The people here commenting that this is outrageous have missed the boat a little bit.
This 'one line change' is an existential and fundamental effect on the company, it may very well affect operations otherwise.
'One line of code' can easily blow up a system, and the checks are not there to for the 99% of time time we are 'all good' it's for the 1% of the time when there is sketchiness.
Someone complaining about 'hard coded variables' is perfectly right to do so.
Every single element in this situation is in place for very good reason.
Imagine someone wanting to replace the lock in your Airline door, mid flight - oh, we'll just use a 'regular screwdriver' instead of the one designed for the door, who cares!? It's just an airplane!
The gripes are misplaced: the solution for this situation probably is to have a war room/crunch room situation to move the issue quickly and correctly through the hurdles so it can be done within the timeframe needed.
All of those 'delays in between' were the problem - they did not respect the urgency of the situation.
The price of all crypto is managed. All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices, and insiders with giant ownership stakes manipulate markets. All exchanges are either a scam, or 'implicitly colluding' with shady things.
BTC is ironically not a very free market in that sense, moreover, because nobody needs it for anything, it has a buy-hold characteristic.
If people needed BTC for things (which would force some liquidity ops) then we'd see a price that reflected something.
Crypto markets are essentially 'schemes' of one kind or another, they serve no purpose other than to be a hustle.
If people want to play dumb games, that's fine, as long as they are doing it legally and it doesn't rope in a lot of external players.
Stocks have value because they are cash flow generating assets, so if you sell low enough it will make economic sense for someone to buy, except for some liquidity catastrophe.
One thing though is that is unlikely that everyone would cash out below a certain price for a stock can be sold for parts. There would be at least some people realizing that they might as well hold, liquidate the company and make a profit out of it. So in practice there's a floor for the stock price (as long as assets > liabilities or similar).
That's not the case of BTC. Its value is completely depends on confidence. At no price can you be sure that you'll make a profit, you can only guess that it'll go back up, so there's no such floor.
In both cases current assets < current liabilities. Both require getting a loan to pay out the depositors. Both make no sense to loan money to as they will have no way to afford the payments to be worth loaning to over someone else.
> In both cases current assets < current liabilities.
That there are some things the same does not make them the same. You and I are both humans, but we are not the same person.
In a Ponzi collapse, all assets are typically < even current liabilities, let alone all of them. Unlike a bank run involving temporary liquidity issues, a Ponzi is never going to be able to pay everyone out.
To the customer it's the same. People don't want to be told that they will get their funds in a few years, they want it now. Liquidating all your assets is going to reduce the total value of all of your assets to potentially below your liabilities. If it doesn't good job, that means the bank is safe against bank runs, but if not they aren't.
That’s an absurd assertion. No, to a customer, a bank run is rapidly dealt with via the FDIC; we just had a great example of this with SVB. Madoff’s victims were not so lucky.
The FDIC made that happen. SVB became illiquid which triggered FDIC intervention. The bank was shut down by the FDIC and the assets were sold off to First Citizens bank. Executed without a hitch and no customer assets lost. The only ones who lost money were investors in the bank.
The FDIC would never make someone acquire a Ponzi scheme. Someone could in theory do it, but why would they? It's just throwing away money.
That's not really true, assuming it's a real company/bank with assets and revenue. If the stock is based on something with actual value there will many parties willing to buy the stock even if all of the current shareholders want to sell.
Behind a stock you've got a company with cash flow and assets. If nothing else you can sell off the office furniture. Crypto is backed by ... a prime number written on a piece of paper (minus the paper)?
> All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices
Even "knowing this" (I mean, none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at and... the same things happens in the S&P500 with high frequency trading algorithms/bots trading back and forth, hedge funds, institutional investors, etc.) I don't feel like I can confidently explain who/how many people really dollar cost average into Bitcoin that can prop it up to $10k, $20k, $30k, etc.
Where/who are the buyers? How many people across the world are actively STILL investing directly into BTC to the point where it's up 80-90% YTD?
> none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at
True, but there was an exchange a few months ago that turned off trading for customers for whatever reason, but the exchange forgot to turn of its bot and you could see a perfectly-formed, gradually-increasing, stair-stepping pattern in it's price chart.
Finance is extremely regulated even if there are shenanigans, Crypto is just an excuse to do finance without oversight, which means it's mostly shady.
Every attempt to peel away the onion layer reveals mass problems.
It's like saying 'we have no hard proof that all this Mafia gangs revenue came from illegal activity!'.
What I'm saying is, the point of crypto is hustle, there is no real economy, and the players are all shady as can be.
Literally nobody knows where the Binance guy even is!
Why would the Binance guy want to hide from global authorities?
Regular bank CEO's don't.
It's mafia-adjacent the whole way down, with a lot of small dupes and kids playing with some amount of money.
There is no 'there there' in the value creating sense that we might want to see.
If you told me BTC was 95% regular people using it for business and 5% shady, I'd say we need to work on that problem. But it's only 5% 'useful' and the rest is just layers of scam and fraud.
We need to dump crypto, and if we want to try that experiment again - because I think there might be value there - we can give it a new name and keep it clean from the start.
Just because Calpers fails doesn't mean the industry is a failure.
VC is a wide gamut, the top 25% generates something like 30% IRR while the bottom 25% is negative return.
LP in VC is just like VC - have to get in on the good deals and I think maybe since it's harder to evaluate deals, than say for building some homes, a lot of money goes to crap.
Yeah, if you don't know why you weren't going to keep your job after that, then well, that's not good. Plenty of places you can work with opinions like that. Also be wary that others will then voice their opinions about you.
This reads 'immature borderline toxic' I can't imagine having to work with this kind of drama.
I'm afraid this call for freedom is actually narrow ideology.
Consider: what is more 'free'?
A) Here is some code, do whatever with it?
or
B) Here is some code, you can only use it in certain circumstances?
FSF is dead because it's not practical, and the ideologues behind it naively malign 'capitalism' as something terrible for the world.
OSS makers are free to publish as they chose. Apple and MS don't force or cajole anyone to use MIT. If you use copyleft, your software will not likely get used very much and that's that.
'Big companies leverage over small developers!'
True, maybe they should get together and license their software to Large Corporations?
Finally, the conversation started with a giant Photo of Stallman and that hints at the ideological demagoguery right from the start no matter how much they try to play it down, it'd have been better to not opened the discussion with that at all.
In the end, it will not matter, very few will use copyleft because it's just not practical and that's that.
Consider two timelines: immediate, and long-term future. Which world is more free?
A: short term more free: you get to do what you please now, including not giving others the freedoms you got.
B: long term more free: copyleft ensures that a library of code builds up, available for everyone to run, study, and modify, and that it's a hassle to restrict others' freedom to use your modifications.
If practicality is only considered until the next tax period, world A is more attractive. Once you start thinking in human lifetimes, it no longer is.
Where your rack is is basically not relevant. For most startups, AWS is great, even if it's more cost of colo, it's the opportunity cost and dynamism it offers. Use AWS until the savings of not doing so will not affect your ability to grow, or costs are not dreadful. Moving away from AWS is a cost optimization, it depends on the kind of business you have.
But more broadly, the value is IP, essentially know-how and lock-in with customers, relationships etc..
Not really, once you are up and running even then the economics of cloud are usually better than self host. Instance time is 10x more costly on AWS than self host, but, it's still very cheap.
Things like 'egress data' can be a problem, but for the most part, even if AWS is more expensive than self hoste - the 'total cost of ownership' is much cheaper in the cloud - usually.
Where a company puts the bulk of its resources, that is up to them for whatever reasons they have. I am not arguing against that. What I am arguing for is that you every company needs to have >1u running in a colo, with hardware that is largely theirs. Every company I have ever worked would be in the >=1rack range.
I will only address TC comments with supporting numbers. Just math, no boogeymen.
This 'one line change' is an existential and fundamental effect on the company, it may very well affect operations otherwise.
'One line of code' can easily blow up a system, and the checks are not there to for the 99% of time time we are 'all good' it's for the 1% of the time when there is sketchiness.
Someone complaining about 'hard coded variables' is perfectly right to do so.
Every single element in this situation is in place for very good reason.
Imagine someone wanting to replace the lock in your Airline door, mid flight - oh, we'll just use a 'regular screwdriver' instead of the one designed for the door, who cares!? It's just an airplane!
The gripes are misplaced: the solution for this situation probably is to have a war room/crunch room situation to move the issue quickly and correctly through the hurdles so it can be done within the timeframe needed.
All of those 'delays in between' were the problem - they did not respect the urgency of the situation.