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BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

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Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#461

Post by majormajor »

btown wrote: post #224
herval wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much how a lot of "unicorns" felt in the past 2-3 years

I once heard that a well-known gig economy company would open up new cities by giving employees essentially-unlimited credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they thought was needed, with no controls or multi-person approvals. It'll be interesting to see how VC changes in the modern environment - will they still be all-in on founders willing to unsustainably burn money just to incrementally boost the probabilit…

> will they still be all-in on founders willing to unsustainably burn money just to incrementally boost the probability of growth

From some previous experience, outside of crypto - which was DIFFERENT™ - this already started changing in 2019 or so. Softbank was one of the most infamous players, and when they started to pull back, so did some others.

Not that there aren't still some "huh"-inducing things - like the new thing from the WeWork guy - but it seems a bit saner-paced on the ground, and now even crypto will get its reckoning.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#462

Post by bjelkeman-again »

mring33621 wrote: post #305
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds. So they decided to just start hiring everyone they could from paypal, to move into "blockchain payments". They paid huge sums. The directors there had no experience ever managing huge teams of people. It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital…

Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, t…

So where is the due diligence that the VCs talk so much about, especially in the case with FTX, which supposedly didn’t have any appropriate financial management?

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#463

Post by rybosome »

mring33621 wrote: post #305
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds. So they decided to just start hiring everyone they could from paypal, to move into "blockchain payments". They paid huge sums. The directors there had no experience ever managing huge teams of people. It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital…

Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, t…

Couldn’t have put it better.

Here’s a true story: a friend and former startup coworker got verbal agreement on funding a startup. His business pitch consisted only of a list of names of people he’d worked with in the past who could execute well.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#464

Post by dehrmann »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #255
dehrmann wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I regret to inform you that it was not isolated to "crypto funds". A lot of VCs mish-mashed them together with their other investments and slapped a Cathy Wood style name on it like "future innovation fund". VCs are mostly just salespeople, and so are founders. VCs sell to organizations such as pension funds, and founders sell to VCs. Most VCs lose money, especially in an environment full of froth, and most VCs don't…

> VCs are mostly just salespeople

Only halfway. Don't the GPs have skin in the game?

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#465

Post by jrm4 »

xorcist wrote: post #435
jrm4 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a trash ad-hominem argument. "Everything is made up" is probably one of the more important arguments to be made, and we'd all be better off if it was taken more seriously. It's difficult to reckon with and it's noisy, but that doesn't make it any less true or valuable. I think it's especially important when trying to figure out regulation, taxes, and broadly how we deal with rich people in the world. The belie…

Especially so in an era of inflation and increasing interest rates. We, somehow, collectively decided to have it this way. It is not a law of nature!

Look, I literally have a degree in economics from an Ivy league university, and I promise you I didn't come close to actually understanding any of it until many years after graduating -- by including the "it's all made up part."

Really, video games and thinking about video game design helped me get it. Because it's a design, and not something like science or nature. It's not that real or unexpected consequences don't happen -- of course they do. But it's exactly like what happens in game dev, because someone tweaks rules.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#467

Post by insanitybit »

zarzavat wrote: post #453
insanitybit wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an immutable ordered log + a single bit flag for "deleted" is radically more efficient than an arbitrarily mutable ordered log. ex: You could store every tweet compressed in S3 with a bitmap for which are deleted (a bit that can be cached forever). That assumes you aren't going to ever have to update the object in S3. Once you have to update it that entire design is horrible, you'll need something completely d…

Add to that deletion flag a tweet redirect ID. Redirect deleted tweets with the ID to new tweets seamlessly. Touch up the old code to account for all this. Now you can edit tweets with immutability intact. Also has the benefit that retweets and likes point to the old version, which is how it should be.

oh ok so now instead of 1 immutable bit that can be cached forever we have to store an id. Good news, instead of a wonderfully compressable bitmap you now have a bunch of uncompressable 128bit nullable uuids. Only a few thousand times less efficient!

Oh and of course you now have a linked list structure you have to traverse every time you want to resolve a tweet. Cool.

It's almost like this is hard.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#468

Post by Art9681 »

SilasX wrote: post #274
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment continues to presume that there is a specific correct value or range of values. That's simply not the case. The list of potential reasons is long because there are a lot of contributing reasons . What are Twitter's goals pre-buyout? Are those the same as Twitter's goals post-buyout? What are the decisions the company makes in pursuing those goals, in each of those contexts? Analyzing all the decisions th…

> Your comment continues to presume that there is a specific correct value or range of values No, I was replying to a comment that was attempting to justify ~7000 as a reasonable figure for what Twitter’s app needs to do. Don’t take my word for it! Read the thread history if you don’t believe me!

Its very simple if you think about it. Can you think of other web services with the scale and popularity comparable to Twitter that run on much lower headcounts?

Go ahead and make a Twitter clone this weekend. There are plenty of tutorials. Then let's assume you go viral and now your little service needs to scale. Then the email and issues start to come in. Now you have to balance fixing bugs and tending to customer support. Oh, are you going to outsource all cloud services or hire a 200k+ a year SRE to scale it out? One wont be enough you will soon find out. Did yo do your research on compliance? Are you sure your app is legal in every country it serves? Pretty soon you have a team whose salaries + benefits are costing you several million dollars a year. And you only have 10 people.

I could go on and on. Yes, creating a twitter clone is trivial. Scaling it and tending to real customers is a completely different story.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#469

Post by suzzer99 »

rnk wrote: post #410
suzzer99 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A buddy of mine had his phone SIM-hacked and his coinbase account drained. He was on the phone with coinbase trying to stop it while it was happening, and said they were beyond useless. Criminals have lists of everyone with crypto on coinbase. They're cross-referencing this list with people with T-Mobile (usually), then pulling off SIM-hacks by buying off a store manager, or just grabbing the manager's laptop and run…

That sounds like fud to me. Coinbase decided my account was left for dead, and contacted my state. It tooks several weeks of back and forth with coinbase, including multiple phone calls with support and sending pics of my id, etc before they let me access my account. I had my password etc, same phone. They wouldn't let me get my money out.

It's not FUD. They used 2FA to reset his coinbase password, then accessed it as him and drained the account.

On top of that they drained his bank account (also using 2FA) into the coinbase account, then drained that too. Coinbase has (or had at the time) elevated levels of trust that they just gave him, which allowed the hacker to immediately buy crypto with transferred funds. Then the hacker just transferred the crypto to another wallet.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#470

Post by incompatible »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #408
eastbound wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think also, there are a few startup ideas considered to be "the future" This. I’m getting annoyed with my jQuery/Spring app with ~million of revenue that I can’t get sexy for employees nor for funding; sometimes I want to throw away ethics and say we’re building “a blockchain of solar-powered AI european-central-bank ledgers”. It would be so much easier. Nah, we’re just storied field data in 7 tables, and custome…

You're almost there. Make it a "blockchain powered 3D PRINTED solar AI bank ledger" and you'll be funded in no time.

Did you even read the article? Make it "blockchain-free 3D PRINTED solar AI bank ledger".
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