In other words: We only disclosed these risk factors because we were legally required to. Please ignore our SEC disclosure and half-billion dollar quarterly loss, and instead trust my unregulated statements posted on Twitter. There are no risk factors, your money is safe, the music will never stop.
"We have no risk of bankruptcy" - objectively false statement
"it is possible, however unlikely, that a court would decide to consider customer assets as part of the company in bankruptcy proceedings" - goes against the entire point of his thread, and is also exactly why this disclosure was required
The quote above seems like a completely accurate and fair characterization.
I would argue that's the people's problem. How important is what they have to say anyway if they won't read the source and can't detect sarcasm?
edit: also, even if it's not a direct quote.. c'mon, it is what he's saying. The SEC made a rule that applies _specifically for crypto companies_, saying they have to disclose that crypto assets under their custody could potentially be taken in a bankruptcy.. and this guy goes on to say what he was just forced to disclose is not true. It doesn't get more obvious.
“It is what he’s saying” is subjective. A quote is not (or shouldn’t be, despite far too many violations in the real world). Just say “Summary: blah blah” if you want to post your subjective summary.
You already write why that is mathematically impossible, so the logical conclusion would be that it is not meant to be interpreted like that no? Language is not maths, no risk doesn't mean the risk is zero. It means the risk is unlikely.
These are complicated topics. The people buying crypto at Coinbase are not sophisticated investors.
It is entirely reasonable to believe that a large proportion of Coinbase users would read, "We have no risk of bankruptcy" and choose to leave their money at Coinbase believing that the CEO must have used some financial mechanism to 100% prevent bankruptcy.
Words have meaning, and when you say, "no risk of bankruptcy" there are a lot of people that will be duped into believing that literally.
It's not a people problem if you're making up quotes and people don't realize it. Use quoting for quotes. Everything else is in your own words, not someone elses, even if you are paraphrasing.
Thank you for summing it up this way. It certainly sounds like the original author wants to be taken seriously. In that case they should probably respect the fact that there is literally a word for what they've done. Misquote and its synonyms do not have good connotations, and in their worst form are simply libel...
If only we took this much care in the news. How many times has both sides misquoted someone? Yet people only seem to care when it’s misquoting the Coinbase CEO.
I don't have skin in the game (not a crypto fan, not in the US and not an investor in coinbase), but I don't think your sarcasm is warranted here (side note for any other readers, that's _not_ what his linked thread says).
Regulatory capture is _real_, and dispraportionately favours incumbents. As regulations are tightened on crypto in general, firms that are not involved in the creation of said regulations are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Furthermore, if _any_ organization has a reputation of taking sides, it's the SEC.
I don't think regulatory capture is the issue here. We're talking about a disclosure of risks ... that seems reasonable to me.
Dude says there is no risk of bankruptcy and is predicting court case outcomes... and it is clearly in his financial interest to make the arguments he is making.
The system is rigged and other truthy arguments are all but standard operating procedure for whatever crytpo idea someone comes up with. Those arguments doesn't make mean we shouldn't be skeptical.
The problem is that the disclosure of risks is written in such a way that captures the existing situatio nand makes it hard for a valid crypto firm to not post... exactly this.
> The system is rigged and other truthy arguments are all but standard operating procedure for whatever crytpo idea someone comes up with.
But remember that applies to both sides of the coin - the SEC disclosure of risks claiming there's a huge risk of monetary loss _is_ true, but it's also unavoidable as (to my understanding) there isn't currently a way for coinbase to be FDIC insured.
> Those arguments doesn't make mean we shouldn't be skeptical.
You should be incredibly skeptical, but you should be informed of what you're skeptical about.
>The problem is that the disclosure of risks is written in such a way that captures the existing situatio nand makes it hard for a valid crypto firm to not post... exactly this.
Because ... they aren't FDIC insured nor do they provide any reliable protections for their user's money?
The problem is that there is no alternative statement for them to make. The disclosure of risks require them to be FDIC insured or state there is a risk of loss in bankruptcy, and given they don't have the option of FDIC insurance, they have to declare the risk. The problem is that coinbase don't have the choice to be insured, yet they get labelled as though they're yolo'ing it _whether they are or not_ because the FDIC don't insure the asset class they're trading.
Coinbase is insured. Crypto balances are insured against theft, and fiat balances are deposited into accounts that are then FDIC (or whatever is equivalent for other countries) insured.
It is probably because we don't understand finance, economics or their history. There is an obligatory xkcd somewhere but I'm too lazy to find it. Software people occasionally find great solutions for existing problems pre-tech X. As experts in tech X they tend to trivialize existing domain knowledge because obviously X has disrupted all that.
> 3. We believe our Prime and Custody customers have strong legal protections in their terms of service that protects their assets, even in a black swan event like this
> 4. For our retail customers, we’re taking further steps to update our user terms such that we offer the same protections to those customers in a black swan event. We should have had these in place previously, so let me apologize for that.
> 5. ...and it is possible, however unlikely, that a court would decide to consider customer assets as part of the company in bankruptcy proceeding
The term people might want to google is "bail-in". And it is likely that Coinbase has less protections related to that than a conventional bank.
I understand it's really carefully worded, but I tend to feel insulted by a press release that says everything _except_ the message, to make it less harsh.
Yeah thats because its an unfalsifiable hypothesis, which undermines its credibility right out the gate
Any theory or hypothesis that has zero criteria for being proven wrong is not science and has no place being repeated at all
So you’re not wrong about it not contradicting, because nothing does since its a bullshit saying masquarading as a hypothesis, there’s just no point in leaning on it
There's various forms of the EMH. As a general heuristic does it really seem unreasonable to assume that a random HN commenter has worse pricing information than a wall st analyst?
But is the psychovisual output any good or do they only target, say, speed? Because back in the days, both Videolan projects x264 and x265 (especially x264) had much better psychovisual quality than commercial encoders.
Back in those days, x264 felt to me like a software written by aliens from the future.
> Back in those days, x264 felt to me like a software written by aliens from the future.
Indeed it may be :) H.264 might not be the latest and best video coding standard anymore, but in my opinion x264 is, and will always be by far the best encoder ever written for a video format.
Which brings me to...
> Because back in the days, both Videolan projects x264 and x265 (especially x264) had much better psychovisual quality than commercial encoders.
Unfortunately x265 isn't a Videolan project (its developed by MulticoreWare Inc.) and it's a very mediocre encoder which doesn't hold a candle to x264 and IMO kind of a shame considering its legacy.
Also after 2018 it's practically became maintainenance-only and was surpassed by proprietary encoders in MSU encoder tests in the following years. That's a big loss considering x264 was still seeing significant efficiency and performance improvements as late as 2013 (when the H.264 format was 10 years old), so when compared to x264 I assume a good 4-5 years of potential improvements have been left at the table for x265.
I think the big issue is x264 was very obviously a labor of love from some very talented developers. I just haven't seen that sort of love dumped into other encoders.
Newer codecs have been relying on the format to provide more obvious tools for compression (and mostly giving benefits for HD+ resolutions).
I wouldn't necessarily say x265 bad. Rather, they simply haven't been taking it to the extreme levels of optimization that the x264 devs took x264. [1]
Up until the end of development, x264 was hyper focused on getting the best possible subjective quality with the smallest possible bitrate. To date, the x264 CRF metrics are (IMO) unparalleled in consistency. With other codecs a similar CRF mode is simply, well, shit. I can't just set stuff to "CRF 20" and expect the output to hit roughly the same level of quality. VP9, in particular, is terrible with this. In VP9 CRF is more closely related to the bitrate than the actual quality of the scenes being encoded.
To be clear, even with these critiques you SHOULD choose x265, vp9, or AV1 over x264 for your encoding choices. They have better specs that allow for better compression. However, they are also leaving a lot on the table for what they COULD do.
I current do VP9 + vmaf on each scene to set a CRF value (using my own thing similar to AV1AN). That gives good consistent results at minimal bitrates. It's just a little terrible (IMO) that I have to do so much work that the encoder should theoretically be able to do better.
My understanding is that there is no intrinsic meaning to "crf", and that it is just a rough way of controlling bitrate (in that it refers to internal variables in the specific implementation of the encoder), am I mistaken about this?
What are up-to-date AV1 encoders still leaving on the table as far as optimization is concerned?
> My understanding is that there is no intrinsic meaning to "crf", and that it is just a rough way of controlling bitrate (in that it refers to internal variables in the specific implementation of the encoder), am I mistaken about this?
You are not mistaken. The difference is in how reliable the control is regardless of input video.
For libvpx, the CRF control is garbage. A CRF of 30 will be good for some scenes and horrible for scenes that are too dark or have too much motion. It means if you want to just use libvpx (or ffmpeg), you are often setting that CRF way lower than you need to so scenes where it fails don't end up looking like smooth color blobs. It's bad enough that they introduced a "minimum bitrate" flag.
x264 is not that experience. The amount of adjustment you have to do for CRF for a given input are extremely minor, I found between 20 and 24 to be more than acceptable. For vpx, you need to come up with a value anywhere from 10 to 50 depending on the source.
I get that a lot of this is subjective experience, but it's what I've experienced doing a bunch of dvd rips.
> What are up-to-date AV1 encoders still leaving on the table as far as optimization is concerned?
The biggest seems to be good quality controls that have been tuned by someone with a good subjective eye for that sort of thing. Beyond that, IDK, the bitstreams allow for a LOT more transformations than H.264 allowed for, yet the codecs don't seem to have the same level of complexity. For example, x264 came up with a bunch of motion vector search patterns over it's evolution. You don't see those sorts of developments with the other encoders.
Heck, you even saw that sort of care for quality output in the fact that x264 has tuning guides for (at the time) common objective measures of quality, SSIM and PSNR. (which returned worst quality than the x264 subjective quality metrics.
IDK, this may also be that I don't have as much time to geek out over video codecs :).
The post is about marketing and ad targeting. For Spotify to satisfy their question of a "brand built through personalization", Spotify would have had to do something like sign up for google/facebook ads, target the demographic of "music listeners" and convert enough users to end up with a successful business. That's not how spotify built their business.
You're talking about their recommendation engine for users they already have, which is completely different.
We also have to take into account that there's a lot of "misses" in those recommendation engines - which is normal. But when they nail it, people have positive emotions towards it, so it's a good feedback loop.
Personalization would be to have Spotify recommend you only songs about expensive watches after you've searched for a Rolex on Google, with ads in the middle about Rolex ahaha.
Personalization would be to have Spotify give you ads for a Rolex right after you purchased a Rolex. At least the way that kind of thing usually works for me is that I always get the recommendations after the purchase (definitely not a Rolex for me).
I honestly think that's still better than most online bans. If you find out you were ticketed because a cop had a bad day, it's not justice, but at least it's closure. Now you know, and you can accept it or fight/appeal if you're so inclined.
If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.
I got banned from eBay as well. I bought a part for my dishwasher and received a counterfeit part. I collected evidence, posted the photos, and requested a return. Next thing you know my account is banned. I think the seller reported me in retaliation.
I have no idea where to go next time I need something. AliExpress would probably be even worse when it comes to counterfeits.
If this is recent, please file a chargeback with your bank. That's the only way to deal with such scum, otherwise they've still won - the scammer got their money and eBay got their commission.
The only thing that matters is money and this is why these bans are a thing - it's cheaper to screw some customers over than to have a competent human analyze the situation. Hitting them in the wallet is the only place they'd actually feel it.
The interesting thing is I still got refunded, about a week after my account was banned. Their backend must be a total mess, but it worked out in my favor somehow. If not for that I definitely would have done a chargeback.
The history of EBay is long (in internet commerce terms) and complicated. At one point 100s of millions of customers on a single oracle db. A colleague of mine was working on this around 1998/9
Can confirm, been working with many eBay APIs for a while now and it's completely and totally a massive dumpster fire. Most API versions are in the thousands, and there's so many random gotchas and contradicting docs and daily bugs and breakages you don't want to go anywhere near it. Not to mention their only recourse for contacting them about bugs or developer issues is via prepaid premium support, paid only via paypal, in which the link for it frequently goes down too. If you check their dev forums it's filled with nothing but people complaining about all sorts of random issues and never getting real responses.
This only works if your bank is on your side. I asked for a chargeback with my bank at the time (Square) for a fraudulent transaction and they terminated my account.
Thankfully, banks in general are in a stricter regulatory environment with a government-level watchdog you can escalate to, though that might not apply for electronic money institutions (or whatever the US equivalent is).
No, why do people think this? In the US banks have a right to refuse to do business with you for (almost) any reason and refuse they do. They are more likely to ban you than eBay. There's no right to have a bank account, there's no right to keep your back account - full stop.
Me to up until this incident. It's worth noting that AmEx has acquired some businesses from Expedia Group and Expedia Group itself is now a major shareholder in AmEx Global Business Travel.
I've also been permabanned from eBay. Buyer for 10+ years, occasional seller. Went to sell something alongside lots of listings for the same thing. Permabanned my account and my parent's accounts as I had logged in from their house previously. No recourse. "Banned without appeal" they called it. "Because of the nature of the ban we cannot tell you anything about it". Many frustrating calls.
Years later, my only thesis is it was due to having HTML in my product description, I linked to the vendor website. Maybe that's against the rules or something.
I've received damaged products from AliExpress a handful of times and found their resolution team/procedures to be fantastic.
You can submit a claim which the seller responds to. If the seller doesn't respond fast enough, AE steps in and suggests a couple resolutions (usually something like a partial refund with no product return, or a full refund if you send the product back). You can then negotiate or just accept one of the suggestions. Absolutely 0 hassle or talking to a person. You click a few buttons and get your money back.
That is absolutely not my experience. During the height of the pandemic, many AliExpress sellers failed to deliver orders. The tracking numbers that some sellers provided showed "delivered" even when the item never arrived. During the disputes, AliExpress would request proof that the item never arrived, which is not possible to provide. Filing a chargeback or PayPal dispute is only an option if you don't mind being banned by AliExpress.
eBay and Amazon Marketplace put the burden of proof of delivery on the seller instead of the buyer when the shipment is not protected with signature confirmation. Many AliExpress-style items are also listed on eBay and Amazon at similar prices, and I've mostly switched over after my bad experiences with AliExpress. AliExpress still has a different selection of items, so I haven't stopped using it completely.
Ehm, nope. Unless your complaint is a very obvious one (i.e. seller didn't send anything at all or the item has visibly not been delivered from the tracking info), good luck.
E.g. I had obviously fake EEPROM chips delivered, they weren't even new (they contained data from the previous use!). I have opened a dispute, posted the evidence that the chips are relabeled fakes - and promptly got it rejected both first time and on appeal. The grunt handling it had absolutely no idea what my complaint was about, I have received my goods, so what more do I want?
Fortunately it was only a few euros worth so not big deal - I have opened the dispute mostly to point out that the seller is a fraudster, not to recover my 15€ or so back. Tough luck ...
Over the years I had more luck sorting complaints out on AliExpress directly with the sellers because they are afraid of losing their ratings and thus a large portion of business (people usually sort by price and then by ratings). The support staff is hopeless in these cases.
In my experience, I ordered a fake USB3 capture card (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001773724519.html, check the 1-star reviews, also debunked by Marcan at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30906127), filled out comprehensive documentation of it being fake USB3 and unable to capture stable footage at 1080p60, and AliExpress sided with the seller. I had to file a chargeback to get money back for the fraudulent product (and I hear chargebacks can be reversed by the seller, not sure if it happened to me).
For what it’s worth, I have successfully reversed a chargeback. I had a customer who ordered a downloadable product then did a chargeback. I presented evidence that they clicked the unique link for their download and the email exchange we had about the product. That seemed sufficient to satisfy the card processor.
I actually like Aliexpress, but I wouldn't expect them to sell parts for American market appliances. I searched now for the old part I needed, and I see "fits <model#>" and "compatible with <model#>" but not the genuine part. Call me old fashioned but I'll pay an extra $20 for first-party components.
You don't know that for certain though. I'd rather pay extra if an appliance is broken, than wait for a gamble on what may or may not be a decent replacement.
You wouldn't have been banned from eBay for a single return like this. It would have to be a pattern that makes you at least appear like an undesirable buyer.
And my contingency plan if I can no longer self host, is export from one of my devices and import into the cloud version of Bitwarden. I don't see myself needing to do that, but you never know.
In other words: We only disclosed these risk factors because we were legally required to. Please ignore our SEC disclosure and half-billion dollar quarterly loss, and instead trust my unregulated statements posted on Twitter. There are no risk factors, your money is safe, the music will never stop.