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skaag

37 karma · joined August 22, 2012

Sleep with itchy bum, wake up with smelly fingers
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skaag··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
Publicly traded companies make money by creating value and selling products or services. At least, the good companies that actually sell something (you'll find a bunch of them don't do crap or are just outright scams).

Take Apple or Coca Cola for example: They have well established lines of products and lines of business. You know people will keep buying iPhones and MacBooks and AirPods and whatever else Apple makes. You know people will keep buying Coca Cola drinks forever and ever.

The popular blockchains do not create any intrinsic value (Looking at Bitcoin and Ethereum). They are heavy and cumbersome and can't handle planetary scale. Some blockchain solutions promise secure, fee-less transfers (for example IOTA and NANO). In my opinion, those blockchains at least partially implement the true promise of Crypto that, if successful, would be able to replace the existing financial system which is extremely wasteful.

Just think about how much money it costs to implement FIAT: You have to print it, which is very expensive (both notes and coins). You then have to move it around using heavy armored vehicles. You have to secure it in extremely expensive vaults. You then need to keep securing it across the entire vertical: Every business that takes cash has to deal with theft, securing the cash, fake notes, etc. Even credit cards are very expensive to maintain. Cards have to be printed & mailed out all the time. It's all plastic, and it all ends up in landfills. The inks are toxic, as are the metals in the chips. The equipment required to process cards is expensive, breaks and needs to be replaced, is annoying, slow, ridden with fraud and theft and chargebacks and a host of other issues.

I implemented EMV and 3D-Secure for card processing, a few years ago. I also implemented cash processing equipment. It ALL sucks. You have no idea how Crypto is a breath of fresh air compared to those crappy standards and mechanisms that take an insane amount of time and money and bureaucracy to implement and maintain.

A really good blockchain that does secure, fee-less transactions in less than a second and can handle planetary scale, now that is the holy grail! You don't need equipment, you already have a phone. The merchants get their money instantly, and they are done, that's it. They have their money. Done. They need to pay their vendors? They pay them, done! They could even instantly pay their vendors at the moment of sale. Can you imagine how revolutionary that is? how this completely changes the game for commerce?

The entire crypto world has been held back by greedy assholes, tens of thousands of scammers (how many ICOs and rug pulls have screwed countless users?!), governments, government bodies and banks, and unregulated companies that behave irresponsibly with customer funds (for example FTX and BlockFi). Leadership that lacks vision and initiative (Any 1st world country that accepts crypto and leads with it, would make its citizens rich, by definition, on a planetary scale).

skaag··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
Except greed...
skaag··on Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
I'm an indirect victim via BlockFi (headed by Zach Prince), which did business with FTX and lost my money as a result. I held 33 ETH in a BlockFi BIA account, and only recently got 4 ETH back. I don't know if I will ever recover the rest of my funds.

I don't know what your financial situation is but I'm not rich, and it is extremely painful to look at ETH trading at above $3000 and realizing my rainy day fund has been stolen by criminal nincompoops.

My personal values dictate that I be significantly more careful with money when it is someone else's money. Even if you gave me $20 to get you a Burrito, I'll get you the best deal, tip the minimum, and give you your exact change. I'd even give you a few cents more just in case because I don't want to be owing you anything.

So when a group of people behaves irresponsibly with people's money it boils my blood. He deserves every jail year he got, just on the hubris alone.

skaag··on Ask HN: Where are all the Rails jobs?
Frameworks are making the whole JS thing much easier now, and since you have JS in the browser, on every device on the planet, it makes a lot of sense to use node.js on the backend as well for certain tasks.

In 2014~2015, I can't imagine creating a web based backend system (or even a mobile app for that matter) in anything other than JS. The costs of hiring a C++/Java/Ruby engineer are not so easy to justify. Beyond the monthly costs, it's also the amount of time it takes to create a powerful, reactive web interface.

skaag··on Ask HN: Where are all the Rails jobs?
Give it time, and someone will write a Ruby/Python to JS pre-processor in JS.

Drats, as I was writing this, someone did:

http://opalrb.org/

skaag··on Ask HN: Where are all the Rails jobs?
As your lazy race flocks towards reactive platforms, they choose frameworks that do more of the work for them. One of the better frameworks out there that does this is Meteor.js

Some human once said: "Everything that can be written in JavaScript, will be". So hone your JavaScript skills, my son.