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.
"Hey patio11 could this happen in traditional finance?"

Ill-timed liquidations can and do, but attacking someone doing something not-risky to force a liquidation is harder, because of many built in safeguards.
One, you can actually borrow in your unit of account (e.g. dollars), and $1 = $1, so you can't convince a brokerage that a $100k debt is actually $130k.

Two, if you regulated financial institution has a goof in your data feeds causes you to mechanically disadvantage retail...
... your most likely outcome is having an internal meeting and saying "Which do we dislike more, covering their losses out of our equity OR getting our knuckles rapped by the regulators, paying a fine, then covering the losses with our own equity?" and choose door #1.
Three, it is enormously hard to pervert the most popular real markets in the world and that is a game you actually don't want to win, because the first prize is frequently go-directly-to-jail.

This is not the consensus viewpoint among engineers, who do not have good calibration.
Like if you somehow did security research against e.g. the monthly Treasury auction and somehow caused it to invert expectations around reality, that would plausibly have $X0 billion in consequences and you could make out like a bandit.
And also literally everyone you had talked to for the last several years would be taken out for tea by friendly serious federal agents.
("Do you really think that would happen?"

For the treasury auction? Oh heck yes I do. Expect a turf war between the money people and the terrorism people over who gets to lead the investigation.)
Crypto enthusiasts would probably suggest me to disagree with them on this, and I actually do not at all:

The financial system is in part of broader systems of state control. Seriously attacking it at scale would be treated indistinguishably from "kinetic" war.
"So is the state going to seriously come after crypto people then?"

While they flatter themselves into thinking they materially challenge the government, following their own logic pretty closely, if this were actually true their conferences would attract precision munitions.

More from Patrick McKenzie

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.

More from Tech

"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.
1. One of the best changes in recent years is the GOP abandoning libertarianism. Here's GOP Rep. Greg Steube: “I do think there is an appetite amongst Republicans, if the Dems wanted to try to break up Big Tech, I think there is support for that."

2. And @RepKenBuck, who offered a thoughtful Third Way report on antitrust law in 2020, weighed in quite reasonably on Biden antitrust frameworks.

3. I believe this change is sincere because it's so pervasive and beginning to result in real policy changes. Example: The North Dakota GOP is taking on Apple's app store.


4. And yet there's a problem. The GOP establishment is still pro-big tech. Trump, despite some of his instincts, appointed pro-monopoly antitrust enforcers. Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim helped big tech, and the antitrust case happened bc he was recused.

5. At the other sleepy antitrust agency, the Federal Trade Commission, Trump appointed commissioners
@FTCPhillips and @CSWilsonFTC are both pro-monopoly. Both voted *against* the antitrust case on FB. That case was 3-2, with a GOP Chair and 2 Dems teaming up against 2 Rs.

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हमारे ऋषि मुनि विद्वान थे, वे जो बात करते या कहते थे उसके पीछे कोई न कोई वैज्ञानिक कारण छुपा होता था।

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एक बात जो कह सकते कि हम सब ने स्वतः उग आये पीपल या बरगद का पेड़/ पौधा किसी न किसी दीवार, पुरानी

इमारत, पर्वत या अट्टालिकाओं पर ज़रूर देखा होगा। देखा है न?

ज़रा सोचिये पीपल या बरगद की बीज कैसे पहुंचे होंगे वहाँ तक? इनके बीज इतने हल्के भी नहीं होते के हवा उन्हें उड़ाके ले जा सके।