I guess as a private fund, that’s between them and their LPs...
Unrelated to this - I've heard that many VC funds were going through their legal paperwork with a fine-tooth comb to see if they were allowed to invest LP money directly into crypto or ICOs. Some were not permitted, and it definitely demonstrated how some of these funds lack the flexibility to pursue opportunities that do not pattern-match classic VC investments of the last few decades.
As per their LP agreement, the fund itself might only have been allowed to invest in equities / companies, such as this one. The company itself could then perhaps invest directly into cryptocurrencies without restrictions.
There is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO spam
How did this become religion on HN? Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today: * Origin * NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team) * Loki * New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature * Trustless Quorums * Distributed validation I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Would you be so kind as to show a few of those technologies in some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses?
> But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some light crime. As an example a New York Times writer just tried to spend the weekend living on Bitcoin and failed egregiously: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
I'm happy to admit that there's more activity in the space than I could possibly keep track of, so there could definitely be a pony in there somewhere. [1] But it shouldn't be any surprise that after so much hype resulting in no apparent useful effect on the rest of the world many people are skeptical that the cryptocurrency world will ever produce anything more than dubious claims, Ponzi schemes, and million-dollar thefts.
Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs, there will be little resistance when a bill gets proposed that bans the purchase and/or mining of bitcoin, "the payment currency for illegal drugs that uses more electricity than Ireland". And then that final use case is also gone, hence why I said "no long lasting use case". And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines"…
Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently. Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind. If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place. Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has ot…
Jmyles, your reasoned and compassionate tone and plea to consider the benefits of blockchain which might effect those less fortunate is right on. How about the thousands of people who have already sent millions of dollars back home to developing nations where they previously had to rely on western union and their exorbitant commission fees. For the unbanked, blockchain provides significant savings in remittance costs. Even with the higher costs of sending bitcoin and ETH, with a little ingenuity, use of lightning, and buying into the book on GDAX, these fees can be significantly reduced to a point much lower then western union. On the opposite side of the spectrum, for the ultra-wealthy, cryptocurrencies offer the ability to place a portion of one's capital in accounts which are not seizable by any means. This is a significant feature of the technology, and coupled with the level of encryption, already represents a small, yet sizable place in the world banking system. It is expected that the many offshore banking havens like Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Mann, will continue to expand this feature in providing protection for people's assets.
I get spammed by ICO offers every day almost from these people. Stopped logging in to claim my dollars since it is too much hassle to complete that captcha every time. Endless pictures of road signs and busses and roads...
Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently. Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind. If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place. Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has ot…
I did not argue that everyone should live in California, I argued that to declare that we need the blockchain, as if free speech and democracy were foregone conclusions, is anti-social and destructive. And I used California as an example of how legalization can happen. You're right that some nations will be more oppressive than others, but you're forgetting that those places will more easily ban public blockchains th…
You've presented a binary choice, but the reality is actually much more nuanced and complex then this. It is not a zero sum game, we can have blockchain solutions that are part of a wider push toward Web3 technologies where data is decoupled from the application layer, and this delivers more control at the user level over their identity and the use of their data. Most people don't/won't care to manage their data permissions and will opt into 3rd party centralized schemes where someone or business does this for them. Blockchain technology is part of a larger shift toward building agency for us as humans within our cyberphysical systems. In order for AI to truly benefit humanity, we have to include all of humanity in the process of training models, and deciding what algorithms we wish to manage various decisions for us on a daily basis. This has been happening for a while (algorithms managing decisions that effect us) but without any meaningful transparency. Most people will only care about the outcome, a la Cambridge Analytica, but in order to solve these problems we need some type of framework to manage our identity and connect that identity to our apps, through a portal that isn't owned by a company. Open source software gives us a lot of the tools and protocols to make this happen, and Blockchain technology, specifically self-sovereign identity, and the ability to link our identity to data and smart contracts, these are essential pieces to building out the web for the next generation. Blockchain tech was overhyped beyond measure, most ICOs were scams or will fail anyway, but the dust is now settling, as regulation reigns in the bad actors. The end result will unfold not in a huge explosion of the one killer blockchain app, but rather slowly, over the next 5 years, as part of a larger shift toward Web3 decentralized architecture, in combination with the existing cloud services that don't need to sell user data to deliver their value.
> The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain The way I see it, one of the big assumptions of the technologies in this space is that participants are only acting out of self-interest. Meaning, that there's a strong push towards designing systems where behaviours th…
I'm saying the technology is derivative of the economics and politics of our culture, and it is unlikely that this relationship will invert itself. Tons of political science and economic thought has gone into designing systems where behaviors that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding, you're basically describing market economics. Nothing about cryptocurrency is novel from a political or econo…
It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).
Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet.
Which leads us back to your point:
> Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us.
> smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized. We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0]. Several large applications are wi…
I honestly think those are the two worst possible examples. I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain. And for medical records? That is laughable at best with severe HIPPA compliance issues.
You would not trust a cryptographic system to manage your cryptographic keys?
And you think regulations are set in stone with no room for innovation?
I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money. I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.
Looking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain." Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary. And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful…
ahh, thats the trick isnt it -- blockchain provides universal currency. No need for local currency handing, banks, cc processors, forex transfer providers, and all the things associated with local payment processors. While i dont think this is the first or is it truely useful, but yes, blockchain (specifically bitcoin) is providing a decentralized universal currency for use in decentralized systems like email. Its a valid point.