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Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

bennettftomlin.com

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Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#61

Post by applepple »

steveBK123 wrote: post #19

I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products. That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases. But most of these products/tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid/pa…

The vast majority of top projects are essentially scams and the real projects are not in the rankings. Even promising projects seem to turn into scams once they get into the top 200 or so. It's as if some wealthy investors buy up a lot tokens from top projects and then threaten the founders to crash the price unless they stop development and start wasting time. I've worked in the blockchain industry for several years and I've seen founders who used to constantly make great decisions start making one terrible decisions after another - It feels like they switched from being productive to being counter-productive from one day to the next. It's as if they're getting paid to NOT innovate.

I'm 100% sure that there is some manipulation going on but I can't figure out why (though I have some wild theories).

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#62

Post by danuker »

treis wrote: post #59
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products. That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases. But most of these products/tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid/pa…

> there really are not a lot of real world use cases. It's effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. That's a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on. Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.

> It's effectively just one. To make illegal transactions.

Your perspective is limited. Check out my general intro [1] and other articles [2].

TL;DR: at least one legitimate use case is to keep up with inflation.

[1] - https://danuker.go.ro/intro-to-cryptocurrencies.html

[2] - https://danuker.go.ro/tag/cryptocurrencies.html

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#63

Post by timy2shoes »

asah wrote: post #55
wyck wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This opinion is really common, I used to have it but what changed my mind was realizing there are not really any "real world" use cases. I look at crypto as actual money, with the same definition: "money is a verifiable record that is generally accepted". Money in of itself does not have any "real world" use cases, money is money. Money facilitates economic velocity and growth in the same way crypto does, except cryp…

+1 - crypto-based lending is an incredibly smooth digital process vs legacy dollar-based lending, which is frankly a nightmare of "wire cutoff deadlines," entering the same info 40 times for 6 people, "security theatre" like call-to-confirm and notary public with people who don't know you and are trusting pieces of paper, etc etc etc

What you call bugs I call features. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25443212

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#64

Post by vmception »

127 wrote: post #26

VC for crypto by definition is a pre-mine, so yeah...

It’s usually a convertible security that can convert to claims of tokens and/or equity

Sometimes it is an investment directly for a premine

Other time it is a secondary offering of the issuing organizations tokens

Your statement is reductive only because most everything in the market involves pre generated stakes in the network. The market tolerates that because it has since the 1600s joint stock company. Crypto ideology can just be dropped, there is no standard that makes a crypto better just because it can’t be purchased to launch.

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#65

Post by cinntaile »

applepple wrote: post #61
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products. That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases. But most of these products/tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid/pa…

The vast majority of top projects are essentially scams and the real projects are not in the rankings. Even promising projects seem to turn into scams once they get into the top 200 or so. It's as if some wealthy investors buy up a lot tokens from top projects and then threaten the founders to crash the price unless they stop development and start wasting time. I've worked in the blockchain industry for several years…

Don't go and claim the vast majority of top projects are essentially scams, that's just spreading false information.

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#66

Post by valuearb »

asah wrote: post #55
wyck wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This opinion is really common, I used to have it but what changed my mind was realizing there are not really any "real world" use cases. I look at crypto as actual money, with the same definition: "money is a verifiable record that is generally accepted". Money in of itself does not have any "real world" use cases, money is money. Money facilitates economic velocity and growth in the same way crypto does, except cryp…

+1 - crypto-based lending is an incredibly smooth digital process vs legacy dollar-based lending, which is frankly a nightmare of "wire cutoff deadlines," entering the same info 40 times for 6 people, "security theatre" like call-to-confirm and notary public with people who don't know you and are trusting pieces of paper, etc etc etc

Yep, no deadlines when you don’t do due diligence.

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#67

Post by asdev »

steveBK123 wrote: post #19

I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products. That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases. But most of these products/tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid/pa…

this was also the case with the internet. the world wide web was just an experiment for a long time. applications and their base layers take time to develop. can't rule it out yet.

tokens and shitcoins as get rich quick schemes are detracting from the true innovation imo

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#68

Post by valuearb »

danuker wrote: post #62
treis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there really are not a lot of real world use cases. It's effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. That's a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on. Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.

> It's effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. Your perspective is limited. Check out my general intro [1] and other articles [2]. TL;DR: at least one legitimate use case is to keep up with inflation. [1] - https://danuker.go.ro/intro-to-cryptocurrencies.html [2] - https://danuker.go.ro/tag/cryptocurrencies.html

Yet BTC is trailing inflation by over 30% the last month alone?

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#69

Post by vmception »

oefrha wrote: post #34
rvz wrote: post #6

For example look at the real price history of a VC funded token called "Internet Computer" [0] by selecting "ALL" on Coinbase. Out of no where on launch, it was listed on Coinbase and Binance already with the top 10 coins of the largest market capitalisations. Only VCs and angel investors with such connections to these exchanges could have made such a listing like that possible. After that, then came the VC dump with…

To anyone familiar with these matters, is this likely going to be investigated by SEC? If this is not investment scam I don’t know what is.

It’s not different than a direct listing for $100B and dumping shares on everyone as fast as you can

Which was obvious Coinbase was going to do and did in their own stock market listing, to me

You sell into liquidity, liquidity comes from people wanting financial exposure, people wanting financial exposure comes from buzz and marketing

When things are actually under SEC purview, the only difference between fraud and not fraud is disclosure. If you tell people and they only watch youtubers instead of reading, you are fine

No, tokens typically are not under SEC purview and they’ve gotten better at ensuring that

Re: Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

#70

Post by MomoXenosaga »

wyck wrote: post #42
steveBK123 wrote: post #19

I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products. That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases. But most of these products/tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid/pa…

This opinion is really common, I used to have it but what changed my mind was realizing there are not really any "real world" use cases. I look at crypto as actual money, with the same definition: "money is a verifiable record that is generally accepted". Money in of itself does not have any "real world" use cases, money is money. Money facilitates economic velocity and growth in the same way crypto does, except cryp…

But we already have banks. Seems like nobody is aware of exactly what problems they're trying to solve here.

"crypto has the potential to be more efficient and secure" Sounds charmingly vague.

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