is a main street where people hang out on the street.

If you have to get in a car to "do something", your chances of spontaneous interactions go down exponentially.

I washed my bicycle outside last week and some 70-80 year old started up a conversation with me. Other times, going to the laundromat, some 80 year old lady chatted with me. But if I had to get in a car to get coffee or ride my bike, these kind of interactions would not happen. I want to live in a city when I get old and die on my feet.

Look at San Jose Diridon Station. Caltrain and links to Oakland and San Francisco go through it. It is in the middle of Silicon Valley and yet the station is empty during the day surrounded by parking lots.

Let's fix the low hanging fruit.

Isn't this the original problem Bitcoin (hash cash?) was supposed to fix? If you send email, you do some sha256 computation to make the cost of sending an email significant, but not cheap. Spammers would go out of business.

Are there other financial markets where a single entity is custodian, trading exchange, market maker, and Kyc/Aml all under on roof? It seems like a fundamental conflict of interest.

The increase in density will cancel out the increase in real estate cost (land). In fact, capital investment in increasing the output from a piece of land is the correct way to profit from real estate, not just squatting as people profit in current markets.

Step 1 to fix out of control real estate prices and suburbia depression is not public transit.

Step 1 is to deprioritize cars. No more free parking, no single family home zoning, free-for-all zoning around train stations and bus stops.

Step 2 is to keep deprioritizing cars. Ban highway expansion beyond 2 lanes in both directions. Match demand and supply with tolls. Excess revenue goes towards funding public transit.

Step 3 is to fund public transit. Private sector will see massive opportunity to build out private bus lines and trains (see Brightline in Florida). The real play is not ticket revenue, but real estate appreciation around public transit. Republicans should get around this idea with private equity guys. This is a no brainer to me.

In conclusion, the key to this morass to make car owners suffer and switch to real estate appreciation to incentivize private development of transit systems.

I don’t understand how VC funds can be in the billions and yet outsiders must assume they do not know anything about: 1. bank failures in the US in the last 100 years 2. deposits being on a bank’s balance sheet, hence the terms credit and debit cards 3. creditor subordination in event of default

Believing #3 especially makes no sense to me given the liquidity preference clauses I hear VCs have been writing into investment agreements with startups over the last few years.

These two realities, naive depositor and liquidity preferenced multi-billion dollar VCs, do not square up in my head.

FDIC protects naive depositors, not sophisticated financial professionals entrusted with billions of dollars of investment funds.

Also, people should pay attention when a bank is missing a Chief Risk Officer for 8 months during the most volatile period in fixed income history when Fed funds rate moved 400bps.

Also, it is not a good look with SVB's CEO personally lobbied to be excluded from stress tests that more than likely would have prevented SVB from YOLO'ing on 10 yr duration MBS.

Fed should have mandated bigger reserves and done better stress testing before raising interest rates so fast. Anything long duration tanked like 20% in mark to market value.

SVB is probably not the last shoe to drop in this story.

I feel like the improvement in ChatGPT is not the "intelligence", but the fact that the number of dimensions (abstract-math-sense) in search input have gone up magnitudes over "old-style" key word searches.

I respectfully disagree.

Trains and real estate go hand in hand. Without real estate, trains lose money. Without trains, real estate is worthless (hence parking lots, which are low value).

Trains and car owners don't mix. Trains + dense real estate usage displaces car owners and low-density real estate usage.

Cities should make car owners bicycles or ride the bus to the train station (ie remove parking lots) or cities should just not bother with trains.

I met someone in Seattle who was working on an optical Asic to mine Bitcoin. Is this in the same direction as this article?

Also, it is embarrassing that San Jose International airport does not even have a rail connection. Even second tier cities overseas make sure to have rail connections for foreign visitors who probably don't have a driver's license.

I visited San Jose Diridon station. It was surrounded by parking lots. It was amazing to me that a train station with connections south and north to both San Francisco and Oakland is a desolate wasteland of parking lots devoid of people. If this happened in another country, the city planners would be voted out of office or disappeared.

That place should be full of 5-10 story buildings bustling with offices, shopping, and apartments/condos. California is urinating away so much potential.

1. Vehicular drivers have no incentive to care. The laws around liability have to be changed. 2. Cities have to deprioritize car traffic to below pedestrians, bicycles, buses/trams. Free parking mandated or provided by the city needs to be eliminated. Zoning for building dense hS to be loosened up. Thankfully, this trend is picking up.

Car lifestyle is heavily subsidized by the state now.

https://nuclearphynance.com/ - 20+/- yr old forum on quant finance.

In Dune and Terminator, AI killed almost everyone. So, AI was eventually banned.

The F-35b/c? (vtol one) lets foreign navies operate aircraft on helicarriers (think Japan, Italy, South Korea).

There are no competing stealth aircraft capable of naval deployment. China is developing what appears to be a stealth fighter for their aircraft carriers, but I don't know how soon they will be deployed.

Without 20x margin trading, you can only be profitable running a spot exchange if you are in the top 3. Everyone below the top 3 has been operating in the red. Even the exchange that Binance bought has been operating in the red for years.

You cannot run a fully compliant exchange with trading, AML/KYC, and custody under one roof and be profitable. The IT controls and operational costs are too much. Moreover, there are not enough regulators in Japan with IT system experience to actually vet companies wanting to enter the market (see https://www.ft.com/content/75a05077-6ac8-4365-a8c5-28fc8928b... ). The salary differential between a civil servant and an IT systems auditor is really big. Companies, even if compliant, have to wait a long time to get their application process inspected. It took Coinbase 3 years to enter the Japan, which is quite bad.

I think the future will be splitting up the concept of exchange. I think only stable coin issuers will survive. You issue stable coins then let customers trade on DEXs. Stable coin issuers only deal with AML and some KYC. Since issuers can remotely freeze ETH addresses, AML is relatively easy as long as regulators don't be come too anal (unlike EU MiCA and FATF travel rule).

I think a wire fraud/bank fraud charge is on the table for people who give in to the temptation.

We only need one case to be successful for the precedent to be set that you cannot fraudulently issue unbacked stable coins for there to be a sufficient deterrent effect.

It seems that with the FTX bankruptcy, SDNY is looking to set that precedence now.

I these holidays will be the most chill in maybe a decade.

That 1.7 trillion USD omnibus package was passed. Mitch McConnell seemed pretty happy, along with the Democrat caucus. Things are starting to look normal again.

Georgia voted for Brian Kemp and Warnock in the same election. Another data point pointing towards the newfound chillness.

I wonder if the bail condition was set this way as a condition of agreeing to be extradited from the Bahamas without resistance.

1. Timezone - I think you need a strong documentation + asynchronous work culture. Less pair programming, more Jira.

2. No "human" touch - just make Zoom calls and drink beer.

3. Difficult to figure compensation scale - I wouldn't bother with CoL. just pick a floor and see who you get. You are fishing globally.

4. Lack of legal presence - this matters if you generate sales in the same country that you have contractors. Tax office will prefer a local entity that files taxes. The labor office will probably pressure you to hire contractors as local employees since you have a local entity. Employees may get taxed more brutally than as employees.

5. Compliance & regulations - I guess your ops people should be in home base. and I guess get your devs to develop code using dummy data. I guess if the code touches HIPAA-ish data, remote work does not really work.

He was trying to influence government policy that directly affected his business. This is like a level or two below bribing the SEC and CFTC to look the other way while breaking regulations.