The AI part of this is a red herring. This is above all a big devops failure.
Three takeaways:
1. TEST YOUR BACKUPS. If you have not confirmed that you can restore, then you don’t have backup. If the backups are in the same place as your prod DB, you also don’t have backup.
2. Don’t use Railway. They are not serious.
3. Don’t rely on this guy. The entire postmortem takes no accountability and instead includes a “confession” from Cursor agent. He is also not serious.
4. See #1.
Running a single bad command will happen sometimes, whether by human or machine. If that’s all it takes to perma delete your service then what you have is a hackathon project, not a business.
I'm fully cognizant that pc understands how payments work, hence why I'm asking the question. What you can infer is this - there is either some I'm missing, or there is some ulterior motive here.
Many skeptics assume that stablecoins are just about regulatory arbitrage.
That's part of it, but:
1. Progress often depends on evolving obsolete regulation.
Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc) and yet in the early years they had to work around taxi regs.
2. Blockchains are a fundamentally more robust way to run a ledger.
If any of you have ever written software touching tradfi custody you'll know about "reconciliation"--start of every business day, you get a dump of files in your FTP server in various proprietary formats. You parse the transactions and they don't add up. The Recon team hand-corrects and recategorizes edge cases so that the balance deltas match transaction totals and everything ties out.
This type of absurd duct tape is ubiquitous, and it's a major reason why trad rails have multi-day settlement times and even longer for international. Inflates team size and cost required to run a product. SWIFT is a messaging system -- bankers use it to essentially text each other about wires to figure out issue resolution. Some lower-level trad payments regulations are written assuming that this level of manual oversight is required to prevent ledgering errors and ensure sound accounting.
Stablecoins run on transparent, precise ledgers with machine consensus. This doesn't solve everything, but there are large categories of issues that can occur in trad payments that do not exist onchain.
3. Control is liability.
Some important regulations actually encourage blockchain-based payments. For example, money transmitter law places significant requirements on custodial money transmitters (you take money from Alice, with a promise to give it to Bob) that do not apply to noncustodial channels (you give Alice a mechanism to send directly to Bob).
I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad.
My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.
> If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen
This is a nice lens for looking at when stablecoins make sense.
If you're an American using your Chase account to buy coffee at Starbucks, the permissioned, heuristically fraud-checked, slow-settling tradfi system is well optimized for you.
If you are an importer buying $3m worth of bulk coffee from Kenya, you would much rather have an instant 1:1 USD transfer on beautifully efficient machine consensus.
In many countries in the world, the banking system is extractive and unreliable. The "confused employee" is not there to help you. The two weeks of money in transit is no benefit, just a source of additional counterparty risk, cost, and delay.
An immutable and transparent ledger is not for everything but it is a useful primitive.
> Uber works much better than taxis (once upon a time, people could "call a dispatcher" an hour in advance, wait on hold, etc)
Uber rides ARE taxis.
The innovation of Uber wasn't done by Uber it was done by everyone having a GPS enabled always connected phone and computing device in their hand at all times.
Uber isn't just taxis - if a bunch of taxi companies just got together and developed a taxi ordering app that looks just like Uber, it still won't be Uber.
Uber is a whole bunch of things combined:
- very intuitive taxi ordering UX (for riders) and dispatching UX (for drivers).
- circumventing regulation so there are no more artificial limits on taxi supply in a given city.
- enabling gig economy: because you can use your own personal vehicle, you can work anytime you want for however long you want. You don't need to lease a taxi for an entire week or an entire month. You can choose to work for 4 hours on a weekend only during surge times if you wanted to. So it allows supply to be elastic to meet demand while also offering flexible work arrangements for part-time drivers.
> The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions [...] This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost)
That's more or less exactly what this is. Stripe is launching an EVM L1.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine part gives it a mature tech stack with experienced developers and auditors. Plus, well-tested smart contracts that have already processed billions of dollars on other chains can be deployed on Tempo.
The "Stripe L1" part will ensure that it's fast, simple, near zero cost.
If we skipped the whole blockchain part, wouldn’t it be faster, simpler, cheaper? What value does the whole blockchain, EVM, L1 offer? Don’t they fully control the network? Don’t they decide “everything” anyway?
I’d love to understand it, I’m not a hater, just a developer who don’t quite get this announcement.
good questions - and your questions are, or could be, actually rhetorical. Yes, they are the validator and thus they control the transactions. It could be as simple as having a Database at the end ... Well I can think of two things:
1- they start by owning all validators, maybe they expect to open validators to other entities at some point in the future. If these entities don't collude together, we could expect some sort of neutrality
2- Marketing - because crypto is coming at an ATH and why not getting some good marketing for free (or almost)
And people mentioning costs, this is not particularly relevant. L2s are extremely cheap by most standards, let alone by Stripe standards which charge horrendous fees.
My questions were not rhetorical. I’m actually interested in the space (fintech, web3, blockchain, etc), but in this space particularly, it’s hard to discern marketing gimmick from use cases where these technologies actually provide real value, so I’m being critical of these announcements while at the same time keeping an open mind.
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
> Just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one
Problem: a forum full of misanthropes dedicated to saying the worst things allowed under the first amendment.
Bad solution: erode 1A at the case law level
Bad solution: censor the internet at the backbone level
Freedom isn't free. We're lucky to live in country with robust speech protections. The tradeoff is that there will always be some people who get a kick out of going right to edge of what they can get away. My view is that our civil liberties are worth it.
And speaking of user-hostile, locked-down phones...
a galactic irony that Ben Wiser, the Googler who posted this proposal, has a blog where his most recent post is a rant about how he's being unfairly restricted and can't freely run the software he wants on his own device.
It's not clear when his most recent post is; the server says "Last-Modified: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 06:00:31 GMT" but I believe I saw references to this post before that in the current discussion.
(What's with the trend of completely omitting any dates on a blog?)
In uni the mantra from the professors was "put a date and version on everything you write for others".
Students still forgot in the first year but got heavily marked down for it. It quickly got etched into your brain to date and version just about anything you did.
Today when I see an undated blog entry it seriously affects my perception of the writers integrity.
<item>
<title>I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone</title>
<link>
https://benwiser.com/blog/I-just-spent-£700-to-have-my-own-app-on-my-iPhone.html
</link>
<pubDate>2022-03-04T11:30:34.067Z</pubDate>
</item>
Inversely, I hate trying to search for old articles and being unable to find them because something about the websites metadata says a blog from 2004 is from 2018. It makes Google's time window search (and general, research for contemporary views) almost impossible.
Not the same thing. Attestation doesn't mean you can't run software you want on your own phone, which Android allows despite having build attestation APIs.
It means you can, but may then be ostracised from services for having an "unsupported" environment, which is in many ways even worse because it's leveraging peer pressure.
It is my understanding that attestation could be used to control which software is running on the client's computer prior to granting access to a web service, yes?
Otherwise, what would the point be of using to, say, protect DRM content on a webpage if I can just attach a debugger to the process in question?
Three takeaways:
1. TEST YOUR BACKUPS. If you have not confirmed that you can restore, then you don’t have backup. If the backups are in the same place as your prod DB, you also don’t have backup.
2. Don’t use Railway. They are not serious.
3. Don’t rely on this guy. The entire postmortem takes no accountability and instead includes a “confession” from Cursor agent. He is also not serious.
4. See #1.
Running a single bad command will happen sometimes, whether by human or machine. If that’s all it takes to perma delete your service then what you have is a hackathon project, not a business.