portent

The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$1=2$), NFTs are not fungible with NFTs (1NFT+1NFT=1NFT+1NFT).

re: surprisingly they don't say infinity

I'm not sure it's that surprising, the expectation is only infinity if you think the person making the payout has the capacity to pay an infinite amount. The second you think this amount is finite (which must always be the case in reality), then the expectation becomes finite and probably quite small.

I agree in the more general point, expectation is not always the best tool for extremely rare / extremely significant scenarios.

The poster is using an interview technique of creating an imaginary scenario, e.g. "deal with a work colleague who is advocating a sub-optimal position". This seems entirely reasonable.

It seems to me that you've jumped to a very strong conclusion, based on a brief conversation that you have interpreted in the least charitable way possible.

Traders typically provide two prices - the price they will buy at and the price they will sell at. Their profit comes from the spread between. A good trader does not care if the market moves up or down, they make their money on the spread, a trader typically wants as little inventory as possible.

The people who cause markets to move are not the traders, they are the people who buy from and sell to the traders.

I'm sure technically you are right on the written wording of the law, but you can be technically right on many subjects and make the wrong business calls. Avoiding a vanishingly small regulatory risk by making real damage to your company seems like a bad call.

You could totally eliminate the risk of meteorite impact on your business by relocating down a mineshaft...

Many regulated industries need to store data for multiple years, often in a secure format e.g. WORM storage

That's a great and informative answer, only minor comment that I think OP said the project was 2 years but the database portion was 1 month of that 2 years.

Still I agree better not to roll your own stuff unless it is absolutely critical.

A good option can be to use your own data center for base load, and on top of that use AWS for traffic spikes. That way you still have the flexibility to adapt quickly but at a lower cost, once you reach a certain scale.

Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that US taxpayers will need US dollars at tax payment time.

I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme.

A pyramid scheme is one where there is a continued and ongoing transfer of wealth from new scheme joiners to earlier scheme joiners, which works great until the supply of new joiners dries up - then the thing collapses.

A new currency could work (in theory) absolutely fine with no further issuance, and no new joiners beyond the first round of adopters - not at all the same as a pyramid scheme.

The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" applies to the US. What if the hacker lives somewhere else? Then that law does not apply to him, and the action was not illegal.

I have been to the NY Federal Reserve Building and seen much of the gold - from the outside of the open door of the vault. This is the highlight of the public tour of the FRB in lower Manhattan. There are many different cages inside the vault - some containing just a handful of bars, and some with gold stacked near to the roof. But we are not told which cage corresponds to which country - that information is secret.

All the bars look identical, to me anyway - there are no stacks of coins or goblets etc. that I could see. (Not all the cages are visible from the vault entrance).

The Fed states in the tour that sovereign nations can keep their gold in the vault, virtually free of charge. And take it back at any time. This is basically a service to the world that the US has provided since the second world war, when much of Europe wanted - for obvious reasons - to move their gold to a safe haven.

As the Federal Reserve is a very secure place, and great value for money, I think most nations have been fine to use that - much cheaper and easier than building a facility that is equally secure.

So personally I'm not sure about the conspiracy theories saying that the Fed refuses to release the gold; to me that is easy for any nation to test - just ask for it, it could be done publicly except that you signal to any thief the date/time of when to attack :-)

OK so in specific case of apple story is complicated by the onshore/offshore tax situation, but it could well be that they have more cash than they know what to do with - in which case returning it to shareholders makes sense instead of using it badly. But it is really not an obvious statement that buying back shares actually returns any value to shareholders.

In my view you really should qualify your earlier statement that "Buy-backs are more tax efficient because they increase stock price" as it is really not a generally true statement. If it was, I would be in the business of buying companies, then making them use any free cash to buy back some shares from me (my remaining shares then somehow go up in value), then selling the remainder back to the market. Free money, it would be great!