Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who don't understand what ponzi schemes are love calling crypto a ponzi scheme.
Lol. Tons of crap coins, fake stable coins, grifters launching ICOs, SBF, bridges getting hacked, being able to print a coin and then get randoms to buy it. Coins named after dogs that mean or reference nothing. Some 20 years? in and what value has the blockchain provided? What is it being used in that has changed the world? Crypto bulls are all the same: Hayek acolytes hell bent on currency that isn’t fiat. It is a…
Kraken lays off 30% of staff
201–210 of 238 posts
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like HN should just auto add a comment that says "Why does need employees?" with a follow up comment that explains how large corporations work. It literally comes up in every single layoff announcement or other discussion of company size in some way, and the follow on comments are essentially the same every single time. I'm not saying that a lot of these companies aren't overstaffed (indeed, that's why they ar…
But why is kraken a large corporation already?
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone actually defending effective altruism right now? SBF has effectively flushed it down the drain along with the investors he scammed.
Me. The movement and ideas are good even if the most famous person connected to it is bad. You don't hear about the vast majority of EAs who just quietly try and improve girl's education in Indian or distribute malaria nets (to mention two I know personally).
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone actually defending effective altruism right now? SBF has effectively flushed it down the drain along with the investors he scammed.
Why would one conman’s association with an ideology condemn the entire ideology? Because he said he was using it as a ruse? Why are you still selectively believing the conman?
The FTX failure was because they were extending leverage to customers to purchase and short extremely volitile cryptocurrencies, including obscure/illiquid/likely-worthless ones (which they marketed heavily). The fact that they also diverted or personally pocketed some hundreds of millions on the back of stimulant-mania induced exuberance at the value of the magic-bean collateral they were holding didn't help things, but it wasn't the proximal cause. If pilfering the company were the issue it looks like from the magnitudes disclosed so far they could have just operated out of it.
The reason it's easy to link to EA forum posts telling people to NOT scam for the "greater good" is because it's responding a common view: it's a natural conclusion of navel gazing utilitarian-consequentialist thinking, especially if amplified by viewing all ethical questions through the lens of extinction risk. Doubly so in the face of "rationalist" ideology which is prone to reject received conventional wisdom in favor of bespoke and often self-serving rationalizations. Ordinary non-utilitarian-consequentialist charity communities don't need regular reminders to not scam people.
"Is it infinitely good to do double-or-nothing coin flips forever? Well, sort of, because your upside is unbounded and your downside is bounded at your entire net worth. But most people don’t do this, because their utility is more like a function of their log wealth or something and they really don’t want to lose all of their money. (Of course those people are lame and not EAs; this blog endorses double-or-nothing coin flips and high leverage.)" -- Caroline Ellison CEO of Alameda Research, responding to Scott Alexander of SSC in Feb 2021
"take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using" -- Peter Singer, "The Most Good You Can Do"
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#205> Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets. This is an incredible couching of the last 9 months of cryptocurrency market behavior. Does anybody actually operate on their belief that "geopolitical factors," rather than astonishing amounts of fraud , are responsible for the current downturn?
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've come to look at it the other way. "Because that's how large companies work" is a lazy non-answer. An honest answer to this question would break it down: # of engineers, # of ops, # of sales, # of hr, etc. And ideally break it down by business division. Of course that requires some real domain knowledge. I've personally watched morons come in, hire lots of useless employees, and destroy millions of dollars of cas…
I’m interested in the ratios - things like for every X coders you need Y managers and Z HR people, that kind of thing.
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#207> We’re reducing our global workforce by approximately 1,100 people, or 30 percent, in order to adapt to current market conditions. Why does a crypto exchange need 4,000 employees?
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#208FWIW, Kraken is the most reputable and longest-running CEX. They even precede Coinbase. Edit: more better words.
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kraken regularly used shell/cover companies to hire employees. They have a pretty complex web of fronts not-called-Kraken. Entire offices are 'employed' by one of these companies.
Interesting, why would they do this?
Re: Kraken lays off 30% of staff
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree! My point was that it's very funny to blame the macro (and even funnier to blame geopolitics), when it's clearly just serving a revelatory purpose.
Rising inflation and correspondant rising interest rates would have resulted in a major crypto market decline with or without the fraud. Bitcoin had already fallen from $60k+ to ~$20k before the waves of failures even began happening. All of cryptocurrency is a risk asset. When credit and money is cheap and flowing freely, it flows into risk assets like crypto, driving up their price and forming bubbles. When rates r…