Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

1) #Bitcoin $ETH #Defi THE ART OF Contrary Thinking by
HUMPHREY B. NEILL

It Pays To Be Contrary

"What is the Theory of Contrary opinion?"

Primarily, it is a method of ruminating over a broad range of public questions; political, economic, and social.

2) In sum, the purpose is to contest the popular view, because popular opinions are so frequently found to be untimely, misled (by propaganda), or plainly wrong.

3) When everyone thinks alike, "everyone" is likely to be
wrong When writers write alike, readers are prone to
think alike Too many predictions spoil the forecasts;
or, to put it another way, the weight of predictions causes
their own downfall.

4) Caution: The contrary theory is a way of thinking, but
let's not overweigh it. It is more of an antidote to general
forecasting than a system or forecasting.

5) Human traits that make the theory of contrary opinion
workable, include:
Habit
Emotion
Irritability
Custom
Greed
Pride-of-Opinion
Imitation
Hope
Wishful Thinking
Contagion
Impulsiveness
Fear

1 - Over the years I've learnt a lot of new things that I wish I knew when I first started so I want to make this thread for all the new traders out there who wants to turn their trading into a profitable career 🔥

Will be adding to this thread over time.

17 - Because trading is a game of numbers and probabilities, whenever you see a setup that fits your trading rules and aligns with your edge, you NEED to take the opportunity!

Don't pick and choose, just religiously follow your plan and rules!

This "bitcoin is better than gold" statement going around once more show that bitcoiners have no clue about monetary history and what the purpose of a monetary system is. A thread.

1- Metal standards were never inflexible; they could not in order to operate properly. Qty of metal was changed, usually lowered, to accommodate for changing economic conditions: price of metal, scarcity of coins, financial needs of economic units (state and private), etc.

2- The purpose of a monetary system is to make the rest of the economy go. It is there to accommodate financial needs. The more elastic one can design the supply, the better.
That doesn't mean that monetary creation & destruction shouldn't follow any rules & have no constraint.

3- Rules and constraint impose depend on economic system and evolve over time has we learn how to manage better the system. In a capitalist economy, the private sector is subject to the profitability constraint. We have learned from experience that this is not enough.

3 (ii) Financial stability requires a "hedge finance" constraint for most private agents: profitability should be judged on income gains, not capital gains.
In the government sector, the constraints are ressource availability and political constraints.

We’ve been around CT for a few years, and while the road still appears curvy, we believe the pieces are moving into place and the destination becomes more clear with each passing day. The following people are all pioneers, when they speak you should listen.

Going to lay out who we think some of the most fascinating thinkers are and some of our favorite podcasts. While these people still differ on some of their viewpoints, they are either the thought leaders of the world we are moving towards or contributing towards building it.

1) Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) - Truly one of the pioneers of our space and one of the first podcasts we ever listened to. Still the pod we send to people wanting to dip their toes in the space. Funny listening to nick, @naval, and @tferriss 4 years

2) Naval (@naval) - Clearly a thought leader in the traditional world, but he understands and is dedicating time to bring the future to the present. When this guy speaks the whole world seems to listen. Once again @tferriss does a phenomenal

3) Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) - The father of Ethereum and when Vitalik speaks we all should listen. He thinks differently than almost every human in this world. Yes...he’s a

How to Trade without Fear, Stress or Anxiety. 💯

Trading should bring wealth, happiness and peace.
Not stress and sleepless nights.

Here is how to trade without dying faster.

Please share to de-stress the world.

A Thread.

The reasons for feeling anxious and Stressed.

1. Too high Position Size.
2. No Exit Plan.
3. Almost no Entry strategy.

We will learn about them below and try to find a solution.

1. POSITION SIZE.
Position size should be equal to what you're willing to lose and not cry over.

Eg. If your position size is 10K, you should be able to lose 10K without it making you depressed.

It doesn't mean you throw away 10K as a random experiment.

If you're stressed? Reduce your Position size, Now!

But If I trade with such a small position size, it won't be much Profitable?

-Profits and wealth are built slowly, trade with small amounts, built your system, profits will accumulate.

Small Position size. Low Stress. Better life.

Remember, you don't need a lot to become big.

1% gain per day compounds to 3700% Return per year.

- If Stressed or anxious, reduce your position size.

Switch to smaller position which doesn't make you feel sleepless.