joyfylbanana

I wonder how much CFTC employees were placing those crypto futures and options before the announcement.

The so-called DeFi is full of centralized choke points, such as stablecoins and other centrally issued securities

People who can use VPN

That's why it pays.

From board perspective it is difficult, because it is difficult to find CEO to do the layoffs and start strategy work again. It is just easier to keep the previous CEO if he is willing to do the dirty work.

The excessive hiring before the market downturn was also copycat behaviour, not about about having good investment ideas. Now everyone has realized that they were in a mass-psychosis, and start having mass-sensibility instead.

The biggest difference is, that with financial debt you basically always have to pay it back in a way or another. With technical debt in startup context, it happens very often that you don't have to pay it back (failures). It is quite logical why startup founders prefer to have technical debt, as the venture is risky in any case it is the kind of liability that you only have to pay if you are successful.

If you are transacting in a business environment, I think it is an added benefit if the counterparty in the transaction can't deduce information out of your transaction. Such as how much assets you have, to what other services have you been sending funds and so on. As Bitcoin does have public ledger, and if you just use single address and don't do any privacy enchancing practices, lots of information could be deductible using blockchain analysis.

I would also suspect that using data collected by governments is used for business advantage. Of course it is hard to prove quite often. Personally I think that in principle it just doesn't make sense to spread your data around, as the benefits are tiny and the potential downsides can be big.

I still use only BTC and the reason why I use it is not because it is so great technically, I just don't like fiat.

That sentence doesn't make any sense. People can become merchants whenever they want for example at flea market, then suddenly they receiving at taler works for them?

This project never made any sense. Move on.

Looking at the downward trend in volumes, I suspect the profits come from the results of selling their bitcoins they have been holding in the balance sheet, the service itself is unprofitable.

The acceptance of bitcoin payments at the grassroots level is still happening. With the Lightning Network, it's quite viable these days. I've been following https://btcmap.org/map off and on, and new merchants and sites seem to be slowly popping up. Interestingly, there seem to be tourist hotspots in some countries where Bitcoin is more widely accepted. It would be a fun idea to visit these places and try to pay for everything with bitcoin only.

LocalBitcoins stopped providing the "in-person" model years ago. Also it really wasn't a business for them as people don't need the escrow service for that. They became regulated, implementing all KYC and AML stuff and I guess that drove customers away to other venues. Binance P2P seems to be the most active these days. In-person trading has been replaced with Bitcoin ATM's I would guess.

Their volumes have been getting smaller and smaller throughout the years. Likely reason is that the service just isn't profitable any more. Their volumes are public: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

These days there are lots of services offering p2p trading, and big exchanges like Binance also have p2p trading services for multiple cryptocurrencies. I would guess that Binance p2p volume alone is likely many times of that from LocalBitcoins these days. Most players don't publish their volumes though.

Yeah, let's say that it is incompetent management. As an business owner, you can fix the situation either by forcing people into offices, or firing the bad managers and recruiting a competent management instead. To me the latter solution sounds crazy expensive and difficult compared to the first.

I think the macroeconomic trend is that the work is moving slowly to poorer countries. Makes perfect sense, as in US there is a lot of money, it should mean less desire to work and more to enjoy life, meanwhile in poorer countries people have high appetite for money/work.

For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.

Managers don't have much idea what employees are doing, them being on site gives them a feeling of things being in control. It is not that surprising, if you think about it business on all level is just a guessing game, and people try to take the reduce their uncertaincies.

> I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits

LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.

It is always the employees telling these stories, but how managers are supposed to know if they are really working? When they are at the office the see it with their own eyes.

Common counter argument to this is that the manager sucks because he/she can't measure the work otherwise. But from managers perspective it is much easier to force people to be on-site than fix his/her own problems.

I'm not a direct employer, mostly an investor and solo entrepreneur who has low likelihood of ever employing people again. Used to be a big employer until sold my company.

Personally I have seen lots of different work in my previous work, and I just don't believe that remote work provides as much value for the shareholders. Productivity is likely better as remote, but the communication and trust issues cause problems. People often end up working on wrong things.

Personally I won't be investing in remote-only companies, unless it is somehow extremely stellar project.

Looking through the chat, it doesn't seem to me that CZ is suspecting SBF with just this $250k trade. To me it looks like he is suspecting that SBF is doing something shady, and the $250k trade is just a tiny example of that activity. You have to intrepret this quite strongly to have the view that CZ seriously would think 250k would move the market. Additionally, CZ was right that SBF is a crook.

Though for many normal people it was also about buying drugs online which could be seen as "get free from the government" kind of thing

Depends on how they communicate with the user. If their terms say that they are allowed to convert other USD-pegged tokens to BUSD, fine.

> we're all here in this space because we want decentralized censorship-proof, public recorded transactions

dude what. no. the majority of people are "here" just wanting the numbers go up in the closed-source centralized database that their trusted banker runs.

there are small group of people that actually care about decentralization and open source access to money, that number is maybe 0,01% of the total "crypto" users.

Probably not dollars, but some kind of low-risk assets like USD bonds? In that case you also can't just withdraw dollars, you have to sell the bonds - if they have to convert large amount like hundreds of millions, the spread on those bonds might get larger.

Also even though it were just dollars in a regular bank account, when the amounts go large enough, the bank might have liquidity issues of their own.

What would be the biggest issue is the compliance. As rumours are circulating that Binance might be getting some kind of charges, the banks and other institutions might just stop doing business with them because that would increase their risk a lot.

Yes they do, they announced it a while back. It is certainly interesting way to handle customer assets.

I think what is interesting here is that they clearly don't have 1:1 USDC reserves. And as their compliance has been questioned by many in the past might be that they might not be able to convert large amounts of BUSD to USDC, not at least cheaply.

The article doesn't claim that he is a supergenius. He might be just dumb fuck giving those interviews. But anyway his one and only objective is avoiding jail and I think that is true. He doesn't give a fuck about customers etc, he only does what he does because he wants to avoid jailtime, whether it is dumb or smart is irrelevant.

Apple should be given a medal for making it harder to trade NFT's. Those are bad for you.