manholio

> keeping unreasonable sums of money on hand has been the primary downfall of the majority of crypto exchanges

That is unconvincing. If they had the USDC in cold storage they could easily see the uptick in withdrawals and prepare the necessary funds. The only moment you become dependent on outside parties, such as, as they claim, the opening hours a random bank in New York, is when you don't have those assets at all and need to repurchase them on the market. If they can't manage a cold wallet, they have no business being the largest crypto exchange, there's nobody more qualified for that task and most certainly you wouldn't outsource it to some smaller provider.

In fact what Binance does is they convert any incoming stablecoin to their own native stablecoin, BUSD. This simplifies operations (as they don't have to maintain multiple crypto-stable pairs) and injects liquidity and reserves into their token, but also exposes depositors to any issue with BUSD (and Binance) itself, because any run will likely extract all liquid assets first.

This is exactly what happened during the FTX crash, they frenzy sold bitcoin, USDC, USDT and anything liquid they could get their hands on until all they had left where "billions" in worthless crap like FTT and related garbage tokens.

That's not the point. YC lends credibility to these companies by funding them, so allowing them to post illegal job ads on a platform controlled by YC strongly implies that YC has no problem with that practice.

This is the appropriate venue to talk about it and make YC aware of it.

But why would they need all these swaps if they held customer USDC 1:1 ? They clearly have done bad accounting and used customer funds for their own schemes. We'll soon find out if it's FTX-level-bad.

It's as if he can only program in sed and he can't save the sed scripts. Even if I could learn such complex and arcane syntax, I would surely forget it by the time I need to use it.

True, writing a program for this task is bringing a bazooka to knife fight, but a bazooka is such a terrifying weapon that will make you king of the hood so fast that you will never have to waste time fighting with knives.

> This post seem to blame victims for the problem, and that is not fair.

Guilt is not zero-sum. A killer gets 20 years, but a group of 10 people conspiring to a murder get 20 years each, not 2 years each.

It's perfectly possible the scammers are culpable to the maximum extent, while at the same time there is a smaller but consistent culpability on the part of the victim.

Regarding tribes, one idea that changed my life was that many successful people are smarter than they seem and don't merely go with the tribe because of herd behavior - they are quite fully aware of the specific madness of their specific crowd.

Rather, leaders perform a delicate balancing act where they act the way in-group expects them to, least they will lose any power and importance. Because your peer group, nation, firm, profession etc. is not just a passive influence on the way you think and behave, it's also the fundamental tool you have to change the world. Outside philosophy or chess nobody can succeed alone, and even there people need opportunities and support.

You can see this balancing act most clearly with politicians, who must change their apparent convictions from one day to the next as circumstance unfold (for example, see Obama's flip on gay marriage once his wider voting public flipped). But it's true in almost any setting you can imagine, all success involves a political power game. Troublemakers, those who are too easily willing to go against the status quo, are culled early, even if they are technically right and even if most people know they are right.

An AI comment bot trained on past HN comments that can be unleashed on the actual HN to whore karma sounds like a great meta-humorous project - it would prove that as far as upvotes go, we have achieved the singularity.

If Ken and Pike could design it in an afternoon, I'm sure even a standards committee could have done it in less than 5 years or so, the ideas are straight forward.

I would also argue that the fast sync with at most one character consumed is a good feature but not essential for adoption. Any byte-oriented Unicode packing scheme that can gracefully consume ASCII is better than multibyte, codepages sent out-of-band etc. etc.

> The point is that the phrase “nobody wants to work” is a meaningless constant refrain that goes back decades

And you are missing the point of my rebuttal: that by the same method anything can be made to appear like a constant meaningless refrain, regardless of actually being one.

It should be clear to anyone with even lacklustre intelligence that finding recurring instances of the phrase "there are not enough jobs" throughout history does not rule out that there were times when that concern was indeed warranted.

I'm sure that with the right search engine one could find a century worth of mentions for absolutely any common phrase, for example "people are working harder and harder", "children don't like to work anymore", "there are not enough jobs", etc.etc.

Such memes only prove the people spreading them don't understand selection bias and cherry picking. "Nobody learns statistics anymore."

What's depressing about the saga of utf8 adoption is that it's such an obvious solution. The ISO2022 standards used the principle since the 70s, and programmers of the era were widely accustomed to extending 8 bit instruction sets to multibyte instructions.

It's one of those cases where you need to hit your head hard and repeatedly until you bite the bullet and accept that the cost of multibyte (for example, strlen() different from character count, need to parse to seek etc.) are trivial compared to the benefits.

Modern devices however are unusable without software and the warranty usually covers at least a minimum of software performance.

I understand why manufacturers wouldn't want to deal with bricked devices, which are technically still perfectly functional yet require some exotic firmware download over JTAG to reboot.

Proprietary app stores are a monopolistic abuse that must be legislated away. I acknowledge the argument for not allowing the platform to run any executable code the user can get their hands on, but this should not be used against the consumer.

Alternate application stores, that fulfill a basic number of legal and commercial conditions, should always be a choice for any owned hardware, perhaps at the cost of the device warranty.

This reads like pure hype from an obscure battery startup pushing their own exotic Sodium-Potassium solution, that sounds no furter then TRL3.

To beat inflation you need a real yield of zero - that's what real means, inflation adjusted; but I didn't type "real" so I don't understand this nitpick.

> transactions don't even involve Ether at all aside from the payment of the fee. Ethereum is a virtual machine that charges for compute time.

Yes, a stupendously inefficient computation on a distributed machine that's only selling feature is that it does not have a central failure point, either technical or legal. The only application that has been found to date for this computation model is settling financial transactions outside traditional regulatory regimes, so all the discussion is predicated on the profitability of this business. You proposed that trading fees could make the model profitable, I countered that it clearly does not.

Perhaps in the future it could be used to cure cancer or put people in orbit, web5 and all that vapor, but to date it's a payment/settlement network.

> The vast majority of stock buyers do not expect to earn from the eventual dividends, rather they speculate on the stock itself, they hold it because it will appreciate in the future.

That's exactly what I claim, crypto is similar to a stock with near zero dividends long term, pure speculation, close to zero fundamental value (or at least, extremely overvalued in regards to its actual technical merits). "But other people bought Enron stock and many people got rich trading it" does not really contradict my point of view, sure, suckers and their money can be parted in many ways.

> money stock velocity of dollars on PayPal, I'm sure we would see that it is orders of magnitude higher than the general supply of all dollars out there.

I'm willing to bet the exact opposite is true: the real world (non-crypto related, NFTs, ICOs etc.) trade enabled by Ethereum and subchains is a very small fraction of the trillion dollar or so that would be implied by its stock valuation multiplied by typical monetary velocities. Alas, no trustworthy data is likely to exist, so each must use their gut feelings.

> charges usage fees, that value accrues to holders of the native token, ETH

The trouble with that is that if the fees are negligible compared to the economic activity that is mediated (as crypto bulls claim), then you need to lock a massive amount of capital in the collective float of the currency.

For example, the M2 money stock velocity of the US Dollar is historically in the 1-3 range, so that each dollar either in electronic or hard currency form changes hands a few times in a year.

So for Ether to generate even something like a meager 3% yield to beat inflation you need to charge on the order of 1%-3% for each transaction, which is orders of magnitude over what is expected or competitive. It follows then that the vast majority of the holders of Ethereum, and the backers of the scheme themselves especially, do not expect to earn from the fees, rather they speculate on the token itself, they hold it because it will appreciate in the future. They are betting ether will replace, say, dollars in mediating transactions and hope to gain value by depreciating the dollar.

To be very precise, I'm not saying that Ether can't move much faster and accrue larger fees (as it in fact did recently), but that the preference of the vast majority of non-speculators is to hold on to currency and near money substitutes for periods much larger than it would allow holders of ether to earn trading fees commensurate to the risk of holding ether. So the flurry of recent activity (and the willingness to pay large fees) must be of a speculative nature, unsustainable on the long run.

> the problem of fraudulent business practices isn't specific to crypto at all.

The problem with crypto is that the bulk of the value is created through seigniorage of the tokens required to make it work, not actual utility derived from its technical features, for example better privacy or enabling new transactions.

So in reality the pump & dump, rugpull and speculative bubble dynamics are characteristic to crypto because there is very limited actual wealth created and a massive conflict of interest from the players to cash in on the juice flowing though their systems, which are nothing else than unregulated and inferior copycats of existing financial institutions, state issued currencies, banks etc.

It replaced the trading mechanism of existing stocks with its own. It didn't replace the traded stocks with it's own stock or stocks it controlled, which is what crypto is trying. Perhaps the example was not clear.

Well, that's the whole meta-joke, that he wasn't a nerd (what he was trying to project to fit in the startup/venture culture), he was in fact a bro with bellow average intelligence.

When people talk about crypto bros and tech bros that's the whole shtick, they are saying their targets are not defined by technical ability (which is stereotypically attributable to geeks). So pointing out he wasn't really masculine is failing to see the metaphor behind "crypto bro" used as an insult.

The problem with crypto is that instead of speculating on the premise of the actual inovative technology, the speculation is centered around the close money substitute that the technology enabled. Investors bet on crypto-assets themselves, freshly printed private coins, as if they are going to have substantial market dominance in the future to the detriment of state-issued fiat money. That is completely unsound.

It's as if investors in the tech stocks would bet that a single company with an innovative trading solution would come to replace a substantial part / all of the stock market.

You may be confusing bros with jocks. SBF was the quintessential cryto bro, checking all the boxes of the startup / tech bro stereotype: young white man with a elite education, or a dropout of such, liberal values wants to change the world, quirky but a genius, filthy rich as a result of his own, totally self made business.

> Is that like just letting every Bernie Madoff's scam run its course -- eventually retail investors and retirement funds will learn to stop investing in scams?

Madoff was a scammer operating in a well regulated traditional financial space, where legitimate investment funds exist.

The authors here propose segregating crypto from traditional finance by forbidding fiat fiduciaries to invest in crypto at all. Basically, recognize that most of the crypto is zero sum speculative game that has no legitimate investments, just like banks today are forbidden from purchasing lottery tickets with their depositors' money.

This is an excelent regulatory option. The creation of money substitutes in the crypto space is not something a state wants to encourage, and is very detrimental to financial stability. The basic tools of the central bank - regulating reserves and interest rates in response to economic conditions - cease to function.

These private money substitutes should be firewalled from the traditional financial system, nobody's pension should be invested in speculative crypto assets. The long term value of crypto should then result from the actual wealth they generate intrinsically (for example, ease of trade, enabling fast innovative transactions that fiat can't) - as opposed to broad "adoption" by the conventional financial industry, who would just use the space to circumvent existing regulations.

Traditional finance can, in time, adopt tools and systems from the crypto space (for example, distributed ledgers, "blockchains") if they are technically robust, without the associated speculative mania.

It's better for the fans since they get more content with less money, with the tradeoff of some personal information.

Since the band and ticketing partner are not in the ad business and want to build long term, I expect that limited personal info to be much less likely abused than what the typical social network site does with even more sensitive data (yet, most people seem to agree trading those off to for free news of the Kardashians in their feed, so what do I know).

At the limit, any kind of price discrimination needs some type of information to execute, you can't subsidize completely anonymous fans because market forces will quickly close that loop and we are back to square 1. For example, a confidential association between my name and a record/stream purchase for the purpose of a substantial ticket discount in the future seems like a good compromise to me.

All kind of models are possible: associate your social ID and prove you've distributed band related content early in their career; associate multiple past purchases - for things like merchandising, fan specials, behind the scenes etc. etc.

The main theme is giving band and labels tools to maintain and curate this relationship with the fanbase, and only then add ticketing on top of it. If you have a certain mass and sign multiple names from the same genre, you can leverage that data to "migrate" say Green Day fans to some new alternative/punk band and offer them discounts, under the assumption this could build strong preferences for that band in the future.

Instead of maximizing present ticket revenue and "burning" a band's current fanbase, you maximize career-wide earnings, fan number and impact. That's a kind of moat that's unbeatable.

The model that works is to build relationships with fans and afford them privileged access, and sell everything else at market clearing prices.

Ticketmaster tried too offer that through a "verified fan" route, but it failed under the weight of its own monopolistic ineptitude. Whoever cracks the fan management+ticketing service and offers it to bands will have an incredibly strong moat.

> And he still managed to f*ck it up.

Plenty of people fuck up in similar or even better circumstances.

What amazes here is the sheer magnitude and low intellect. They did no accounting. They bought property in their own names out of company (customer) assets. He was still "trying to raise money" as of yesterday, in full denail.

This is not an excessively sophisticated criminal mind, he doesn't seem to understand why people would take issue with his actions.

It doesn't really matter, FTT is a garbage token forever associated with fraud. Its value is zero and you can print how many you like without hurting anyone.

The distinction is between something that costs money and competes in the maketplace based on that, versus something so insanely expensive the only way it can compete is to pretend it prints actual money and speculate on their future value.

If Bitcoin didn't have bitcoins, nobody in their right mind would pay to an electricity bill the size of Argentina just to keep it running as a distributed timestamping ledger. There is no imaginable practical application that would justify that resource waste.