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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

#331

Post by thinkmassive »

arcticbull wrote: post #323
thinkmassive wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using Venezuela as an example of the success of "real currencies" hahaha Look at Bitcoin's yearly lows, and tell me more people aren't finding it useful every year. Again, YOU mentioned the Venezuela example, and IT IS BEING USED THERE. I never claimed it would save that country, nor have I heard anyone else make that claim. Clearly some people there find it more useful than other alternatives to their hyperin…

I don't claim Venezuela's currency is an example of success. I'm saying that their currency's failure is a result of the failure of their government, and even waving a wand and switching everyone over to BTC (which again, the initial distribution problem) won't magically make their government work. They can't control BTC but they sure can control the populace. They'd make it illegal and beat everyone with BTC until t…

What does any of that have to do with Bitcoin?

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

#332

Post by xtracto »

chx wrote: post #327
xtracto wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> MXN to GBP : I can't do it. Both https://www.currenciesdirect.com/ and https://www.smartcurrencyexchange.com can do it.

Currencies Direct: https://ibb.co/BTzRGq3 nope

SmartCurrencyExhcange: https://ibb.co/4RGXvbc also nope

They don't have MXN/Mexico, along with a lot of other currencies from Latin America, Africa and Asia

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

#333

Post by arcticbull »

stale2002 wrote: post #328
arcticbull wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, though this isn't the technology that'll solve that. You've just centralized the decision making to the PRC which controls more than 51% of hash power. All it takes is a strongly-worded memo from Beijing and they can censor payments and rewrite the blockchain. That said, with $1.26 transaction fees + 1-2% to buy BTC vs. even 20% for a credit card in this high-risk MCC, the breakeven is ~$7, and while I'm not su…

I mean, buying a bunch of miners in order to 51% attack a network is significantly more difficult than making a phone call to a Visa or MasterCard executive. It is also not enough to censor a singular Blockchain. You'd have to get the hardware to attack all the chains, because then people would just move to the other ones. This is still not impossible. That's why I used the words "censorship resistant". But it is cer…

My understanding is 2 or 3 miners in the PRC have all that 51%, and in China, when Beijing says jump you say how high or you may end up escorted from your penthouse at the four seasons in Hong Kong to seek medical treatment on the mainland and never be heard from again (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/worl...)

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

#334

Post by peteretep »

eouw0o83hf wrote: post #218
peteretep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onlin…

> If the government's records were up-to-date and perfect, the title industry wouldn't really exist

Why would a blockchain magically fix this?

> "my computer got hacked" is kind of a blanket argument against using technology in general

Many (most?) financial actions you can take with a computer can be rolled back if shown to be fraudulent, because the asset isn't stored on the computer itself. This is specifically not true of crypto assets.

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

#335

Post by arcticbull »

thinkmassive wrote: post #331
arcticbull wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't claim Venezuela's currency is an example of success. I'm saying that their currency's failure is a result of the failure of their government, and even waving a wand and switching everyone over to BTC (which again, the initial distribution problem) won't magically make their government work. They can't control BTC but they sure can control the populace. They'd make it illegal and beat everyone with BTC until t…

What does any of that have to do with Bitcoin?

Ah, we’re on the same page! It solves nothing for the Venezuelans.

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

#336

Post by chx »

xtracto wrote: post #332
chx wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MXN to GBP : I can't do it. Both https://www.currenciesdirect.com/ and https://www.smartcurrencyexchange.com can do it.

Currencies Direct: https://ibb.co/BTzRGq3 nope SmartCurrencyExhcange: https://ibb.co/4RGXvbc also nope They don't have MXN/Mexico, along with a lot of other currencies from Latin America, Africa and Asia

Fancy. But https://www.currenciesdirect.com/aff/v1/money-transfer-compa... has this: https://i.imgur.com/qaFkctU.png

https://www.mycurrencytransfer.com/apply/smart-currency-exch... also has it.

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

#337

Post by russelldc »

arcticbull wrote: post #277
gruez wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Bitcoin I recently sent a $30 transaction (non lightning) for around $0.05 in fees. That's 0.1%. It wasn't "low fee" either - it was confirmed within the next block. Bitcoin transactions are charged by the byte, so I could have sent a million dollars for $0.05 as well.

Fees are $1.26 right now, domestic ACHs are largely free. What was your FOREX risk? Did you figure in that you now have to report your transaction on Form 8949, can no longer use TurboTax and will have to spend hours figuring out your reporting obligations or paying an accountant? If you're just going to break the law the rest of the calculus probably doesn't matter as much.

As of 2019, you can definitely use TurboTax to report Bitcoin transactions. And if you use Coinbase, there's deeper integration there, as well.

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

#338

Post by ajross »

mattnewport wrote: post #257
pbreit wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article itself includes: "The firm’s first and third flagship funds, $300 million and $900 million, respectively, are already expected to return five times their money to investors, sources say. Its $650 million second fund and $1.7 billion fourth fund are expected to return three times their investment capital, good for the top quartile of firms, and are expected to climb." Selecting the NASDAQ in 2009 is a bit…

I don't think selecting the NASDAQ in 2009 is a cherry pick given that is when the first fund started and we're talking about a tech focused fund. Even if the numbers here are more accurate than the WSJ, that still indicates the first fund is returning on par or slightly below what investing in the NASDAQ would have done over the same time period.

2009 was the end of the biggest market drop in a half century...

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

#339

Post by chx »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #324
raverbashing wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculate the full chain of costs then come back here with how it compares to Transferwise or other methods

Interactive Brokers easily beats Transferwise

IB is a stock and similar trading platform and not a transfer company. What am I missing?

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

#340

Post by mightybyte »

notyourday wrote: post #192
mightybyte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem that I think blockchains could be well suited for is the storage of police evidence. Not physical evidence of course, but anything that could be turned into data. There was a scene in the show Billions where U.S. prosecutors tampered with evidence in the from of notes taken while interviewing persons of interest. Since blockchains are at their core a tamper-proof append-only data store, if those notes had…

How does a distributed public ledger help with it?

It provides more protection against deletion. But also note that my comment was explicitly not limited to distributed public ledgers.
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