Tech bros completely ruined possibly our greatest city. They’re such scum.
akm
December 5, 2023, 6:12pm
292
I hope it’s crapto season again, I miss the content.
jwax13
December 16, 2023, 6:24pm
296
1 Like
kerowo
January 3, 2024, 12:57pm
299
Isn’t it super easy to set up sandboxes so you’re not running someone else’s code in your dev environment?
Effen
January 3, 2024, 5:14pm
300
In an age of $500 laptops it’s egregious to not have one dedicated for your crypto with no other activity on it.
kerowo
January 3, 2024, 5:19pm
301
I’d say he failed the interview…
goofy
January 4, 2024, 8:05pm
302
Levine has a fun crapto story today:
Or people in crypto have spent years arguing that decentralized autonomous organizations are a new and better way to organize economic activity, never seen before. (This is wrong and they are general partnerships , but never mind.) But there are also sometimes arguments that DAOs are a way around securities regulation: If some crypto project (a decentralized exchange, a lending platform, whatever) is run by a DAO rather than by a company, then it is more robust to regulation; regulators can’t fine the DAO or arrest its leaders, because it is decentralized and computerized and thus resistant to government interference.
My guess is that this is partly correct: Some decentralized crypto projects really do run as more or less autonomous code on distributed blockchains and really can’t be shut down by an SEC order. But there do seem to be a lot of $5 wrench vulnerabilities in crypto, where “decentralized autonomous organization” is a fancy way of saying “Discord page for voting on stuff,” and the SEC can find the Discord’s administrator and say “hey we can make your life bad if you don’t shut down this DAO” and the administrator shuts it down and everything was a lot less decentralized and autonomous and organized than people thought.
Last month the SEC shut down a DAO :
The Securities and Exchange Commission [Dec. 22] announced that BarnBridge DAO, a purportedly decentralized autonomous organization, and its two founders, Tyler Ward and Troy Murray, will pay more than $1.7 million to settle charges that they failed to register BarnBridge’s offer and sale of structured crypto asset securities known as SMART Yield bonds. The Commission also charged the respondents with violations stemming from operating BarnBridge’s SMART Yield pools as unregistered investment companies. To settle the SEC’s charges, BarnBridge agreed to disgorge nearly $1.5 million of proceeds from the sales, and Ward and Murray each agreed to pay a $125,000 civil penalties.
“The use of blockchain technology for the unregistered offer and sale of structured finance products to retail investors runs afoul of the securities laws," said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. "This case serves as an important reminder that those laws apply to all who wish to access our capital markets, regardless of whether they are, or purport to be, incorporated, decentralized or autonomous.”
Reading the SEC order , it is a little puzzling how BarnBridge could have settled the case. It’s a DAO? Did it, like, take a vote? Apparently not; apparently the SEC got to the founders and the founders shut it down:
In July 2023, Ward and Murray took steps to close investments in a second version of SMART Yield that had launched in January 2023, after BarnBridge DAO had stopped offering investments in SMART Yield Pools described in this Order. Ward and Murray also canceled a new product launch, limited access to Discord, Github, and other platforms used by BarnBridge DAO, and stopped development of further securities using the BarnBridge protocol.
So not that decentralized or autonomous.
1 Like
The biggest threat to crypto I see is its totally indefensible compute bill. In a world where the total amount of AI that can be deployed is a function of the supply and price of compute I don’t think there’s any way something that produces no tangible value is going to be able to pay a viable price for compute.
Basically I think the miners are going to get offers from people looking to do AI and those offers are going to be more attractive than what they get from crypto mining… and that money will be cleaner/easier to digest and nobody wants to interact with a grey market where your counterparties could meet the three letter windbreaker guys any day now. If someone offers you something that pays comparable money in USD doing something else you’re going to switch.
