joyfylbanana

I wonder how much CFTC employees were placing those crypto futures and options before the announcement.

The so-called DeFi is full of centralized choke points, such as stablecoins and other centrally issued securities

People who can use VPN

That's why it pays.

From board perspective it is difficult, because it is difficult to find CEO to do the layoffs and start strategy work again. It is just easier to keep the previous CEO if he is willing to do the dirty work.

The excessive hiring before the market downturn was also copycat behaviour, not about about having good investment ideas. Now everyone has realized that they were in a mass-psychosis, and start having mass-sensibility instead.

The biggest difference is, that with financial debt you basically always have to pay it back in a way or another. With technical debt in startup context, it happens very often that you don't have to pay it back (failures). It is quite logical why startup founders prefer to have technical debt, as the venture is risky in any case it is the kind of liability that you only have to pay if you are successful.

If you are transacting in a business environment, I think it is an added benefit if the counterparty in the transaction can't deduce information out of your transaction. Such as how much assets you have, to what other services have you been sending funds and so on. As Bitcoin does have public ledger, and if you just use single address and don't do any privacy enchancing practices, lots of information could be deductible using blockchain analysis.

I would also suspect that using data collected by governments is used for business advantage. Of course it is hard to prove quite often. Personally I think that in principle it just doesn't make sense to spread your data around, as the benefits are tiny and the potential downsides can be big.

I still use only BTC and the reason why I use it is not because it is so great technically, I just don't like fiat.

That sentence doesn't make any sense. People can become merchants whenever they want for example at flea market, then suddenly they receiving at taler works for them?

This project never made any sense. Move on.

Looking at the downward trend in volumes, I suspect the profits come from the results of selling their bitcoins they have been holding in the balance sheet, the service itself is unprofitable.

LocalBitcoins stopped providing the "in-person" model years ago. Also it really wasn't a business for them as people don't need the escrow service for that. They became regulated, implementing all KYC and AML stuff and I guess that drove customers away to other venues. Binance P2P seems to be the most active these days. In-person trading has been replaced with Bitcoin ATM's I would guess.