Compared to other crashes where there seemed to be an underlying economic issue - this one feels like it will bounce back quickly at some point in my amateur opinion. Am tempted by some 2022 SPY leaps for this reason.
> Someone's just bought a $1000 call option on a stock that's currently $400? Automated trading systems will probably raise alerts on that stock since someone must know something for that to happen.
Not an expert but I'd be surprised if one trade like that triggered anything, could easily be a hedge.
Lots of third party implementations will take a few % off your bottom line. That's the main one.
There's a couple of other points here as well:
- If you do enough volume, you're able to negotiate the fee with the payment processor, we've done this successfully. If you outsource, that negotiation is the third parties margin.
- I'm not sure if this is true for third parties, but if they wrap up all your payouts in your native currency (EG GBP£), you lose money on forex. We try our best to have all our EUR and USD sales land in their respective currency accounts, then convert them with low cost services such as transferwise which has saved us a lot of money in the long run.
Saving on your forex and having no third party processor fees, I think in some instances you could be saving in the region of £40,000 to £80,000 per £1mm of sales.
We also couldn't find a third party implementation that would allow us to bill for our product, varied by country, amount, currency AND billing frequency. This fine tuned control can have real benefit, for example we noticed in Ukraine we had high traffic but no sales - by introducing a low monthly UAH billing option we started to grow sales in this region.
Other third party implementations won't handle VAT properly or comprehensively which can create more of an accounting burden, or round VAT transactions unfavourably (size of that benefit is irrelevant to very small obviously depending on volume of transactions!) This gap is being slowly filled from what I've been seeing though.
Using a third party solution for SaaS will always have some level of disconnect, it just feels nicer for the customer when it's all integrated seamlessly. One example being you have full control over branding and distribution of invoices/receipts etc.
I'm currently rewriting our store implementation, and it's complicated.
One example is that some currencies have 100 subunits (eg USD), some have 10 subunits (EG TWD/MOP) and some have no subunits (eg JPY). This is made slightly more difficult in that Stripe/Paypal will treat subunits differently, for example Paypal might treat JPY as having 100 subunits and Stripe will treat it with 0 subunits.
You want to be really careful here not to charge 10x/100x more/less to the end customer than you imagine.
Formatting currencies is also something you need to do carefully as dots and commas mean completely different things in various countries and can lead to unexpected charges for customers.
Don't get me started on VAT :P
All worth it in the end though, I enjoy writing this sort of thing and I do see long term benefit to our business that we do it all in-house.
I'd also recommend future proofing implementations to use longs instead of ints for storing money values. Back when Bitcoin was less valuable we allowed BTC as a currency where 1 subunit = 1 satoshi (100,000,000 satoshis in a bitcoin). It was possible to overflow an int this way.
You also can't really write payment systems with the speed you might write other code in your startup - errors and mistakes here could have real impact on peoples lives. For example, loops that create charges that don't end (possible with both Stripe AND Paypal). Loops can manifest themselves as lock collisions as well. Basically, be careful and if speed is important you probably want to outsource it at the expense of some control.
Devastating for them I imagine. Website offline since 31st December, purposefully timed attack for maximum disruption I would imagine.
Looks like they had aspiration to IPO earlier in 2019, imagine this would now not be on the cards for a long time.
I wonder how much the ransom is for. It appears to be an enormously damaging attack - I wonder if paying it is the best option for their business at this stage, then follow the money.
Our software Construct 3 (https://editor.construct.net/) I think meets most of these points. It runs offline, and we never have access to the users project files. You can save/load locally, and it runs in the browser. Game project files are zips with JSON + raw asset files. No syncing with the server needed so it is fast, and a design mistake that is severely hampering some of our competitors!
I'm not entirely sure how supporting collaboration in real time belongs on this list. Seems like a nice to have that isn't really related to the rest of the list.
That's what we're trying to do and we're making good progress!
As our engine Construct 3 is written in HTML5 itself, Javascript was the natural language choice to integrate with our block system.
All languages have their up and downsides but we love Javascript and think it's suitable because it's used in many industries (not just making games) and is likely to have a growing demand going forwards. I think this is a much easier sell to education than other tools such as Gamemaker who use their own propitiatory language.
We talked to a lot of teachers, and it's a real problem going from block based programming to syntax heavy scripting - there's a chasm there which from a teaching standpoint is sometimes tricky to breach and keep students engaged with.
We've gone for a different approach with Construct 3 which is so far resonating well in education, by mixing our block based programming system with Javascript itself helping to smooth the transition:
The above example is a mix of block based and Javascript, but it can go all the way to making games with pure Javascript in script files - we're hoping to cover the transition in education from between Scratch and other tools such as Unity. There's a big gap there.
If I understand correctly, the full URL is hashed (or at least the first n bits of the full URL). It really isn't computationally expensive to work out undesirable URL's being visited because the undesirable domains are known, and it would be trivial for them to periodically crawl the undesirable domains for all known internal URLs and build a dictionary of hashes.
I think there were some legal rulings IIRC in the UK regarding software to auto mute/block/skip ads on TV/Radio, but for the life of my can't find them.
If it was ruled illegal, then it being "perfectly fine to block them" might be correct ethically but not legally, although I suspect the details of implementation might be the important point.
"The Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation is a United States class-action lawsuit filed in 2005 by merchants and trade associations against Visa, MasterCard, and numerous financial institutions that issue payment cards. The suit was filed due to price fixing and other allegedly anti-competitive trade practices in the credit card industry."
Another area where giving freedom to these businesses ends up screwing the average person. This is why I like the EU, they are strong on consumer rights. The naive would assume these businesses would naturally want to compete on these fees.
From our point of view, a card where we could use our USD and EUR balance to make USD/EUR payments would be one of the biggest pulls if possible. I think recurring USD charges for UK based businesses are probably quite prevalent.
I don't think many UK startups realise how much they lose out on being charged in GBP on these transactions (especially with debit cards). There's likely an opportunity here to educate UK businesses and use that to promote this sort of card.
> all want a corporate card early on for their business spending (to get it off personal cards)
I'm surprised by this, been a while since we were an early business but didn't have any issue getting a corporate debit card which is more than adequate early on.
Tend to agree but I don't think a card is that big of a deal as in this case it's less Stripe owned as it's a Visa card so pretty sure you'd have some additional protection there.
