hrudham, Kraken's new VP Product here -- my apologies that you're having trouble removing this. This is a mistake if you are not being removed. I'm investigating now to a) confirm that unsubscribe requests are working and b) find a way to lower/remove that 30 day period.
UPDATE: Thanks again for raising this issue hrudham. It seems there is indeed a bug in the current unsubscribe flow. This was not intentional behavior, and it will be corrected. As for "30 day" period, my initial review indicates this should take 24-48hrs max to be fully unsubscribed (based on how our email and account systems interact). Working on getting fixes for everything. Will update again once it's all corrected.
You should investigate who in your company decided upon the 30 days and be weary of what they're up to.
30 days is unheard of for an unsubscribe system. Usually it's not mentioned or it's 48 hours. Very very few websites claim they need thirty days, and it's ridiculous.
Will Kraken provide bitcoin savings accounts? I'm thinking something where you deposit some BTC, it gets loaned out for several months to a year (and you're not allowed to withdraw during that time), and you get paid an interest rate denominated in BTC. Would be nice to get a positive real rate given the 21M supply cap.
Given that an SPDI isn't a deposit-taking license (like a traditional banking license), what building blocks will the Kraken SPDI give you, that you don't have today? Is it mainly the ability to interface with the banking system/plumbing, without being subject to a third-party's AML and risk management processes? Or something else?
Possible to plug directly into the banking system, and also provide common savings/checking bank account experiences to customers. The key difference is in being fully reserve backed (no fractional reserves). David Kinitsky and Marco Santori from Kraken talk some of these details in a podcast called "On The Brink", if you'd like to learn more.
If I get paid in crypto can I custody it with you and use it to pay bills, buy a house, etc.? Are you trying to make this like a real bank? My normal bank will cancel my account if I start wiring in large amounts of fiat that originated from a crypto exchange. Also, if I have a crypto business, can you be my crypto business banker? Thanks.
You're welcome! You can sign-up for a standard Kraken account now, or wait until we announce more about the SPDI bank experience. We should have more details out before the end of the year.
I have a Kraken account - but I am a Poloniex engineer :) but I will be happy to use your banking services in the future! Amazing work. I don’t think most people outside of crypto (and especially HN) understand the value proposition for what you are providing. This is huge!
Ha! Thanks for your work there, and glad to hear it. We are all in this together -- building a better overall financial and computing systems. More people will understand as we launch more features and products.
Is it a no-op? Does it increase safety of fiat and/or crypto deposits, or increase e.g. the risk that you'll be forced to lock an account for months to comply with some banking laws?
Most customers, including those in Europe, shouldn't see any noticeable change. The longterm improvements customers will see is for more/better funding options (for everyone) and new banking products (for some regions).
Are you referring to supporting customers in WA?
Or hiring engineers from WA?
Unfortunately our service does not currently support residents of WA. The SPDI should help with this in the future.
Re: working at Kraken, we hire in all US states including WA and most countries globally. We're one of the few global companies that was already fully remote before Covid19. Any engineers in Washington state are encouraged to apply!
We do slightly adjust pay based on location, but most positions stay within a range regardless of your location. Our CEO Jesse and CBO Christina recorded a whole podcast on our compensation philosophy and distributed workforce approach.
Are you hiring for any positions in Cheyenne as a result of acquiring the license there, or is everything purely remote? The jobs site makes it look like the latter.
Yes! We are excited to invest in Cheyenne and Wyoming. Several members of the Kraken team are moving to Cheyenne, and we will be hiring more locally. You should expect to see more job postings there over the coming year.
Some of our team has also expressed interest in visiting Cheyenne to work for a period of time, even if they are not moving there full-time! We will continue to have many fully remote positions open for hiring globally (as we always have).
That's awesome. In today's decentralized world I'd love for more companies to encourage hiring in the smaller cities of the US. It would really increase our competitiveness globally if the average US programmer wasn't trying to cover rent on a 500 sqft $2k/mo flat in San Francisco.
Can't go into details yet, but we do expect the SPDI setup to benefit all our global customers in various ways -- from easier funding options to totally new banking products. Stay tuned.
In my (granted fairly limited) experience, very few of those hauling in the really huge paypackets (or the huge, huge bonuses or clever backhanders or whatever) are doing it for the actual money. They don't spend the money they have now. It doesn't seem to be about having the money. It's some kind of social status game involving bringing in the money. Coming up with ways to dodge tax doesn't seem to be about having more money to spend; it's another part of the game, and they're all playing against themselves and each other.
As a wealthy person once explained it to me: half the fun is making a ton of money, and half is finding a way not to pay (or just a tiny amount of) taxes.
If you have $20m in the bank and are living off of investment income, in a way it makes sense. You want the highest return, for the least effort and risk required. Taxes eat into that.
As a wealthy person once explained it to me: half the fun is making a ton of money, and half is finding a way not to pay (or just a tiny amount of) taxes.
Exactly; that leaves none of the fun being in actually spending it.
Going WAY off-topic now, I split the very wealthy into two groups. Rich people, and poor people who happen to have money.
Rich people think differently. They've got a whole lot of money, and now they can stop worrying about that and get on with doing things. Bill Gates deciding to team up with Rotary International et al and see if we can't finally kill Polio stone cold dead with the extra help of all this money that seems to be cluttering up his bank account. This is the action of a rich man.
Poor people with money have the same concerns and same aims as they did when they didn't have money. They just buy a more expensive watch, a more expensive car, move their social status group to be around other similarly wealthy people and signal at each other, keep thinking about making more money.
Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users.
Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile.
Rdio could easily carve out a dedicated customer base at the high-end who would pay MUCH MORE for a Pro version (I'd do $50 a month).
The UI is the best since gasp Winamp. But their networking was terrible. I could never use the app while traveling abroad plus the Mobile streaming was useless to say the least. Yes, I'm an audio purist, but I don't mind sacrificing quality for the convenience of not listening to listening to regular radio payola.
It's sad, a simple buffer implementation would have kept me as a customer, but looks like they focused more on failed Video platforms (did anyone ever use Vdio?)
This is my impression too - and as a rdio subscriber myself, I also have annecdotal evidence: I maintain a huge offline library of losslessly bought music and that will never be replaced by a streamign service. Still, I love rdio as a preview, discovery and social hub - the people I interacted with there are all very similar: Audiophiles, with deep knowledge about music, digital crate diggers. Most, including me, still buy everything they like.
Rdio has always been the service for true music enthusiasts in my mind and, frankly, I don't know where to go from here - I tried most other services at some point and have been pretty disappointed with their superficial approach to discovery and social features.
Just now I tried Spotify again and I don't like it all: No album focus, no label focus. Social features via Facebook? Meh.
ever since I discovered rdio a year or so ago I am always telling friends etc.. I think their UI is superior and the experience is just better than e.g. pandora imo...
I constantly use the service. I download songs to listen to offline while driving, streaming albums / playlists while coding, and if I'm at home and chilling, I normally have the Rdio Roku app playing music while I'm cooking or keep my laptop on and connected to Bluetooth while remote controlling it from my phone (phone notifications over Bluetooth audio get annoying). It's an amazing service and I'm really sad to see it go. :/
I agree that it seems like a big misstep to discontinue the service so quickly. Given their relative size, there have to be hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, and an order of magnitude more Free subscribers that are dedicated Rdio customers. That's significant. Why inspire all those people to go away and risk them getting attached to another competing service? Why not simply re-brand Rdio as Pandora for the time being?
I understand that there are costs associated with maintaining the Rdio application back-end; all the API services the clients use, databases, content delivery network, media storage, new music ingestion, royalty payment system, the mobile, auto, TV and set-top apps etc. It costs a lot of dough just keeping the lights on.
But how much does it cost to a) keep the lights on for say 6 months to a year versus b) what, develop your own product and market the hell out of it so you can start from 0 paying subscribers and try to work your way back up to where Rdio was? (is what Pandora has in mind? Can't believe they just wanted to snuff the service.)
But somebody must have done the math and said "yep, makes sense, kill it." Either because they just wanted to flush Rdio out of the way or because the math comparison was a no-brainer.
In the meantime, I'm going to join you in continuing to enjoy the best, and most beautiful on-demand streaming service available.
(not sure about the comments regarding buggy mobile streaming. At 320 it may drop in the countryside, but dial it down to 192 or lower and you're fine. Yeah I like high grade audio too, but I prefer lower grade music to no music at all.)
Yeah, I just switched to rdio and I love it. The interface is so clean and slick. It's a lot less buggy / unreliable than Spotify imo. It's such a pity.
Strange. I was the biggest Rdio advocate until it just flat out didn't work on my MacBook. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no luck. Support couldn't do much for me. I ended up moving to Spotify and while I agree that Rdio has a superior UI, Spotify worked consistently on my machine. Plus, their mobile app, especially offline playback, is a godsend on long trips.
Such is the way of the world. 50,000 customers willing to pay $50 a month aren't worth the trouble, especially if they're even slightly demanding. Everyone wants the 50 million users willing to put up with ads that bring in $3 a month or are willing to pay $5 or $10.
In fairness, it's probably the only way to get the coveted billion-dollar valuation. If that's your metric for success rather than operating margins or return on shareholders' equity, you don't really have much of a choice. A small company could serve those 50,000 very well and make its founders and investors quite rich, but very few people want to run a small company. It's all about getting to $1 billion and either selling out huge or going public. That status is more important to almost everyone than actually making money or creating something people like. So enjoy your Apple Music and your Pandora!
Die hard audio people using the desktop application surely must have been turned off by the fact that the desktop application could not even do gapless playback, even after years of subscribers begging for it over their forums.
In my experience the Android application, while able to do gapless, was not able to consistently _stay logged in and play music_. Or feed back track identity through bluetooth devices to cars and the Pebble.
The only "improvements" made to either the desktop or the mobile application seemed to be about making it harder to see or filter which songs you had added to your Favourites.
I wanted it to work out, but it became so frustrating that I gave up a bit under a year ago and went back to Spotify.
Really like what this team is building. We have plenty of tools for people that live in one city and travel occasionally, but very few tools for those that want to rotate multiple locations for a few months at each spot.
If we had a better way to have a registered agent for acceptance of physical mail, tax docs, etc while living a nomadic life, I think many more people would do this.
I generally agree with your categorization, but I would be more specific that Tesla is both a Battery distribution AND marketing company. EVs existed prior to Tesla, but they were the first company to identify and correctly serve the high end market with the Roadster.
My company Chrg specializes in charging infrastructure. Note that the Superchargers you mentioned actually use specially designed Tesla batteries, which are precursors to the Home battery product Tesla will likely be launching soon.
Solar advancements are a great thing for Tesla. Once power is captured via solar panels, it will need to be stored – preferably in Tesla batteries.
