281–290 of 360 posts
Kind of depressing that they gave up on the "GPs must have been operators" rule (presumably due to pressure by LPs or the press). Do any large VC firms still maintain that?
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I feel like there's some misunderstanding of what these terms are. All VCs are investment advisors (either Exempt Reporting Advisors or Registered Investment Advisor depending on assets under management and investment types). The article is vague in what it actually means, but it sounds to me like A16Z is going through the process of giving up its VC exemption to the Investment Advisers Act and registering as a RIA.…
What is an RIA? I know what these things are: hedge fund, private equity, wealth management, venture capital. Which is A16Z now closest to? Or is there a class of financial firm I'm not aware of? Edit: I'm also curious, does this place any material restrictions on their startup investment activity?
VCs, hedge funds and wealth management tend to be RIAs. Private Equity I'm unsure. Wealth managers are all either RIAs, brokers, or banks.
The article is unclear. A16Z are forgoing a certain exception that VCs have, I'm not sure what their legal structure was beforehand.
You can look up all RIAs on the SEC website https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/
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As a would-be founder, this new move from A16Z makes me worry they won't focus on helping startups like this anymore. Anecdotes like this help quell that fear a bit, even if wrongly.
Why would you want to wrongly quell a fear?
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Censorship resistant electronic, financial transactions. The evidence shows that it is much easier to censor a credit card payment, or bank transaction, than it is to censor a crypto transaction.
Which only matters if you're trying to do illegal things on an international scale. Locally, you've always got cash.
Adult content is one area that comes to mind. If you run a business in this area, on the internet, which is perfectly legal, you will quickly find that every major financial institution refuses to do business with you.
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Which only matters if you're trying to do illegal things on an international scale. Locally, you've always got cash.
There are lots of perfectly legal things that get censored all the time, by both the government and private companies. Adult content is one area that comes to mind. If you run a business in this area, on the internet, which is perfectly legal, you will quickly find that every major financial institution refuses to do business with you.
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Calculate the full chain of costs then come back here with how it compares to Transferwise or other methods
MXN to GBP : I can't do it. BTC to BTC :I can do it. Non of the fancy services allow me to send money from Mexico to the UK. It is crypto or paying for SWIFT, Western Union or similar. With very high costs.
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I was specifically talking about the Lightning Network, a second layer that facilitates Bitcoin's smart contract capabilities to enable off-chain payments via so called payment channels. There's no mining involved during transactions in the channel - only for opening and closing a channel, making the transactions almost instant. Thanks to proper routing you can reach most of the peers even with a single channel. It e…
Not enough thought. With 7tx/sec it will take 35 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and another 35 years to close it assuming nobody is born. I believe that's in the white paper, actually. Either way you'll be paying $1.26 to open a channel and another $1.26 to close it, so paying Stripe 2.9% + $0.30 makes the fee break-even point vs having a wallet on your micropayments server funding with $76, any less,…
And looking at how many people use a custodial Bitcoin wallet today (e.g. Coinbase), many will probably use custodial LN wallets as well, with only the wallet service requiring a channel. Not recommending this of course.
Also, my use case was regarding micropayments (e.g. for reading a news article) and nanopayments (e.g. for an API call). That's below $0.30. If you're now going to say that you could top up some balance (like $20) and just deduct a cent from that for every payment, that was exactly the other point of my use case: No accounts required, neither in the DB of the news or API service, nor in the DB of some payment processor that must keep your credit card data.
So it's not just about fees, it's also about privacy.
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Not enough thought. With 7tx/sec it will take 35 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and another 35 years to close it assuming nobody is born. I believe that's in the white paper, actually. Either way you'll be paying $1.26 to open a channel and another $1.26 to close it, so paying Stripe 2.9% + $0.30 makes the fee break-even point vs having a wallet on your micropayments server funding with $76, any less,…
Search for "channel factories" - it allows multiple channels to be opened with a single on-chain tx. And looking at how many people use a custodial Bitcoin wallet today (e.g. Coinbase), many will probably use custodial LN wallets as well, with only the wallet service requiring a channel. Not recommending this of course. Also, my use case was regarding micropayments (e.g. for reading a news article) and nanopayments (…
The reason we don't have micropayments isn't an accounting issue, fee-related or a technical issue -- or even a privacy issue -- it's a human biology issue. IMO hooking it up directly to a wallet without topping off isn't going to change that, especially since you still have to top off the BTC wallet regularly as you get paid in real currency. Boat-anchoring two things that are complex and people don't really want (crypto + micropayments) isn't going to make the two work all of a sudden.
The only way to really solve the news business model with something other than ads is a Netflix-for-news. I hope that Apple News becomes that because newspapers deserve to exist.
TLDR;
As companies stay private longer, and get bigger and raise more money while staying private:
* The secondary market for private shares becomes more important.
* VC's now may have more asymmetric information or more reasons to invest in public markets.
* Mutual funds are competing with VCs in later private rounds so why should VCs be able to compete with Mutual Funds in public markets.
* The obligatory crypto reference.
Another one he doesn't touch on is maybe it's difficult to efficiently deploy > $10 billion in just private markets?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-03/buying...
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Unseizable money.
It may not be easily seizable, and with the right security practices it may be nearly impossible to seize directly. But governments could announce certain coins are not spendable and enforce that on companies or people subject to their jurisdiction. Prosecuting anyone who accepted one of those coins with a crime.