BC CRYPTO
Saved by @zmbnski

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

 Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):
Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.
"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."
Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
Our money launderer may be engaged in layering, which we have extensive experience w... saw once on an episode of Breaking Bad and this unfamiliar jargon seemed surprisingly appropriate.
(If you haven't seen it, the prestige television scene most likely to be mentioned in a compliance department presentation: https://t.co/Qmz7UUUPKn )

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
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.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
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.
FINANCE
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
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.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
STARTUPS

More from Crypto

Eric Tymoigne
Eric Tymoigne
@tymoignee
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.
CRYPTO
David Schwartz
David Schwartz
@JoelKatz
@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket If the whole world settled on one stablecoin, I'd agree with you. But stablecoins are always going to be tied to jurisdictions and counter-parties too. So it is unlikely one winner will emerge.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Today, one of the roles of the dollar is acting as an intermediary or bridge between currencies. For that role, its tie to the US jurisdiction is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Better US than a worse jurisdiction, but a pure digital asset is better still.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Imagine a future (maybe not so far off) where everything is tokenized and you can have your salary agreed in dollars but gold gets delivered to your wallet and you can buy groceries by selling tokenized shares of a REIT.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket In that world, there will need to be concentrations of liquidity. You can't go from gold to shares of an obscure REIT by finding people who want to go those same shares to gold. The liquidity-concentrating asset likely can't be one country's currency. How could that be universal?

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket So, sure, if you get paid in dollars and pay your bills in dollars, it may make sense for you to use a dollar-denominated stablecoin for short-term holdings and payments. Absolutely.
CRYPTO
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Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.

But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.

An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.

Of course, that's a bad heuristic in a casino, which relies on a constant influx of losers. But in other environments, particularly with persistent populations and no evidence for sudden changes in the underlying laws, it makes sense.
CRYPTO
Jin
Jin
@Jin_8315
A primer on how to use @coingecko for your crypto data/research/trading needs.

Share it with a friend who needs it!

1/ Getting started with crypto and want to check prices/projects? https://t.co/LFnk4vukxj has info on just about every crypto you'll need :)


2/ Search over 6000+ cryptocurrencies available on the market. You can see what's trending in the space as well.

Researching by categories? Filter (left side) -> Select categories -> DeFi, DOT ecosystem, Exchange-based tokens, NFTs - anything!


3/ Lets say you're looking at #Bitcoin https://t.co/g205lj03pG

At a glance you get:
- Price
- Mkt Capitalization (valuation)
- Circulating/Total supply
- 24h trading volume
- Links to websites, social media, block explorers
- Calculator

Next - check valuation?


4/ Market cap is used to rank coins, and we'll show you how its calculated - Hover over Circulating Supply (?) for breakdown.

Note: used @chainlink as example here - https://t.co/Jc46fe79Ag

While MC is important also consider product fit, narrative, team, community etc.


5/ If you're trading on AMMs like @Uniswap or @SushiSwap, you can copy the contract address directly to your clipboard.

Using @metamask_io? Add the token directly so it shows as one of the "Assets" that you own in the wallet.

See: https://t.co/94XihMf5oz
CRYPTO
Bartek Kiepuszewski
Bartek Kiepuszewski
@bkiepuszewski
[1/13] It may be initially confusing to fully grasp how deposits and withdrawals from L1 to @optimismPBC are actually implemented, and it helps to see the on-chain action of what is happening behind the scenes.

[2/13] Initial setup (simplified): on L1 we have SyntheticBridgeToOptimism from Synthetic and OVM_L1CrossDomainManager from Optimism contracts. On L2 we have SynthetixBridgeToBase and OVM_L2_CrossDomainManager contracts.

[3/13] Additionally we have Sequencer (L2 mining node) that verifies all L2 transactions and submits them in batches to L1 for future reference and Relayer that is responsible for relaying messages from L2 —> L1

[4/13] Step 1 - Alice wants to deposit $SNX to L2. To do that she calls initiateDeposit() method on the L1 SyntheticBridgeToOptimism which takes her $SNX, puts it in the escrow and calls OVM_L1CrossDomainManager sendMessage() method.

[5/13] The CrossDomainManager puts this request to CanonicalTransactionChain (this is an “official” and “unmutable” list of all L2 transactions on L1). As a consequence the Sequencer (L2 mining node) will need to execute this transaction on L2.
CRYPTO

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Sri Adi Jagannatha Perumal Temple, Thiruppullani, TN

Thiruppullani village is located in Ramanathapuram district, It is located 62.3 km distance from Rameswaram. The main tourist attraction in Thirupullani is Sri Adi Jagannatha Perumal Temple....👇👇
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This temple is mentioned in the Tamil classic devotional literature” Naalayira Dhivya Prabantham”, Thirumangai Azhwar sung a song on this place and the temple. and also Thiruppllai temple is referred in Valmiki Ramayana, Ramayana written by the great Tamil poet Kambar....👇


It is one of the 108 Divya Desam temples. Thiruppullani Sri Adi Jagannatha Perumal is also called as Sri Kalyana Jagannatha Perumal. It is believed that those who have difficulties or dhoshams regarding marriages and childbirth worship Jagannatha Perumal...👇
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Egypedia
Egypedia
@Egypediax
Ancient Egypt was the most advanced civilization in the ancient world. Why was Egypt so special?

There are so many firsts in Egypt that we all know about, and that makes Egypt unique. For example, the Sumerians did not build the pyramids of Egypt.


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Brian Cates
Brian Cates
@drawandstrike
A lot of people don't understand that Trump & his incoming team didn't face a normal transition period, like it was over a in a matter of a few weeks or months.

The DOJ transition period JUST ENDED when Sessions left. Almost 2 exact years to get it there.

Pompeo at the CIA took over a year before he was done and ready to shift over to the State Department.

All kinds of stuff has been going on behind the scenes nobody leaks or talks about.

We only had the barest mention of the fact the Clinton Email investigation restarted

Nobody leaked in a year that Huber was deep diving into the Clinton Foundation.
Keep that in mind as all the usual suspects continue to INSIST nothing is happening/going to happen.
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SK
SK
@sk_diary1
#sculpture #story -

Chandesha-Anugraha Murti - One of the Sculpture in Brihadeshwara Temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram - built by Raja Rajendra Chola I

This Sculpture depicts Bhagwan Shiva along with Devi Paravathi blessing Chandeshwara - one of the 63 Nayanmars.

#Thread


Chandeshwara/Chandikeshwara is regarded as custodian of Shiva Temple's wealth&most of Shiva temples in South India has separate sannathi for him.

His bhakti for Bhagwan Shiva elevated him as one of foremost among Nayanmars.
He gave importance to Shiva Pooja&protection of cows.


There are series of paintings, illustrating the #story of Chandikeshwar in the premises of
Sri Sathiyagireeswarar #Temple at Seinganur,near Kumbakonam,TN

Chandikeshwara's birth name
is Vichara sarman.He was born in the village of Senganur on the banks of River Manni.


His Parent names were Yajnathatan and Pavithrai.
Vichara Sarman was a gifted child and he learnt Vedas and Agamas at a very young age.
He was very devout and would always think about Bhagwan Shiva.

One day he saw a cowherd man brutally assaulting a cow,Vichara Sarman could not tolerate this. He spoke to cowherd: ‘Do you not know that the cow is worshipful & divine? All gods & Devas reside in https://t.co/ElLcI5ppsK it is our duty to protect cows &we should not to harm them.
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Stambheshwar Mahadev Temple, Kavi Kamboi, Bharuch, Gujarat

Stambheshwar Mahadev is a Hindu Temple dedicated to Bhagwan Shiva, located in Kavi Kamboi in Bharuch District District of Gujarat, India. The Temple is about 150 years old. 1/n


The Temple is also known as the Submerging temple. The Temple is flanked by the Arabian Sea on one side and the Bay of Cambay on the other side.

As per legend, Tarakasura troubled the common people, sages and devas a lot. 2/n


Hence, Bhagwan Kartikeya k!lled him, but later he felt guilty for killing a demon who was a great devotee of Shiva. He went to Prabhu Vishnu and told about his guilty. Bhagwan Vishnu advised him to install a Shiva Linga to get relief from the sin. 3/n


As advised, he installed the Shiva Linga in this place and prayed to Bhagwan Shiva to forgive his sin.
The temple is located in Kavi Kamboi between the shores of Bay of Cambay and the Arabian Sea. This Temple is very simple temple in terms of architecture. 4/n


Every day, during the high tide hours, the temple submerges, and when the tide level becomes normal, the temple reappears again. The Temple houses a 4 feet high Shiva lingam. The Lingam can be seen during low tide. The visit to the temple should be planned in such a way that..5/n
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