Hacker News: esonoi

New comment by esonoi in "US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance"

esonoi — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 01:22:41 +0000

Crypto is more a commodity than currencies, because unlike currency, crypto is subject to the same speculative supply and demand forces as conventional commodities.

Examples of non-physical commodities: music and apps.

Example of something that doesn’t exist at all: Carbon Offsets which are credits for negative production of GHG. Credits can be purchased on the market by companies to offset their own emissions for regulatory or other reasons.

New comment by esonoi in "US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance"

esonoi — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 21:52:40 +0000

Gold is not a currency, it is a commodity that is similar enough to a currency (meaning it can substitute as a currency). ISO 4217 includes precious metals that it explicitly states are not currencies.

Currencies do not exist outside a monetary system. If I sell you something, and accept skittles as payment, that does not make skittles a currency.

New comment by esonoi in "US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance"

esonoi — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:56:59 +0000

I’m not a lawyer but work in the industry.

This is a slightly incorrect interpretation. Not all financial instruments are securities. Financial instruments are legal contracts between an issuer and one or more holders + other parties. If you own any stock in a company, you don’t own part of that company… what you own is a portion of a legal contract that defines what rights you have as a shareholder and what obligations the issuer has.

Currency isn’t a commodity. It’s treated as a commodity because they shares characteristics - you can buy and sell them over FX market. It’s a bit of an oddity because its value isn’t solely based on supply and demand, but stability and existence of a central authority controlling its supply.

(Opinion) Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a virtual Commodity. It is not recognized as a currency. Similarly, gold is a commodity but not a currency, though it does have a place as a non-standard currency in ISO-4217.

Commodities can be hedged against (oil futures) through derivative products. Those are formalized through a legal contract.

Your notion of a financial instrument doesn’t cover the fact that it is the legal contract involving money that makes it an instrument.

But as others have pointed out that’s not why the SEC is suing.

New comment by esonoi in "An oral history of Bank Python"

esonoi — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:52:11 +0000

Not entirely true. Two things to consider: 1. Public sentiment. When Goldman Sachs open sourced their collections library on GitHub, it gained marginal traction (opinion: seemed more about PR to attract tech talent). When it was adopted by the Eclipse Foundation, usage rose by a non-trivial amount (based on usage stats from mvnrepository that aren’t other eclipse projects). 2. There was a massive hiring frenzy, and their due diligence regarding IP was non-existent. Garden leave doesn’t compensate for ‘strategic’ systems. Apart from “competitive advantage”, when you have someone as tenured as he who shall not be named, you mitigate the risk of being sued by not making it obvious you’re cloning a system developed for another firm.

Bulge brackets are more risk avoidant than smaller firms, like hedge funds. Today, we have LMAX disruptor and Real Logic’s Aeron (basis for Akka Remote) due to their liberal policy towards open source.

New comment by esonoi in "An oral history of Bank Python"

esonoi — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:30:41 +0000

That proprietary IDE was a piece of crap. Monkey patching was prevalent, exponentially increasing startup time depending on the last time you opened it, and an “online” source tree where one could easily modify the source code in someone else’s ‘private’ workspace.

PyCharm was a move in the right direction, but the way it worked was absurd- it would run the internal IDE in the background and sync to the file system. Given the proprietary IDE took up more resources than PyCharm, you constantly had to shut down apps so the machine had enough memory.

IDEs should not be a requirement- they are tools… but you had no choice but to use it and their totally flawed code completion. Their measure of success was tantamount to having a Jupyter notebook- write code and get back results immediately.

New comment by esonoi in "Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline"

esonoi — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 18:34:43 +0000

You have a primary and a backup with a synchronous commit protocol. When a commit request is made on the primary, the primary writes to its transaction log and the backup’s log. If the backup does not acknowledge, the commit fails.

The backup doesn’t need to be in the same exact state as the primary (it’s not meant to service requests), it just needs to have a persistent log of what changes were applied so that it can roll forward when needed.

Most relational DBs do something like this for their DR product offering. Oracle has Active Data Guard. DB2 has HADR.