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A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

forbes.com

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Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#211

Post by MusaTheRedGuard »

zby wrote: post #130
chrisco255 wrote: post #50

Skepticism might be warranted, but it should be noted by now that decentralized finance has a place in the present and future of our planet and it's not going away. I strongly encourage technologists to keep an open mind and do in depth research into the space. Yes, 2017 was over-hyped. The tech was not mature then, and while it has matured some since then, there's still quite a ways to go. Bitcoin Lightning network…

The problem with decentralized money is that there is no way to manage the supply - you can only commit to a given supply curve, but you cannot adjust it according to the state of the economy. Money is a collective action problem, a public good - it requires a solution that bounds everyone - just like defence.

> you can only commit to a given supply curve, but you cannot adjust it according to the state of the economy.

Why do you think this? Ethereum has changed its inflation schedule a few times recently.

It seems you are basing this on the hard capped supply model of bitcoin which is not the same as every cryptocurrency.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#212

Post by MusaTheRedGuard »

zby wrote: post #136
mbrock wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t you do that?

The fundamental problem is probably with the possibility of fork - if it is decentralized then everyone can fork it if he disagrees with the way it works. But maybe there are some good in-between solutions, less dogmatic, more pragmatic.

Forking is not a problem. It's users voting with their feet.

The possibility of forking is a necessary deterrent in cryptonetwork governance.

If the maintainers of a network become compromised or get coopted by special interests, the collective owners of the network(the holders of the cryptocurrency) have the right to exit.

The right to exit is a necessary part of governance.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#213

Post by kurtisc »

baddox wrote: post #209
kurtisc wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single entity at one point had over 50% of the mining power for Bitcoin, effectively owning its blockchain.

Having just over 50% of mining power does not effectively mean you own the blockchain.

s/effectively owning/effectively determining the concept of 'truth' on/

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#214

Post by sidlls »

rococode wrote: post #55
Alterlife wrote: post #45

As a side note, I generally like reading, but I cannot for the life of me pay attention this circus of an article. The animations give me motion sickness. I see comments here which indicate there may be something worth reading in there, but my brain is screaming at me to ignore it. The whole thing feels like an advertisement. Perhaps it's because suits are making a corporate comeback.

Firefox has a "Reader View" that's super convenient for things like this. Automatically shows a button in the address bar on sites it supports, and it turns the page's content into a simple mostly-text view with some nice customizations: https://i.imgur.com/GJ6fW0y.png

Unfortunately "reader view" does nothing to aid with the "rambling narrative" model that articles these days have. I read through the first half of this one before I gave up: the salient points can easily be condensed into a couple of paragraphs even with some embellishment to avoid being merely a list of facts.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#215

Post by xtracto »

mruts wrote: post #170
PhilippGille wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments on the web without users having to create an account. For example paying a few cents for reading a news article, without an account on the news site and without the high fees for a payment processor. (Via Lightning Network) Example news site: https://yalls.org Example browser extension for great UX: https://github.com/wbobeirne/joule-extension Or even nanopayments for single API calls, between the brows…

Seeing how slow and expensive both BTC and ETH are, micropayments aren’t really viable, tbh. The mining and gas fees for BTC and ETH respectively are going to be higher than the cut a payment processor would take. The one advantage that you might be alluding to is that bitcoins are divisible into satoshi’s, which are much more granular than cents.

That hasn't been my experience. I pay some services with BTC via CryptoPay and is really fast.

What is the alternative? Card? 2% + .3 fee. That's expensive. ACH? takes 5 days to be processed.

What is the fast, cheap digital alternative?

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#217

Post by eouw0o83hf »

defen wrote: post #72
eouw0o83hf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title. Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property. A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-h…

> A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Only if all the property records are already in the ledger, right? If I buy a house via blockchain, someone can still come along and say their great-aunt should have inherited it 80 years ago, before blockchain records existed. So you still need title companies.

For sure - and digitizing that data would take a very long time so it wouldn't be a drop-in replacement for title.

It wouldn't be easy, but it is a good use for the tool.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#218

Post by eouw0o83hf »

peteretep wrote: post #74
eouw0o83hf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title. Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property. A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-h…

Why is this better than the government keeping records, and having court remediation and error correction, rather than “oh my computer got hacked and now my house belongs to someone else”? Company ownership information seems like much the same thing, and is a solved problem in all countries (that want to have solved it).

If the government's records were up-to-date and perfect, the title industry wouldn't really exist. Having publicly-accessible digital records would make the concept of property ownership simple and deterministic to figure out.

And "my computer got hacked" is kind of a blanket argument against using technology in general - by that same argument you should probably never use digital banking/investment or anything online to manage your life, and nothing should ever be digitized.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#219

Post by eouw0o83hf »

travisjungroth wrote: post #70
eouw0o83hf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate, particularly with regards to ownership and property title. Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property. A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable. Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-h…

I've heard this argument, and I don't see how it works. It relies on trusting the information put onto a blockchain.

It most definitely does require a base trust - however that's not an argument against the solution, just a challenge to implementation.

We implicitly trust a tremendous amount of digitized information because we trust its sources - for instance, digital banking works because we trust banks to only log verified transactions to our account. Sourcing that information is absolutely very difficult, but it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.

Re: A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC

#220

Post by wheelerwj »

navigatesol wrote: post #182
quickthrower2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to believe or not believe in? It is what it is. Bitcoin is a perfectly functional means of financial exchange, and has use cases that beat regular cash, and other use case where it sucks compared to cash.

> Bitcoin is a perfectly functional means of financial exchange Okay. So where is the Venture Capital going, and where will the returns stem from?

how are those things related? do all mediums of financial exchange require venture funding? does all crypto qualify as fincial exchange?
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