phphphphp (u/phphphphp)

phphphphp commented on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco sfgate.com/bayarea/articl... · Posted by u/rdl

that_guy_iain · 3 years ago

I dunno, London is getting up there. I'm sure London, England has more murders per captia than quite a few major US cities.

phphphphp · 3 years ago

There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).

phphphphp commented on Ask HN: WWYD? Built a company valued at $1B and may walk away with nothing · Posted by u/susanwise

oulu2006 · 3 years ago

A few people have said the same thing, why not bring costs down.

130M in ARR and you can't save 1M a month in burn? what is holding you back from letting go ~60 people and/or trimming other costs?

Raising on those terms, that dilution and no board seat, I would not do it.

phphphphp · 3 years ago

If I have the math right, their revenue of $130m is made up of $110m in COGS. If they’re losing $1m/month that means they’re spending roughly $30m/year on running the business. My educated guess is most of that $30m is marketing spend required to secure the $130m revenue and cuttable costs (salaries, office space) are much less than $10m/year.

Sounds like ARR is the wrong term since it’s probably not a business operating on recurring revenue — probably an example of the bananas valuations of the last few years, based on revenue not viability.

phphphphp commented on Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister coindesk.com/business/202... · Posted by u/janmo

kijin · 3 years ago

The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that it's easy to hide.

A few years ago, a man named Son Jung-woo was arrested for running what was the largest child porn site in the world back then. His sentence? 18 months. The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him.

I'm sure Do Kwon would rather hand himself in to the Korean authorities than risk going to prison in any other country.

phphphphp · 3 years ago

So why didn’t he hand himself in? He’s been on the run since last year, he has had numerous opportunities to hand himself in before being arrested in Montenegro.

phphphphp commented on Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister coindesk.com/business/202... · Posted by u/janmo

m3kw9 · 3 years ago

He is probably better off getting caught and get his sentence over with than to live watching his back betting a country won’t turn him in for decades

phphphphp · 3 years ago

He’ll be watching his back in prison, he’s got access to billions of dollars — or, at least, is perceived to. He has wronged a lot of people, too. Also, prison is a one way street: if he stays on the run, and some day things do get to the point where he would feel safer in prison, he could hand himself in. Once he’s in prison, he has no choice left.

phphphphp commented on Block: Inflated user metrics and “frictionless” fraud facilitation hindenburgresearch.com/bl... · Posted by u/boh

baryphonic · 3 years ago

The report is extremely long, but having gone through the bullet points, the case seems quite overstated.

There are in fact millions of people who use Cash App, though it's probably less popular overall than Venmo. I know this because my wife and her friends will mention it and Venmo when talking about splitting bills. (Given the technical challenges Wells Fargo has had lately, I'm not sure who trusts Zelle.)

A lot of the claims amount to criticisms of Block's address verification functionality. But that doesn't mean Block engaged in fraud, perhaps they just have crappy address verification tech. Short of sending a human investigator out to physically verify that a given person really is located at a given address, I'm not sure what foolproof methods people use to eliminate that kind of fraud. The "let's send you a postcard with a code" method I've seen from legacy banks seems quite easy to exploit as well, just a bit slower.

The last question about merchant fees isn't fraud at all, but regulatory avoidance. Maybe the government will shut this down, or maybe they've found a loophole that Congress may want to close. It's unclear.

The least persuasive part of the report was the implication that rap lyrics imply Cash App facilitates crime.

phphphphp · 3 years ago

If verifying people is hard and so a company chooses to take the easy route of not bothering and therefore attract lots of customers who do illegal things, surely in any world that's at the very least knowingly facilitating illegal conduct? There are a lot of platforms that do far more than Block to verify people -- Block absolutely could do the same if they wanted to.

This is what Block do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2uhWTFvug8

phphphphp commented on Swiss Are on the Hook for $13,500 Each on Credit Suisse Bailout bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mpweiher · 3 years ago

"Taxpayer exposure amounts to 109 billion Swiss francs "

(Though that maximum is unlikely to be hit)

In the meantime, top managers extracted 32 billion in bonuses over the last 10 years.

Privatise profits, socialise losses.

UPDATE: My mind still boggles at the scale of the looting. 32 billion in bonuses. If that's a thousand "top managers" that would still a jaw-dropping and life-changing 32 million per person. If it's a hundred "top managers", then it's a mind-numbing 320 million per person

Let's go with the lower payout figure: 32 million would still be an insane amount even as the top payout for the singlemost important person, let's say the CEO, iff the company had been immensely profitable during that time and there had been significant personal risk. But the company wasn't profitable, there was no personal risk, and it wasn't a payout of that scale for the top one person, but for the top thousand or so (or whatever the number is, I don't know how many top managers there were...but if there were fewer top managers, the relative amount of the payout just gets larger).

UPDATE 2: Source (German)

"Denn was ist mit den verantwortlichen Top-Managern der Credit Suisse? Die, so hat es der "Tagesanzeiger" aus Zürich ausgerechnet, seit 2013 32 Milliarden Franken an Boni kassierten, während die Bank im gleichen Zeitraum 3,2 Milliarden Verlust machte."

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/weltwirtschaft/credit-s...

phphphphp · 3 years ago

bonuses are to banks what stock is to tech startups. A bonus is a part of total compensation.