A16Z is re-registering as a financial advisor, renouncing its status as a VC • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by monsterbash506 » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #273

stale2002 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

paypal and visa censor legal things all the time, such as pornography. Or if you express the "wrong" opinions, such as what happened to subscribestar when it was deplatformed by payment providers.

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

#292

Post by monsterbash506 » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

jasonvorhe wrote: post #114

troquerre wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handshake.org decentralizes the root zone and obsoletes certificate authorities. Basically, it lets you register new TLDs that are censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, and tamper-proof.

At the expense of no one getting do your site because they don't use a custom DNS server?

Opera and Brave are integrating ENS (ethereum name service) into the browser so you can resolve .eth domains. There is no fundamental reason why this couldn't happen for handshake (cool project btw).

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

#293

Post by notyourday » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #258

notyourday wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in a separate digital realm that never touches the rest of the world. In the rest of the world there are laws that are enforced by force and no amount of math is going to prevent a SWAT team from dragging a crypto punk into a slammer.

Censorship is something that can be done by both the government, and private companies. It is something that happens with or without a court order, to people who have broken zero laws. Yes, the government often censors perfectly legal financial transactions, to people who aren't criminals. And crypto makes such censorship against people who have broken zero laws, much more difficult. It makes it no longer as easy as…

Only in the realm of digital stuff. The moment it hits real physical world it becomes clear that the entire castle is built on sand, using sand. Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd.

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

#294

Post by xtracto » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #267

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.

Totally can, FairFX and TorFX (both UK-regulated money transmitters) will safely and securely make an MXN to GBP transfer for right around 2.5% and believe it or not Western Union is usually quite competitive. Next time check out cuex.com which compares options for you. BTC is a nightmare. You have to find an exchange in Mexico (which won't run away with your money a la Quadriga) and they'll take 1-2% and sit on the…

> Totally can, FairFX and TorFX (both UK-regulated money transmitters) will safely and securely make an MXN to GBP transfer for right around 2.5% and believe it or not Western Union is usually quite competitive. Next time check out cuex.com which compares options for you.

I tried both of them and I can't (I am living in Mexico). I don't understand why you think BTC is a nightmare. For me, living in Mexico, and dealing with MXN and GBP (my brother is in Northen Ireland) it has worked wonders.

You are assuming that Bitcoin exchanges in Mexico are unregulated, when they are VERY regulated. You are making negative assumptions for every Crypto step while making positive assumptions for every step in your scenario. I does not make sense.

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

#295

Post by luckydata » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:30 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #203

luckydata wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a blockchain to do that?

What other architecture would you recommend? There's no single entity which can be trusted to maintain a centralized database.

I challenge that requirement. Why no single entity can be trusted? It's like saying the banking system doesn't work because no single entity can be trusted with maintaining a database of transactions. That's self evidently false.

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

#296

Post by thinkmassive » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #278

thinkmassive wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solving trust is the only benefit of Bitcoin, but I think you’re underestimating the importance of financial sovereignty.

Lack thereof is currently working for 7.5 billion people. Bitcoin works for basically nobody.

If you think present financial systems are working well for every inhabitant on the planet, you probably spend a lot of time in a very comfortable bubble.

Besides, talking worked well for thousands of years, what use would humanity have for the Internet? /s

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

#297

Post by stale2002 » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #293

stale2002 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship is something that can be done by both the government, and private companies. It is something that happens with or without a court order, to people who have broken zero laws. Yes, the government often censors perfectly legal financial transactions, to people who aren't criminals. And crypto makes such censorship against people who have broken zero laws, much more difficult. It makes it no longer as easy as…

Only in the realm of digital stuff. The moment it hits real physical world it becomes clear that the entire castle is built on sand, using sand. Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd.

> Since we have not figure out yet how to feed ourselves and house ourselves using the crypto assigning it such attributes is rather odd.

Of course there is a way to do this. You go to a store and pay for food with crypto if the store accepts it.

Is has an advantage over credit cards, as a couple companies could block your transactions, whereas this is much more difficult with crypto.

Lots of in person stores have had problems with the visa MasterCard duopoly.

Being able to escape from the risk of censorship from visa and MasterCard, for brick and mortar stores, is useful in and of itself.

Money is digital. And you can use digital money to pay for physical things. And you can get around censorship, enacted by private companies, using digital payments that are harder to censor, and this works for real life physical goods.

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

#298

Post by ALittleLight » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #283

ALittleLight wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to wrongly quell a fear?

Why would you assume that wrongly quells the fear? I would tend to assume that the demonstrated character (good or bad, good in this example) of the principals of A16Z would remain the same across the company change.

I'm not assuming anything. The comment I'm replying to states that this helps to quell a fear "even if wrongly".

To me, this seems like saying that removing the batteries from your smoke alarm will help you sleep, even through house fires.

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

#299

Post by kurtisc » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #272

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.

This isn't really true. The only thing you can do with 50% of the hashpower is determine the most recent block. And it still has to be a legitimate block. You can't undo history very far. And to the extent that you can, transactions either go through as intended or get reversed, and the owners keep their money. Money doesn't get redirected. Any blockchain going through repeated attack would be pointless to use anyway…

It would be possible to fork to create a higher limit with that hashpower. It would also be possible to have 51% without making it publicly known. But nobody needs to bother with that when they can just double spend.

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

#300

Post by brian_cloutier » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

briatx wrote: post #238

brian_cloutier wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what's the win? Why split up the cost per single watt or packet? No one cares about losing one cent per day due to rounding errors Honestly with this question you've summed up most of my feelings about blockchains. Humanity feels like it's become more powerful in some very specific way. We have a new tool and we're trying to figure out what it's good for. I've pattern matched this to early reactions to the inte…

> And if 10 years from now we haven't found a use for nanopayments I'll admit it was a silly idea Why do you need another 10 years? Bitcoin has already been around for 10 years. The micropayment and tipping use case has been explored fully and has failed.

ArpaNet was started in around 1969; it was only really good for email, and few people had a computer anyway so it wasn't very useful for them.

NSFNet started in 1985 and with it the US could finally transfer Megabits of internet every second! By that point more people had computers but they weren't on them enough for things like e-commerce to make any sense at all.

It took until 1991 for the Web to be invented, and arguably in 2000 the web had still failed to really find it's niche.

--

I make no claims as to whether crypto will have as much of an impact as the Internet had, I suspect it will impact only a few domains. However, we're still decidedly in the ArpaNet phase. Bitcoin can only process ~5 txns/second, Ethereum can only process ~13/sec. This isn't good for anything at all! I'd argue the nanopayment use-case hasn't been explored at all, because there's still no good way for me to spin up a server and accept nanopayments with it. Bitcoin transaction fees just spiked to ~$1, ETH transactions currently cost 15 cents.

You're looking at a steam engine the size of a building and telling me it'll never fit onto a train. And you're right! It took something like a hundred years for them to be compact and strong enough to power any vehicles.

A lot of people with a lot of money are working on newer designs which can process a lot more transactions for a lot cheaper, it's only once those cryptocurrencies have been built that the experimentation can really begin.