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Silicon Valley Bank Collapses
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TimFox:

--- Quote from: HuronKing on March 17, 2023, 06:47:20 pm ---Adding to what you said Tim - it's also sometimes the case that lack of risk management isn't a bug caused by some other external factor, but a feature for the rich to get richer as quickly as possible before the whole thing comes crashing down while they bail out with golden parachutes and often move on like locusts to the next company to rinse and repeat.

Enron was giving bonuses to executives moments before the whole thing went to hell:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/02/09/enron.bonuses/index.html#:~:text=The%20list%20of%20so%2Dcalled,to%20give%20them%20severance%20packages.

Enron is one of the rare cases where the perpetrators were punished, somewhat.

Remember Wells Fargo? Coincidentally it's just coming back in the news again.
https://apnews.com/article/wells-fargo-sales-scandal-carrie-tolstedt-guilty-013f744a811b741560b466a7b8e203dc

--- End quote ---

I never understood what Enron was supposed to be doing.
In the court proceedings, apparently they weren't doing anything except accepting funds.
This is far from novel:  look at the history of Dr. Frederick A Cook, the arctic explorer.
He may have been the best expedition physician of his day, serving on an early voyage of Peary and on the ill-fated voyage of the Belgian antarctic expedition, where he probably saved the crew, including Roald Amundsen.

(Of course, Amundsen is remembered as the first man to achieve the South Pole, beating Scott in a two-expedition race by a month.
Amundsen took unfair advantage, being competent and already knowing how to ski before arriving on Antarctica.
Amundsen remained a friend, even after Cook's imprisonment mentioned below.
However, most of Cook's later exploits, including an announced visit to the North Pole, are no longer believed, along with the alleged visit by Peary.
The only well-documented sled trips to the North Pole are much later, in 1986 [one-way] and 1995 [two-way].  These were after the first genuine surface trip, on snowmobiles, in 1968.)

Cook was convicted in 1923 with a long prison term for deceptive practices in the Texas oil patch, with the Texas Eagle corporation of Fort Worth, including paying dividends from stock sales instead of profits.
Some believe the prosecution was politically biased against him, since there were lots of operations doing much the same thing at the time.
Reference:  R M Bryce, Cook & Peary: the polar controversy, resolved, Stackpole, 1997
Marco:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 17, 2023, 07:08:32 pm ---I'm sure they did it just because they don't know what they are doing.

--- End quote ---
Well in retrospect it was a pretty bloody disastrous investment.

They could have many times more gold now, hindsight is of course 20 20.
coppice:

--- Quote from: TimFox on March 17, 2023, 07:29:54 pm ---I never understood what Enron was supposed to be doing.
In the court proceedings, apparently they weren't doing anything except accepting funds.

--- End quote ---
Enron's basic principal of operation was dynamic pricing of energy down to the consumer level. I was approached about a project for this. They needed ultra low power consumption meters for customer's premises that could operate for long periods from a modest sized battery, providing reliable exchanges of pricing and consumption information with rapid updates. When I enquired whether this was a second generation the answer was basically that it would be the first. When I asked how Enron was currently operating there were crickets. I didn't take it beyond that.
james_s:

--- Quote from: tooki on March 17, 2023, 07:51:28 am ---I was just discussing this with a friend last night (who didn’t know about this issue), and I came across the figure of it taking 1200kWh to process a bitcoin transaction. :o And that the entire bitcoin network uses more power than Argentina.

Apparently, a lot of mining is now done on custom ASICs whose useful lifespan is just 1.3 years before it’s no longer economical to run. So mining a bitcoin also creates lots of e-waste.

I think it’s crazy, when you think that this nonsense has wiped out all of the progress made by e.g. mandating very low standby current on chargers at idle. Our poor little planet can’t handle bitcoin’s future.

--- End quote ---


Yes we could totally forget about crypto and then we could forget about all the environmental stuff and just go back to the way everything was in say the 90s and it would all be a wash. Kind of a depressing thought isn't it? All of our efficiency gains are just wiped out by some other use of energy, our overall consumption just keeps rising. A lot of the people I know that talk a lot about "green" stuff are also the ones that are into crypto ironically.
EEVblog:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 17, 2023, 08:06:40 pm ---A lot of the people I know that talk a lot about "green" stuff are also the ones that are into crypto ironically.

--- End quote ---

There are a lot of crypto systems that don't use much power at all.
I posted the numbers once for LBRY/Odysee. The miners that keep the system running use very little power in the scheme of things.
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