All true. Source: I was there.
Sarcasm? Forgive those of us who can't tell.
AWS and Blockchain
671–680 of 724 posts
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's great for levelling the playing field of finance. In traditional finance only the most capitalised players are able to do small arbitrage opportunities, and many firms make billions of dollars this way. In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans.
> In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans. Ok... how do you repay flash loans when things go bad? Please, do elaborate.
Flash loans are repaid instantly in the same block. If it doesn't repay itself the transaction isn't valid.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#673> Since I left AWS in 2020, I’ve been super-careful not to share things from behind the scenes. I can’t actually remember the details of the nondisclosure agreement, but I have strong feelings about the ethics. This story, though, doesn’t reflect poorly on anyone and I’m pretty sure nothing in it is material to any business plans at AWS or elsewhere.
"Can't actually remember"? Yikes.
"I'm pretty sure" ... based on...? Not working there any more?
"Strong feelings about the ethics?" Dude. Contracts are not about your feelings about ethics.
Mr. Bray doesn't have -- or didn't take the time to find -- a signed contract from two years ago.
Not a great example to follow.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though these "financial primitives" on the blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified). I would rephrase this to say that the less liquid state of blockchain markets limits the available set of financial primitives which are resistant to manipulation. It’s true, but if liquidity is the only hur…
> I think you’ve more or less ceded that blockchain provides value. It just needs wider adoption This is a vacuous non-sequitur. It's like saying "my new social network provides value, it just needs wider adoption"—uh, yeah, that's how social networks (or markets) work . If no one is using it, by definition, it has no value. Markets are social games (not merely "financial" ones). And exceedingly few people are using…
> This is a vacuous non-sequitur
In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships. Please get your facts straight. This happened in Canada, one of the supposedly best democracies out there "The Attorney General of Ontario sought and was granted an Ontario Superior Court of Justice court order under Section 490.8 of the Criminal Code of Canada against GiveSendGo,[69] to freeze the funds collected from two campaigns, "Freed…
You're letting your conspiracy politics cloud your thinking. This entire screed is entirely irrational FUD. Stop. Canadian banks and regulators looking into potential money laundering is entirely reasonable and appropriate behavior.
And you're letting your simplistic take on democratic government being "nice" color your own thinking.
Canadian banks and regulators looking into money laundering might be reasonable when carefully permitted by tried legal procedure. A bunch of freely donated money for a peaceful protest of a type with lots of basic precedent being suddenly frozen for blatantly political reasons by pressure from the country's leader is not the same thing. Quite the opposite, it's a small bit of third world tinpot, would-be authoritarianism that has no place in the legal proceedings of a highly developed country like Canada.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for. It's these kinds of rules to "save people from themselves" that have the bonus effect of the rich gatekeeping the best investments that make a lot of people mad and see the current system as corrupt. Being able to spend and invest my money how I want should not be a crime.
> Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for. Whaaaaat? Sorry, but that comment makes no sense. You can buy a share in any small business you want. You're mistaking this for some types of stock market investments[1], which are made to "save people from themselves", from back in the day before 1929 when access was free…
Sounds like you live in the USA right? And probably have a good income?
I tried for years but angel list never accepted me being an investor because of income or nationality restrictions. And other methods of gaining access to silicon valley startups didn't work out.
Now imagine how hard it is for someone in India or Thailand to invest in USA startups.
In crypto I can buy their token in seconds from anywhere in the world, no kyc required, and no middle men taking their cut to custody it for me.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept. Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or…
> How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I can spin up my own app in days This sounds nice in theory, but aren't most of the guard rails of the financial institutions for complying with government regulation? If anyone could interface with these companies then it would be too easy for abuse. USG is…
Aave is decentralised.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#678Everyone uses Git by day and then moans how blockchain in not useful by night. Specific technologies have specific applications. Blockchains in general - immutable history. Crypto blockchains - consensus in untrusted environment. Just use given technology for what it’s designed for, and stop being full of yourself.
The double standard you mention is actually created by the Blockchain advocates.
Git does not include a distributed consensus algorithm. So it's a chain of blocks, but not a "Blockchain". Blockchain advocates will gladly tell you so when they want to sell you on how revolutionary Blockchain tech is.
But once you ask for actually useful use cases, all they can point to is things that are trivially done with Git and its predecessors, in the sense that they don't require distributed consensus…
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for. It's these kinds of rules to "save people from themselves" that have the bonus effect of the rich gatekeeping the best investments that make a lot of people mad and see the current system as corrupt. Being able to spend and invest my money how I want should not be a crime.
What? I think you have some fundamental misunderstandings here. Buying a stake in a small biz is perfectly legal and people do it all the time. That's entirely separate from the requirement to be an accredited investor to buy unregistered securities.
Maybe unregistered securities is what I want to buy. What gives the government the right to say I'm not allowed to enter into a consensual agreement with someone selling them? Why do I have no way of opting out of these protections unless I'm rich already? Sometimes it feels like I'm explaining water to a fish on here.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the whole idea of certificate transparency to detect that situation? That's why the system also has auditors which would detect such tampering.
The challenge is that if a discrepency is shown, how do you know who is lying? The whistleblowers or the CT log vendor? A consensus mechanism built on top of the log would be able to show the 'history of the history' to enable folks to make better determinations on who to trust or not.
The CT log vendor is signing entries, so although you don't know what the "true" state of the log is, you know that you cannot trust the CT log vendor.