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Binance lays off over 1k Employees

wsj.com

151–160 of 234 posts

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly does it provide? So far it seems that Bitcoin mainstream use is to create speculative markets. Any other intended objective is a drop in the bucket.

If your country's money and banking works for you I don't think I can explain to you why bitcoin is useful, you simply have no use for it. That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.

I would like to hear more about those use cases.

Because I cannot fathom a system where either currency or banking does not work, and the preferable alternative is to rely on a highly volatile asset that requires vast amounts of energy and time to work.

> That your peers primarily use it for speculation says more about them than about bitcoin.

We are not in 2011 anymore. Bitcoin did not become a widespread vehicle for commercial transactions. Countries with defenestrated economies did not find an alternative in Bitcoin. Instead, we have whales, among them large banks and corporations, controlling over a third of the market, and most transactions are made in exchanges with arbitrage or speculation purposes.

Suffice to say, I don't consider JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs my "peers".

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High salaries are part of the grift. Makes you look really successful (they pay a lot, so they must be super profitable!) and helps, at least partially, select employees who won’t be asking questions, just do their job and collect paychecks.

[flagged]

High salaries makes people want to work there which creates competition which in turn drives prestige.

Not asking questions is a little facetious, however it is plausible that things like questionable business practices are easier to overlook when working / applying for a job because $$$. In other words, it's very hard to explain a concept to someone if his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#153
post #132
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knew someone who worked at Binance, as support. I'm sure he's competent enough at his job, but he has no special skills or anything. He made more money than I did as a senior software dev at the time. It seems not only did they hire a lot of people, they also paid them an ungodly amount of money.

Hope for their sake they were paid in actual money.

They did pay their bonus in some Binance crypto coin, but at least their base salary was relatively high.

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#154
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'm just naive, but I'm always confused when I see such a high headcount for companies with such simple tech, the staff of Twitter (even after mass layoffs) confuses me also. I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.

True sign of the arrogant software engineer, believing they can single-handedly recreate an entire company just because they went to school in one subject for 4 years.

every profession does this. Have you ever spoken to marketers about how important marketing is? or accountants? most people have a massively outsized idea of their own role to the point they wonder what other people even do.

The only difference with engineers is they can believe at least in theory they could create the backbone of some services, so they could have a shoddy mvp made in a few days which they assume just needs a "little" work to top it off, whereas others can't start without tech help, but massively underestimate how much tech work is required for their ideas.

If you dont believe me, hang around a startup space and see how people talk about trying to find technical cofounders

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#155
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have around 100M registered users, so approximately 1 employee for every 100k users seems reasonable.

That figure seems implausibly high. 1 in 80 humans on Earth are not only participating in crypto but specifically have an account on Binance? It certainly cannot be the number of active users.

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Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet. This is actually a worry i have about in regards to crypto, the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power. Ai is next of my power hungry worry list.

> the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.

If you really believe that something that is 1 million times less efficient than Visa/MasterCard for a fraction of the service, and that miners really use residential energy when they are active 24/7 and thus by definition a continuous strain on the grid, I have so many scams^W interesting products to sell you

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#157
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is basically like arguing: “Sure, using the Infant-Chipper 9000 results in the deaths of infants. But it’s a rounding error if you consider how many infants die in the world every year!” Bitcoin purposefully wastes lots of energy to provide something of extremely dubious value.

Yet obviously, some people find it useful. Who are you to tell people how to live their lives? Maybe you should stop flying on airplanes for the rest of your life?

When how people live their lives depends on them shoveling millions of joules s of externalities onto my environment and that of my kids, in addition to propping up a rube goldberg Ponzi scheme that has a non-zero chance of ensnaring people I care about either directly or indirectly through financial mismanagement, you better believe I'm going to tell you how to live your life.

I'll tell lots of other people how you live your life is hypocritically contributing to a massive increase of financial leverage on the part of "rationally self interested" sociopaths and criminals at everyone else's expense( in direct opposition to its putative purpose of undermining predatory central bankers, yet is simply shifting the power to predatory anon-ish ransomware purveyors and sex traffickers and bullshit gambling token insta-twit "influencers" seeking to exploit the naivety of children for their own financial gain), and generally promoting the enshittification of everything that touches the internet, and should be mocked and discouraged at every opportunity.

You don't like the free market of ideas when it turns against you? tough.

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#158
> As we prepare for the next major bull cycle, it has become clear that we need to focus on talent density across the organization to ensure we remain nimble and dynamic. This is not a case of rightsizing, but rather, re-evaluating whether we have the right talent and expertise in critical roles.

This is some next level PR "major bull" right here. Not only are they claiming with a straight face that these are not layoffs, but they're saying it's happening because crypto is about to rocket to the moon! (As opposed to, say, Binance being currently raked over the coals by every financial regulator on the planet.)

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the BTC network uses a staggering amount of power Actually, bitcoin uses a ridiculously small amount of power for what it provides. See for example here https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ for an introduction to clear up this misconception.

If you really believe that something that is 1 million times less efficient than Visa/MasterCard for a fraction of the service, and that miners really use residential energy when they are active 24/7 and thus by definition a continuous strain on the grid, I have so many scams^W interesting products to sell you https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[flagged]

Re: Binance lays off over 1k Employees

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offence, but that's usually how capitalism works, the least talented are the first to go - unless we're talking about Twitter and then it's about showing off at the office.

Never in any layoff I've been a part of, have the least talented workers been let go first. It's usually by category: contractors, age (early-retirement), department, or job description.

I have seen a lot of layoffs over the years and I would put the main targets into here buckets:

1. People with bad relationships with he boss and bosses boss. 2. People with higher salaries. 3. Unlucky folks where an entire line of business or corporate department is shut down.

Number 1 is the vast majority of the cases. Make sure your boss smiles when they see you and you can sleep well at night.

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