Maybe. Those are not clearly indicated as mistakes either (i.e. the article does not demonstrate or even argue that another choice would more likely than not have led to a better outcome).
And the article conveys some justification for the choices that did get made. For example, they couldn't use certain "second tier" Ethereum features because they aren't approved in states like New York? So maybe you argue that such features should have been used to save on gas fees, but then you're optimizing for a different outcome -- the outcome where you don't win the auction. With the benefit of hindsight, sure, but the leaders didn't know before the auction that they would lose. So it was certainly a reasonable choice to take the approach that seemed most likely to raise the most money.
Or at least -some- sort of suggested mechanism by which that opportunity could and would have been exercised.
"They could have invested better" - sure, they probably could have. However, there is no reason to believe they -would- have invested in a way that better serves their customers (or whatever 'better' means, that isn't just maintain the status quo), given they never have shown any inkling to do so in the past. Given no proposed catalyst to cause a change on their part, there is no reason to believe they would have changed; ergo, this particular change's leading to 'better' results equals a better outcome than this change not having occurred.
Well the answer is probably in 95% of the cases 'not enough sales', but it wont tell you anything. Also I believe even in hindsight you dont know what was really the problem (in the sense that you know what could have been done to make it succesful)
To accurately judge though, we need to know how many people/companies are offered large sums and decline, and how that works out. It might still have been a bad decision that just happened to work out.
They recovered while acting ethically - I think a better thing to ponder is whether the company would have gained more ground without the initial setback from pulling the product.
Though any speculation we have there is just that - pure speculation.
The interesting question is whether it was a mistake. Just because it was eventually rolled back, doesn't mean it wasn't worth it to win the large customer.
To me, it seems that they started to use mitigation strategies because they figured the time/economic variable that I pointed out, and realized the impossibility of their gamble.
They had a customer base that would knife them at the first hint of a liquidity issue, then they had a liquidity issue. Of course a different approach would have reduced their returns, but then they’d still be in business.
I'm more of the opinion that if the existing customers were concerned enough, they could have found a better solution. Forming a consortium doesn't seem too far off. Of course now i'm speculating with somebody else money, but I also believe somebody run the numbers. Strategy is basically about running numbers continuously about every possible scenario.
If one of the competitors cared to address the issue, yeah, it would have gone down. When there's a choice, there's (more) incentive to address things that will give you bad press.
If they really had no great alternative, and the chain of reasoning was that clear, then traders would have anticipated it and it wouldn't have caused any major problems.
Since it was widely unexpected and people did lose piles of money, I expect there were other likely alternatives and perhaps your analysis may be suffering from a bit of post-hoc rationalization.
We may disagree—I think that surely there must have been some way of solving the problem—but it seems very unlikely to me that they missed it.
They just exercised judgement that I think was suboptimal.
Of course, they are selling millions of products and making billions of dollars doing it, so not sure I can claim I’m unambiguously right.
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