[satellite2]

I've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think you're being too hard on yourself.

The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win win for all parties involved and more.

From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access to startup using js and with relatively simple tech stacks access to a tool that would otherwise be relatively complicated and time consuming and for which they would not necessary have the resouces. By doing so you lowered the cost of entry and allowed new entrants to challenge the status quo.

And from a macroeconomic perspective I think it's one of the reason access to capital has been simplified and has lowered in cost, it's one of the reason for the low cost of mortgages and the relative resilience of economies during covid (central banks interventions are useless without bank and other financial intermediaries participation, it would be like pushing on a string).

Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. It's still the most important reason that explain the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years, and the best thing one can do is to make it less arcane and open it to more people. One of the achievements of your tool.

You can be proud of your work.

[nicoburns]

> Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance. It's still the most important reason that explain the constant improvmements in prosperity and peace of recent years

I think the contempt comes from the fact that financial instruments have a tendency to concentrate those benefits in small proportion of the population. Low-cost mortgages are an excellent example: these have enabled wealth gain for those who were able to get them at a certain time. But that gain has come almost entirely at the expense of those who weren't able to (or simply didn't) get them, who now face greatly increased rent and house prices.

[lazide]

It isn’t financial instruments doing that - it’s people.

Be thankful that it allows this to happen somewhat transparently and peacefully, rather than at the hands of pinkertons, criminals, or the military - which is how historically it has happened.

[nicoburns]

The financial instruments (and the underlying rules of the economic system) are the enablers here. You're probably right that it's probably better than what came before, but that doesn't mean we can improve on the system we have.

[lazide]

Of course we can improve it - by identifying where people’s behaviors and systemic effects are causing undesirable behaviors. That probably doesn’t happen if we blame ‘finance’ for it though?

Every system has exploitable loopholes and will become unbalanced once enough people start gaming it. Some of them (especially new ones) are easier than others.

It’s easy to say ‘this is terrible’, but that can easily turn into rejecting a known system with adjustments and corrections for bad behaviors that isn’t perfect into a system that gets gamed even easier by bad actors and turns into an even worse (but different) mess. See 90% of all revolutions ever.

[CRConrad]

Judging from how utterly close that was to a well-worn idiom, I'm guessing what the GP meant to write was "that doesn't mean we can't improve..."

Just so you guys don't get into violent agreement.

[nicoburns]

Ha, yes I certainly did mean that. Sometimes I type HN comments too quickly.

[lazide]

Haha, for sure.

That’s it! Handshakes at dawn it is!

[andrepd]

> It isn’t X doing that - it’s people.

That's quite a silly argument since you can very literally replace X by anything and get a true statement.

[lazide]

Definitely not true.

Wildfire burns down your house (assuming no intentional negligence?) - fire burned down your house.

Tsunami happens and wipes out your village? That was a tsunami, not people.

Neighboring countries army invades? Yeah, that’s people.

[andrepd]

Anything man-made, as should be obvious.

Example: It isn't democracy doing that, just people. It isn't autocracy doing that, just people. It isn't socialism doing that, it's people. It isn't capitalism doing that, it's people.

Therefore democracy = dictatorship, and socialism = capitalism. It's all the same, it's all people in the end, so it's no matter.

Patently absurd.

[lazide]

If you replace ‘finance’ with another system, I guarantee you’ll end up with another disaster soon enough. The only way you get halfway decent stability in any human run system is to build in expectations of human corruption and add in methods for self interested (aka greedy) people to get payoffs by tackling said corruption.

The problem is that people are involved, and you’re not realizing what that means - people inherently are corrupt, self interested, short sighted, power hungry, etc.

[andrepd]

The financial services industry is focused on helping those with the most wealth accumulate even more wealth. You can try to spin this any way you'd like, but this is their raison d'être, it's the business they're in. Don't try to pretend they're actually helping us all, especially after 2008 has revealed their true nature to the wider public.

All you're saying would be correct if we had a sane system of property rights, (which we don't); then finance would be truly benefiting everyone. But that's not the world we live in.

[lmm]

> The financial services industry is focused on helping those with the most wealth accumulate even more wealth.

Every business is focused on making money, and that usually means serving the people with the most money because, well, they have the most money.

> Don't try to pretend they're actually helping us all, especially after 2008 has revealed their true nature to the wider public.

2008, where it became clear that the banks had screwed over their wealthy investors (and each other) to help chumps get mortgages they couldn't afford? How does that show what you're claiming it shows?

[nicoffeine]

> (central banks interventions are useless without bank and other financial intermediaries participation, it would be like pushing on a string).

Yes, the only thing financial intermediaries would be missing is the actual funds (largely paid by the middle class) to bail out corporations for the second time in less than twenty years.

> Don't be fooled by the contemporary contempt against finance.

There has been contempt for greed and corruption for a long time, and for the same reasons that finance continues to earn it today. If the middle class didn’t constantly bail out the banks and their related parasites, you would all be bankrupt.

Frankly I don’t want to hear any advice from anyone in the financial industry until you demonstrate the ability to pay taxes and save enough to make it through the next crisis without crawling to the capitol building with your hand out.

[lazide]

Pretty sure you’re blaming the wrong people. I’m not now and have never been in finance - but blaming banks or traders for the Fed’s actions is prima facia ridiculous.

And throwing in the whole ‘greed is good’ stereotype doesn’t help.

[nicoffeine]

Did the fed lobby for the end of regulations and then immediately tank the world economy with a pyramid scheme?

Blaming the fed for the bailout is like blaming firefighters for putting out a fire instead of the arsonist. That’s a pretty strange understanding of accountability.

While the world economy burned to the ground and families went hungry, the financial industry awarded their executives with billions of dollars in bonuses. If that isn’t greed, what is it?

[lazide]

Which ones exactly and how did they pull off this apparent massive conspiracy?

Near as I can tell, Greenspan pumping trillions of near free credit into the economy is nearly if not more culpable than the loose underwriting at these banks - after all, if they didn’t loosen them, they’d lose their market share in near free credit environments.

And what about the borrowers that were signing up for these completely unrealistic loans? How do they fit in?

And the poor bastards bidding crazy amounts trying to get a house, any house, and also way overpaying in any real sense because of these crazy bidding wars?

It’s easy to blame amorphous entities, it’s hard to really nail down what was actually happening - and point out that everyone in the US was playing a part in a spiraling out of control mess.

[nicoffeine]

> Which ones exactly and how did they pull off this apparent massive conspiracy?

Most of those details are in the findings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission [1]:

"More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe. This approach had opened up gaps in oversight of critical areas with trillions of dollars at risk, such as the shadow banking system and over-the-counter derivatives markets. In addition, the government permitted financial firms to pick their preferred regulators in what became a race to the weakest supervisor."

...

"In the years leading up to the crisis, too many financial institutions, as well as too many households, borrowed to the hilt. ... [A]s of 2007, the leverage ratios [of the five major investment banks] were as high as 40 to 1, meaning for every $40 in assets, there was only $1 in capital to cover losses. Less than a 3% drop in asset values could wipe out a firm. To make matters worse, much of their borrowing was short-term, in the overnight market—meaning the borrowing had to be renewed each and every day. ... And the leverage was often hidden—in derivatives positions, in off-balance-sheet entities, and through "window dressing" of financial reports available to the investing public. ... The heavy debt taken on by some financial institutions was exacerbated by the risky assets they were acquiring with that debt. As the mortgage and real estate markets churned out riskier and riskier loans and securities, many financial institutions loaded up on them."

...

> Near as I can tell, Greenspan pumping trillions of near free credit into the economy is nearly if not more culpable than the loose underwriting at these banks - after all, if they didn’t loosen them, they’d lose their market share in near free credit environments.

None of the firms told Greenspan to stop. They pushed for more and more deregulations and continued to take the money.

> And what about the borrowers that were signing up for these completely unrealistic loans? How do they fit in?

> It’s easy to blame amorphous entities, it’s hard to really nail down what was actually happening - and point out that everyone in the US was playing a part in a spiraling out of control mess.

No, it's pretty well documented. Calling the financial industry "amorphous entities" is... well, just kind of humorous. It's your choice whether to hold the industry that spent decades eliminating regulations for themselves accountable, or the people the industry took advantage of once they were free of oversight.

In line with your argument, if our financial elite don't know more about finance than everyday citizens (why else hold them equally accountable), and they're too incompetent to regulate themselves (else they would have corrected the Fed's behavior), what is their purpose? Wouldn't it be cheaper for everyone if we gave practically interest free money directly to businesses that produce actual goods and services?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crisis_Inquiry_Commi...

[lazide]

Your documentation literally backs it up as a wide scale failure of an industry resulting from many contributing factors slowly building up over time, not an explicit conspiracy, or caused by concrete players who had all the cards and knew the whole situation or had any historic examples that could show where what they were doing would go.

You can certainly go on about all the folks who didn't stand up and say 'Stop!' - but really, we've got a bunch of those brewing in tech, and no one listens to anyone saying stop there either. There are a million apocalypses predicted every day - and it's rare if any of them ever ACTUALLY happen.

In retrospect, you can find those doing it in Finance back then, but they couldn't stop this mess anymore than anyone else - and plenty of people easily papered over the possibility of the crash, the same as we paper over a million other issues in tech.

The regulators were in on all this too.

So you can blame 'finance', same as someone could blame 'tech' for the election. But it doesn't really mean anything and it won't change anything, because it doesn't provide any useful information or potential corrective action.

[krageon]

The financial industry is a necessary evil because our entire financial system is so fucked up. I recognise that a certain amount of cognitive dissonance is required if you work in the industry, but I think saying it is a primary driver for social improvement is really taking that way too far.

That said, if you write cool software that is cool. It doesn't need to have a huge social impact as long as you enjoy creating it, which appears to be the case here :)

[logotype]

Thank you!