[benburton]

> I think we can all sleep easy that the terrifyingly smart rich people made the right call on how to handle their own exposure.

My personal Venn diagram of "terrifyingly smart people" and "people involved with cryptocurrency" is a null set.

[SturgeonsLaw]

The people building distributed tech and the people shilling shitcoins on Youtube are two different groups

[tim333]

Jump aren't really crypto folk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_Trading

It's kind of a new thing for them. They do HFT and the like in normal financial markets.

>Jump Trading is a registered broker-dealer and member of multiple exchanges including the CME Group and the New York Stock Exchange.[13][4] They are also members of most European exchanges including Eurex and the London Stock Exchange.[14][15]

>In September 2021, Jump announced their cryptocurrency business through a new brand named Jump Crypto

Also from their website:

>We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting-edge research to global financial markets.

so they sound a bit more of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies type outfit

[benreesman]

Jump is really good, I’m not sure I’d compare them to RenTech, that’s very select company, but certainly Jump Crypto has a lot more in common with e.g. Alameda Research than they do with $COIN_COMPANY.

It’s a very opaque business, but AFAIK Jump’s bread-and-butter desks are more like ultra-low-latency microwave-tower Chicago <-> NY/NJ arbitrage.

When conducted ethically (which ic clearly not always), arbitrageurs and market makers provide a critical, socially useful function. There are ways to cheat, and people do everyday, but that’s any business.

Retail traders benefit from ethical HFT whether that’s on ARCA or Binance. I’m not sure the same can be said for things like PFOF, intentionally mispriced IPOs, or offering crypto traders 100x leverage.

[loceng]

What's the Venn diagram look to you between projects using blockchain vs. projects using blockchain inherently designed to have or allow same pattern as Ponzi and MLM schemes?

[benreesman]

I think there’s a general consensus about the speculative bubble in the crypto asset class, but that’s a consequence of central-bank monetary policy, you’ll find the same in real-estate, equities, precious metals, you name it. When the cost of capital is ~0, the scammers come out of the woodwork. Flack-it-till-you SPAC it.

But even if it all ends in tears it will have financed research in:

- Byzantine consensus - Gossip protocols in P2P networking - Zero-Knowledge Proofs - Auction Theory - Verifiably Random Functions - Virtual Machine execution cost models

right off the top of my head.

[newswasboring]

Care to give some names? I'm tired of only knowing cryptobros as representatives of crypto world

[benreesman]

https://iohk.io/team/

https://www.parity.io/about

https://celo.org/about

https://wintermute.com/about

https://www.alameda-research.com/the-team

https://www.lmax.com/press-centre

From IO-HK: “ Philip is professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh and senior research fellow at IOHK since 2017. He is an ACM fellow and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a past chair of ACM Sigplan. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor at Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 70 with more than 24,000 citations, according to Google Scholar. He contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery. Philip is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison-Wesley, 2004), Java Generics and Collections (O’Reilly, 2006) and Programming Language Foundations in Agda (2018). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich. Philip is a past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson research merit fellowship, and a winner of Sigplan awards for both distinguished service (2004-09) and most influential paper (‘Imperative functional programming’, by Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler).”

[benreesman]

https://iohk.io/team/ is probably the best single link that demonstrates how absurd that statement is, but that group is far from the only one where basically any of the senior technical people could work basically wherever the hell they want.

[capitalsigma]

Are we supposed to know who any of these people are?

[benreesman]

The first 5 or 10 people on that list include ACM Fellows, Godel winners, full professors at Oxford, that type of thing.

I’m a bit of an FP weenie so I’d probably be most starstruck by meeting Wadler, but yeah, heavy, heavy hitters.

[kooshball]

serious question at what point do you concede your biased understanding of the world is wrong? if there is no such scenario are you really thinking critically?