171–180 of 544 posts
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There are LPs behind a lot of these incompetent VCs dumping money into in crypto, including public workers' pension funds.
My hope is most of the crypto investing was isolated to crypto funds, though I still lost some respect for VCs for even playing the crypto game.
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I hate how accurate this comment is. Without going too far with examples, PGP exists, but using it is simply harder so most people default to an easier email sending. Now.. the question remains as to whether it would be the same, if it tech was not made so accessible ( some people would be forced to learn since the bar was high ). I mostly think that battle is already lost.
PGP has horrible user experience for experts. Its CLI is incredibly un-intuitive and needlessly complex and integration with mail clients is poor to non-existent.
Thunderbird[0] has pretty good (see what I did there?) PGP integration[1]. The UI is decent and there is discoverability support with various key servers as well.
But that would require folks to break their addiction to web-based email and use an actual email client. As such, I won't hold my breath.
[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...
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Do you think self-custody is simple enough for mass adoption by non-technical users?
If you can write down 12 or 24 words on a piece of paper thats all you need for a backup. Hardware wallets make this easier but I agree it needs to be simplified for the masses.
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Is it wrong to assume that this is because the industry is mostly built upon a house of cards or because of bad actors? Objectively asking.
That's the thing, you only depend on centralized actors if you want to. The entire point of cryptocurrencies are to not depend on centralized institutions that can screw you over.
The blockchain, being a public ledger, ensures that transactions are accurately recorded and can be publicly verified as such.
But it’s been centuries since the actual accurate recording of transactions has been an issue. The real problems are far removed from this. When was the last time you heard about people complaining that they paid off their Visa but it did not credit them for the payment?
Meanwhile, real problems that people do face, such as a vendor not providing you the goods or services that you paid for, are still a problem with blockchain.
The fundamental problem with cryptocurrencies are that they add a whole lot of complexity to solve a problem which is a trivial issue in practice at best, without providing any tools to solve the actual problems people face and in many cases making it harder to find solutions for those problems.
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Given the amount of handwringing we've seen over the past couple of weeks in re: Twitter's headcount, it astonishes me that we haven't seen anything close to that for these cryptocurrency firms. Twitter ran one of the world's largest social media networks with around 7000 people; what in the world is Kraken doing with ~3400[1]? [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/krakenfx
Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I hate to ask the question because it aligns me with Elon whom I despise right now. But what do all the employees do at tech companies? I thought the beauty of tech and why the valuations we…
Twitter runs its own infrastructure too. That takes a bunch of people. Computers don't just run themselves and they certainly don't provision themselves.
Traffic is likely super spiky too because of how Twitter reacts to current events. That probably requires cutting edge load balancing and real time code.
Not to mention all of the work getting everything translated and accessible to the entire globe. And of course moderating a site with millions of people so that literal civil wars do not start. And keeping in contact with various governments who probably contract each other and themselves on a regular basis. These are problems that are not as scalable as writing a bunch of code. You need real, physical people to handle these issues.
And now setting up a creator economy and their Clubhouse competitor.
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Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I hate to ask the question because it aligns me with Elon whom I despise right now. But what do all the employees do at tech companies? I thought the beauty of tech and why the valuations we…
The value proposition of decentralized finance was supposed to be a replacement for traditional finance: automating away the hundreds of manual roles that banks currently employ as part of their regulatory requirements and customer services. Do you have a source that shows that a substantial percent of Kraken's headcount is customer service? They've tried recruiting me a handful of times, and each time they highlight…
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Where do you start? You start with company that builds a lemonade stand, and they dress it up like a life changing lemonade that's going to replace all other drinks in 38 days or whatever. So let's ignore what it does, let's pretent is does literally nothing, it's just a stand. So what's next. This lemonade stand has some market price, it's probably not zero, right? Let's say it's 20 million dollars market price. May…
To be fair, that is how the entire fractional reserve banking system started. Safe houses for gold handed out slips of paper to make it easier for the guys storing their gold to spend it and said, "hey, we'll actually pay you to let us hand these slips of paper out to people who want to borrow your gold. We just need you to stay quiet and be cool with us committing fraud and handing out WAY more borrow slips than the…
All the US banking crises since the 1920s have involved some form of deregulation.[1]
Somehow these guys peaked at about 900 employees, according to linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockfi ) They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... (note, CB lists $1.4b, of which 400M is debt from FTX, which I imagine they never got) Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage.
Given the amount of handwringing we've seen over the past couple of weeks in re: Twitter's headcount, it astonishes me that we haven't seen anything close to that for these cryptocurrency firms. Twitter ran one of the world's largest social media networks with around 7000 people; what in the world is Kraken doing with ~3400[1]? [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/krakenfx
Kraken is one of the OG cryptocurrencies exchange. Maybe the oldest still around. They're in the business since 2013 or so.
Since then the Crypsy, Quadriga, Mt Gox, FTX, etc. have all come and gone (with their customers' money) but Kraken is still there. If they are on a scam, it's a really long con: a decade and a half of a con?
They're not "Binance big" but they do nearly as much volume as Coinbase, so 3 400 employees doesn't feel that surprising.
I don't think BlockFi did anywhere near the volume of trades Kraken is doing. As I understand it BlockFi was some kind of a "fire and forget" thing where you'd loan your crypto and get some yield in return. So very little things actually happening there compared to Kraken.
Yes, 900 employees was insanely huge for BlockFi. But I don't think 3 400 employees for Kraken looks that crazy.
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>And at the bottom of it all, one of the first dominos to tumble, was a company called 3 Arrows Capital, which promised to generate revenue by buying crypto-dickbutt NFTS... and then went on the run. I'm not even kidding. They lost borrowed funds in a ponzi scheme called Luna. I get that you wanted to poke at nfts, but the last remark may make someone think this is how it actually went down.
It is part of what they were doing, part of their investment strategy to grow the funds that were invested with them was to nfts such as "cryptodickbutt #1462". Look it up if you don't believe me. Yes, I'm sure that Terra/Luna was a big part of it, and you're right that it's worth calling out, it may even have been the single biggest factor. But it wasn't the only way 3AC squandered invested funds. Perhaps Terra/Luna…
I can't see how much they paid for it, it was a transfer. Maybe someone sent it to them as a joke, who knows.
In any case, it was around the time they were created, so easily it 20x to today's price.
I guess they should have invested more in cryptodickbutts.
Look it up if you don't believe me.
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Is it wrong to assume that this is because the industry is mostly built upon a house of cards or because of bad actors? Objectively asking.
I think the true answer to this question is that it was/is a gold rush with low interest rates that led large amounts of capital to be allocated to less than competent people. In particular, the companies and operators that look the smartest when a bubble is inflating are the ones that genuinely hedge downside risk the least, while pretending to enough to fool people with capital to allocate. This only becomes appare…
Ironic, given that the narrative during its rise was that the "Best and Brightest" were working in crypto and everyone else was fighting over the "B" level people.