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.
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."
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.
And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."
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.
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.
Two, if you regulated financial institution has a goof in your data feeds causes you to mechanically disadvantage retail...
This is not the consensus viewpoint among engineers, who do not have good calibration.
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.)
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.
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
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.
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.
On a serious note, it's interesting to observe that you can build a decent business charging $20 - $50 per month for something that any good developer can set up. This is one of those micro-saas sweet spots between "easy for me to build" and "tedious for others to build"
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) September 5, 2019
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.
More from Tech
On press call, Zuckerberg says FB users "naturally engage more with sensational content" that comes close to violating its rules. Compares it to cable TV and tabloids, and says, "This seems to be true regardless of where we set our policy lines."
Zuckerberg says FB is in the process of setting up a "new independent body" that users will be able to appeal content takedowns to. Sort of like the "Facebook Supreme Court" idea he previewed earlier this year.
Zuckerberg: "One of my biggest lessons from this year is that when you connect more than 2 billion people, you’re going to see the good and bad of humanity."
This is how Facebook says it's trying to change the engagement pattern on its services. https://t.co/3p0PGc912o
.@RebeccaJarvis asks Zuckerberg if anyone is going to lose their job over the revelations in the NYT story. He dodges, says that personnel issues aren't a public matter, and that employee performance is evaluated all the time.
Zuckerberg says FB is in the process of setting up a "new independent body" that users will be able to appeal content takedowns to. Sort of like the "Facebook Supreme Court" idea he previewed earlier this year.
Zuckerberg: "One of my biggest lessons from this year is that when you connect more than 2 billion people, you’re going to see the good and bad of humanity."
This is how Facebook says it's trying to change the engagement pattern on its services. https://t.co/3p0PGc912o
.@RebeccaJarvis asks Zuckerberg if anyone is going to lose their job over the revelations in the NYT story. He dodges, says that personnel issues aren't a public matter, and that employee performance is evaluated all the time.
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So it's now October 10, 2018 and....Rod Rosenstein is STILL not fired.
He's STILL in charge of the Mueller investigation.
He's STILL refusing to hand over the McCabe memos.
He's STILL holding up the declassification of the #SpyGate documents & their release to the public.
I love a good cover story.......
The guy had a face-to-face with El Grande Trumpo himself on Air Force One just 2 days ago. Inside just about the most secure SCIF in the world.
And Trump came out of AF1 and gave ol' Rod a big thumbs up!
And so we're right back to 'that dirty rat Rosenstein!' 2 days later.
At this point it's clear some members of Congress are either in on this and helping the cover story or they haven't got a clue and are out in the cold.
Note the conflicting stories about 'Rosenstein cancelled meeting with Congress on Oct 11!"
First, rumors surfaced of a scheduled meeting on Oct. 11 between Rosenstein & members of Congress, and Rosenstein just cancelled it.
He's STILL in charge of the Mueller investigation.
He's STILL refusing to hand over the McCabe memos.
He's STILL holding up the declassification of the #SpyGate documents & their release to the public.
I love a good cover story.......
The guy had a face-to-face with El Grande Trumpo himself on Air Force One just 2 days ago. Inside just about the most secure SCIF in the world.
And Trump came out of AF1 and gave ol' Rod a big thumbs up!
And so we're right back to 'that dirty rat Rosenstein!' 2 days later.
At this point it's clear some members of Congress are either in on this and helping the cover story or they haven't got a clue and are out in the cold.
Note the conflicting stories about 'Rosenstein cancelled meeting with Congress on Oct 11!"
First, rumors surfaced of a scheduled meeting on Oct. 11 between Rosenstein & members of Congress, and Rosenstein just cancelled it.
Rep. Andy Biggs and Rep. Matt Gaetz say DAG Rod Rosenstein cancelled an Oct. 11 appearance before the judiciary and oversight committees. They are now calling for a subpoena. pic.twitter.com/TknVHKjXtd
— Ivan Pentchoukov \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 (@IvanPentchoukov) October 10, 2018
BREAKING: @CommonsCMS @DamianCollins just released previously sealed #Six4Three @Facebook documents:
Some random interesting tidbits:
1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition
2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:
Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.
3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.
4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.
https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
Some random interesting tidbits:
1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition
2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:
Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.
3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.
4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.
https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x
