> Why would that be particularly bad if the momentum is downward?
That is why. You are too late for justifying a short position if it is already going down as you can still get yourself liquidated quickly if the price jumps in one day after a correction.
Here's a million dollar short that got liquidated all of seven hours ago. Shorting Bitcoin is madness, partially because no regulation prohibits most exchange operators from frontrunning their own customers (besides the ones that voluntarily signed on to become the benchmarks for CME's Bitcoin futures price). Exchanges and market makers will collaborate to artificially push prices around to optimally liquidate shorts -- it happens all the time. They love people shorting Bitcoin.
For most purposes, it's enough to know that the money you put there could go to zero. Which means that you shouldn't invest in crypto anything whose losing would take a psychological toll if you lose (let alone investing money that you need for mortgage, etc. as seen in the Luna subreddit).
Then beyond that, the more information, the better, but the rest is not essential.
I’ve been holding Bitcoin since 2013, and this 50-60% retracement from the all time high was nothing compared to what I (and other people) were living through. I advise people to look at past volatility of Bitcoin before making an investment decision.
Also bitcoin != crypto, those are not even subset/superset for the most part.
Bitcoin solves one single problem of "digital cash" with the most robust and boring mechanism (known to mankind so far).
While the "cryptos" aim at satisfying demand for all sorts of p2p apps and moneymaking schemes that can be funded with the digital cash to avoid getting regulated out of existence.
It’s practically impossible to use Bitcoin as digital cash because it’s so slow and expensive. That was the original problem it purported to solve, but it failed miserably at that.
So far. If you spend any time in the research community you’ll realise that those problems are very likely to get solved. Lightning alone probably gets us there.
Its volatility and UX, as well as how negatively it is perceived currently (by some people) look like bigger blockers to me.
Which that is not Bitcoin and neither is it on-chain.
The parent comment is correct on Bitcoin's failure as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and all it is instead, is a store of value. This is how you know it has failed in its intended purpose.
What advancements have happened regarding lightning? Last I heard about lightning was around 2017, and 5 years later it doesn't really seem to have gained much adoption.
The US adult population is ~250 million. With Bitcoin's ~300k transactions/day, it would take over 2 years for each of them to simply open a LN channel, if we dedicate the entire network just to onboarding.
Ligthning is an alternative to Bitcoin, not a fix for it. It has a different security model (much much much weaker), it uses entirely different technology, it is essentially centralized. The fact that it uses Bitcoin on the back end is mostly a detail of Lightning.
There is literally not a single thing true in this comment. I would advise you seriously revaluate where you are getting your (mis)information from.
Lightning is a way of using bitcoin. A way of cooperatively creating bitcoin transactions with multiple parties, in such a way that you can minimize the number of on-chain transactions required. It is bitcoin. It has the same security model as bitcoin. It uses the same technology. It is not in any way centralized (it's a p2p network of payment channel connections, with each operator running their own server).
If you and I have a lightning node and a channel between us, and I send 1 BTC to you, this transaction is NOT secured by the bitcoin network, nor any similar technology. It's basically just a regular ledger that my node and yours keep track of (there's a little more cryptography in place, but not much more).
Even worse, if you saw my transaction, then sent me 1BTC worth of goods, then your node becomes offline and I forcefully close the channel with the original balance, I still have my 1BTC and there is no proof anywhere except your node that the transaction ever happened. So no security, unless both nodes are online.
Finally, unless you open direct channels with everyone you want to transact with, you will rely on a 3rd party node that does have such a channel. In practice, this likely means you will use one of a few major nodes that you trust to stay online and not refuse transactions, so the payments are in effect highly centralized.
It is almost like 99.999% of the crypto people don't have computer engineering or computer science degrees or have never built a production system that requires concurrency and fault tolerance over a persistence layer.
A system that validates new entries into a database can either be "very cheap and very fast" or "very fault tolerant and very decentralized". The speed of light in networking and the speed of modern CPUs make this unavoidable.
but yeah, bitcoin has no utility. you'd just have to wait until The Merge inevitably occurs, or use any of the few PoS cryptocurrencies that are generally better & more capable than bitcoin in every capacity, like Avalanche, Cardano, Fantom, Solana, etc.
At this point it can be used for payments practically everywhere where Bitcoin accepted, but it’s not yet practical for payments over $100 as far as I know, so I still only use the base Bitcoin layer for paying for my travels.
There are new algorithms in late research phase though for much larger payments (like $5000) that are expected to go into production this year. I’m waiting for that before switching to using lightning network.
For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.
> For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.
Am I right to assume that "use" here is in the same sense[1] that you can "use" "dollars" to pay your Big Mac in Paris with your US credit card? I.e. French McDonald's does not set the price in dollars but euros and does not need to touch dollars with a ten foot pole during the whole process and receives euros in their account?
[1] Which hardly makes any sense to me, to be honest.
Why doesn’t it make sense to use your USD based credit card in France? I use both EUR based credit card and my Bitcoin wallet while travelling in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, and setting up bank accounts in those countries would be infinitely harder.
Regarding hotels and flights, I book it on internet, and I don’t even know which country the travel agencies are located, and I don’t care.
It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
> It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
I see your point. To be more precise I use the MasterCard payment network that uses a combination of Mexican Peso, USD, and EUR in the background to settle with the merchant’s bank periodically in the background (and as I use Revolut based Mastercard, it’s even more complex).
Last month the biggest POS company integrated the lightning network, an international payment network protocol, that uses Bitcoin as its settlement currency and Bitcoin network using Strike, and as the POS company does the settlement with the credit card company, the merchant in practice doesn’t see the difference between accepting credit card payment or lightning payment, as it doesn’t handle any of the two (the POS provider handles them).
Cash settles immediately. "Sometime in the next 24 hours" is not digital cash.
Not to mention that Bitcoin is so volatile that the transaction's value in real-world currency may be 10% higher or lower within that 24-hour window, and of course you still need to pay someone to convert it into money if you're not planning on being a crypto holder.
That's not really a fair comparison. Bitcoin cannot has very limited use for actual commerce - actually paying for stuff. So you also need to consider the inconvenience, complexity and cost of trading the received BTC for local currency.
I haven't paid anything for international transfers within the SEPA area for years. Depending on the source/destination bank, the transfer can be completed within an hour or so.
Sometimes the solution is simply better banking infrastructure. The banking/payments system in the US is a mess but it doesn't have to be so.
The field of Speculative Blockchain solutions is a tiny part of crypto. But your examples sound like they either are or anchor to speculative Blockchains so Bitcoin is the leading implementation of infrastructure for your examples.
When was long term memory ever a thing for people. People have completely forgotten about invading an entire country finding no WMDs and the recent Afghanistan debacle.
Do you have a strategy of selling on the peaks (possibly even buying on the lows with some of the proceeds) to eventually exit while ahead or are you just holding because you have a strong belief that it can only rise in future and it's not worth following the day to day drama (as many do with stocks)?
Either way, you personally benefit from belief in Bitcoin and crypto being generally positive, which has implications for your objectivity even if well meaning.
If there would be a huge peak, like $200k, I would sell, but generally I don’t believe I can compete with the hedge funds trading Bitcoin, so it’s the second. The only exception was the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, that I strongly opposed as it was being pushed by companies so aggressively even though there was no rough consensus reached, while segregated witness fork contained several critical bug fixes for Bitcoin. I sold all my Bitcoin Cash instantly for about 0.13 BCH/BTC exchange rate.
The way i've been looking at it is thru the lens of allocation ratios. You never have one asset with a high allocation (compared to another). You also have to decide ahead of time (when you start investing) what an appropriate allocation ratio is between the different assets (e.g., you might have 10% bonds, 80% stocks and 10% crypto).
Then, one or twice a year, you an reallocate assets as they drift away from the ratio. Doing it too often is detrimental, so my guess is once a year is "enough", and may be keep an eye on any fluctuations and if it grows bigger than some threshold, you do a second rebalance.
Let's say in 2021, crypto had a huge bull run, and went from just being 10% of your allocation to something close to 20%. It makes a lot of sense then, to sell the 10%, and rebalance back into the other assets you hold.
I’m extremely bad at trading, but it didn’t stop me from achieving amazing returns. Just an example last year I had a target of $150k when it was at $50k, and also (like most people) I got a BTC based loan (it made sense for tax purposes as well). The problem was that everybody was doing it, and professional traders probably used those loans to short the market and trigger margin calls. I had multiple margin calls as well, but I was able to add extra collateral. At the same time I spoke with a person who lost all his money because he bought BTC/ETH from his loan.
At the end the only experience I got is that I’m still a bad trader, and I won’t do it :)
That is only if you bought Bitcoin when it was <$10K and as low as $5K or 6K in March 2020 which I hope you got in at the time and not at $20K, $30K or $40K.
> Just an example last year I had a target of $150k when it was at $50k, and also (like most people) I got a BTC based loan (it made sense for tax purposes as well).
That doesn't sound like a good idea in the middle of a bull run and everyone being in profit on Bitcoin when it was at $50K last year or even $69K. I have a different strategy - taking profits and taking advantage of the hype.
It's better to get in when the market crashes so that you can buy it significantly lower, (Like say <$10K) and sell some of it during the height of the euphoria, than it is to enter when everything is going up and end up bag-holding and waiting months, or years in an unrealised loss for it to go back up again.
Hence being against anyone jumping in at >$60K last year [0] and warning another person about DOGE going all the way up and bag-holding it at $0.6; thinking that it will go to $1 by August. [0]
The people who bought in at around >$40K and higher just did that and are now bag-holding in drawdown.
> PP got a loan at 50 which is a bearish trade, halfway to shorting.
Well no wonder they received multiple margin calls when the smart traders were taking profits or shorting from >$60K with him ending up on the wrong side of the trade or entering at higher prices and holding into unrealised losses.
It's completely different, OP still owned the BTC, it was just collateral to a loan. The loan currency was presumably USD, so they were short USD but still long BTC.
The intelligent strategy is to do progressive selling on the way up rather than try and predict the absolute top, which nobody realistically can do.
Progressive selling on the way up is emotionally very hard to do, as it feels like you're losing money whilst actually being in profit. It's tempting to fully ride the top. Don't.
Next, when the inevitable crash comes, you're uniquely positioned to buy in heavily as you have the dry powder to do so. This too is emotionally hard as everybody is fearful, "blood in the streets". Here too you can progressively buy in rather than try and predict the bottom.
This strategy only works for things that bounce back, which is not true for almost every altcoin or shitcoin.
You can also take permanent profits. Once I made my first significant profit, I took out my initial investment so that effectively I'm in crypto only with profits. I could lose it all and whilst that wouldn't make me happy, it wouldn't truly affect me either.
I bought in 2017 & sold the peak. My strategy was that in 2017 I back of the enveloped a fair price of 30k CAD, so when I checked in awhile later it was 69k CAD I knew things were getting stupid & had to sell for the memes
I also sold most my investments in January because I wanted to buy a house. Moral of the story: be a lucky bastard like me
I believe crypto doesn't need to "go to the moon" to succeed. If bitcoin hit a stable price of 1k it still works. If I were to make another play in the crypto space I'd probably do something stupid like buy 32 eth & stake it in eth 2.0
Coinbase supports staking ETH into ETH 2.0 without needing 32 ETH to do so. You can put pretty much as little as you want in. Yield is 3.68% right now. You can see what you're earning but you won't be able to move it until the ETH merge.
Or 4.75% running it yourself, & figuring out how to run a validator seems more fun than handing coinbase your funds. I strongly disagree with people having their crypto held by third parties
If you feel like purchasing the 32 ETH to run a validator and/or set things up with a staking pool, that's great, have fun. I personally don't have that much, and I was also hesitant to put it into a staking pool since I couldn't just unstake it whenever, and I trust Coinbase a bit more than a staking pool. I have most of my crypto in non-custodial wallets myself.
Was just mentioning it in case you (or someone else on HN) weren't aware it was an option, but clearly you are.
Past performance is indicative of future results except for the purposes of liability punting, which is a super convenient capability of apocryphal disclaimers
The meltdown in cryptocurrencies is raising alarm about the future of digital assets — or is it?
Fears over soaring prices and slowing economic growth have sent investors fleeing from risk assets, notably cryptocurrencies. In the latest Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, explains the drivers, evolution and the outlook for crypto assets and the broader digital assets ecosystem.
Recent volatility underscores that crypto assets are still an emerging asset class with a large number of retail participants, McDermott explains to Exchanges host Allison Nathan of Goldman Sachs Research. “The move so far has been correlated to the broader macro market moves,” notes McDermott, who points out that nearly every asset class with discounted cash flows has been hard hit by inflationary pressures.
Blockchain, crypto and digital currencies are gaining broader acceptance among investors, companies and institutions. “Maturity across both the market participants and the infrastructure has given not only confidence to many different institutional sectors, but also has enabled many more traditional traders to really look forward in how they trade this marketplace because of this maturity in the product suite,” McDermott says.
Venture capital investments in digital assets are surging. While valuations are pretty high, there continues to be “high levels of interest because people continue to see exponential growth opportunities and are keen to deploy that capital,” says McDermott. “I think valuations have got a little out of kilter, so perhaps we'll see some more sensible valuations in terms of investment opportunities, too.”
If you follow that reason then it's rational that there are crashes after peaks (cashing out), and it's still rational that it will keep rising to a point that it reaches its true value (whatever that is).
The peaks and troughs will flatten out as that happens.
Could well all be wrong. But so far that seems to be the pattern.
There are still plenty of people who enjoy betting providing a bottom layer and whales are happy to buy low and sell high, so they have an incentive to ride trends.
There is a lot of pumping going on in private telegram chats at multiple levels of wealth.
I guess it will crash to zero when governments start rolling out their own and declaring illegal all the other cryptocurrencies.
Or you could look at the absolutely factual statement that since Bitcoin isn’t a productive asset (in fact it’s the opposite it’s expensive to create) then every single dollar that will ever be taken out of Bitcoin is a dollar that some other person put in.
This is not true of normal investments. For example the dollars you get from selling McDonald’s stock 30 years after purchasing it come from people buying hamburgers.
The fact that there’s no such mechanism with Bitcoin demonstrates that it’s not actually an investment at all.
So when you get your profits out who will have given them to you, and what’s their story?
So from money someone else put into this whole hamburger thing and won't get it back?
> For example the dollars you get from selling McDonald’s stock 30 years after purchasing it come from people buying hamburgers.
Some dollars not all, and most likely bot even the most.
So the Bitcoin doesn't have this merchandise based mechanism for sucking the money out of the rest of the economy, so what? Only a part of the cash of the investors comes from it anyways. The rest comes from other investors who gambled wrong. Same as with Bitcoin.
Your argument is just a version of intrinsic value argument tgat crypto bros dismiss with a wide smile.
They could eat something else. From the point of view of McDonalds investor there's no guarantee money will be flowing in because of sale of hamburgers.
McDonald's stock (MCD) pays a 2.39% dividend yield based on people buying hamburgers. That's hard cash paid out every year. Bitcoin doesn't pay any dividends.
People invest and trade in gold. Which effectively means "gold paper", you don't physically own the gold. In fact, there's 4 times more paper gold than actual gold mined. This type of gold isn't productive. It's not going to be used to make jewelry, it doesn't even exist. It's just a number on screen and a shared belief that it has value.
To a degree you can extend that idea to stock. Sure, you can consider Apple stock to be "productive", as they make desirable products. Explain to me then how stocks are so volatile? It's because the value of the stock is largely believe-driven.
It's all just a bunch of numbers on screen. And they're all investments, regardless of personal opinions on actual value.
Gold is a raw material used in the production of manufactured goods. Which is the literal definition of a commodity. It's not a productive asset either. For the most part investment in gold doesn't produce returns. It's considered something that people hope will stay (roughly) at the same real value because it's scarce.
Apple stock on the other hand takes raw materials like people and chemicals and produces computing devices that are extraordinarily useful. That transformation is the definition of production. The stock value is a NPV calculation of the future earnings of that productive enterprise, which is the interaction of expectations of the enterprise as well as a guess what the cost of capital will be, iterated over many years into infinity.
Just because of the math involved and the iterative nature of the calculation tiny changes in expectations can cause large present value changes, but that isn't really material to the general concept of the enterprise as an ongoing means of producing new, novel, value in the world.
Ultimately, they're all a number on screen that at bare minimum needs to pertain inflation-adjusted value, and preferably grow. Otherwise there's no point to any of it.
>In fact the picture is rather different: a sorting process is under way
And talks more about the process of penalizing weaker crypto assets, focusing on Tether. So it's actually a balanced and interesting overview of the fallout of the current selloff on what is now becoming a rather large and very complex market all of its own.
I only mention this as your comment seems a bit dismissive based on that one sentence.
> “… The trouble is that a draconian crackdown would put at risk the benefits that crypto eventually promises, including new financial products that bypass stodgy banks; innovations in property rights; and the possibility of a less centralised financial system.”
Bit OT, a further good idea will be to buy the subscription and support good journalism. I am not being flippant, I believe good journalism needs support.
IIRC they offer some trial subscription where you can register and read a few articles for free in a month or so. Also articles from "The Economist" are frequently posted in HN and often comments have non-paywalled links. Reading through them probably help you to judge whether it is good journalism or not.
If tether manages to make people believe that its demise would derail the regular economy, and get bailed to keep their peg, then they’ve definitely screwed everyone over.
Solidcoins are great deal for issuers if solidcoins. At any point they can just take their money and run. And it would be a smart choice given to what happened to money that tried to keep UST peg.
With markets it's all about narrative. Growth stocks have been coming down and so has Bitcoin, so people like to highlight that everyone is sharing the pain.
I pretty much think all real news articles are completely dead.
Historically, there were always catchy headines in newspapers. But they had some factualality to them, and if not they were trash rags like the National Enquirer, a newspaper sold at grocery checkouts, often explaining how a celebrity was really an alien, or time traveller, or some such.
Real newspapers had to adhere to some standards, and usually ran mostly on sales for revenue.
They sold ads, and classified ads, but they were paid papers, and each paper sold meant more profit, and for advertising revenue.
This meant that if the paper had a headline, but the headline was a lie/untruthful, some people would get upset and demand their money back.
And if this continued, people would stop buying it, because they were paying for it, and who wants to buy something which lies to get sold?!
Beyond that, if the article was poorly written, if the article was poorly researched, many would be annoyed at wasting cash. If the newspaper ended up with a reputation for this, sales would likely drop.
Point is, when paying hard cash for something, people typically demand something of value in return.
Compare that to today, where modern news is like a poster someone stuck on a lamp post. Are you gonna complain, if the free poster is just made up drivel?!
Modern news is this. Nothing you read has any incentive to be true, the only incentive is to get you to click, and look at the ads.
So you do, because OMG! Bad thing happened!
Modern democracies depend upon pillars of society to hold it up, news being one of them.
And news used to serve this purpose, being primarily consumer facing.
With Bitcoin, the narrative is that it goes up after every halving cycle.
Will confidence shatter completely if it doesn't go up in the next cycle?
Hard to tell. Important to remember that BTC has only existed in an easy monetary environment. Will risk assets like this still go up if there is no cheap money available?
I appreciate the core ideas behind it and I've profited a lot from crypto. But I don't know if the narrative can hold true in a tight monetary environment
Fwiw, on log scale there has been a pretty solid price channel for the past 8 years. It has only been broken twice. One was the covid low, when the price was rescued by fed printing. The second time is now. Not sure what is coming to save the price this time.
Tether truthing the eminent doom of tether is all well and good but why aren't we talking more about YCombinator promoting startups that burned their customer's money by sending it to anchor protocol UST ponzinomics while lying that those investments were held in USDC and USD?
Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. You need to make bets everywhere and hopefully some stick. The other side of that is some don’t stick, and some go proper pear shaped. Make enough bets, it has to happen.
I’ve got no idea what their original pitch is, I certainly wouldn’t back a crypto startup that ostensibly aims to do something like what it looks like they tried to do, but if I was making 300 bets a couple times a year I’d be silly not to do something in the space.
Whether a ycombinator seal of approval lead to investment which lead to consumers getting fleeced and culpability in that situation, I don’t know. It’s crypto. If you’re silly enough to think it’s a safe investment, you’re blind. A company can also say a lot of things differently from first pitch to accepting millions from consumers. As an investor with 10%ish equity, you’ve got some sway, but you don’t have much sway. And who is to say their bet isn’t the right one.
A stain, but I don’t know about righteous indignation, I don’t know how much culpability transfers back to yc… but I don’t feel it’s a whole lot
The problem here is not a bet on crypto but a company that basically went "oh hey sorry too bad the USD displayed on your account is actually UST. K thx bye".
I think I cover that. Company does not equal backer. Bad behaviour by company is not the responsibility of investors, it’s the responsibility of the board, the exec, and ultimately the courts. Investors can shape and influence, investors hopefully provide a filter and feedback, but everyone can get swept up in a good story. Company should be caned. Yc? I’ve already said what I feel.
It's not the legal responsibility of the investors, because society has given them limited liability. It may or may not be their moral responsibility, depending on what they knew, encouraged, or whatever. And the usual payoff for morally-shady but legally-blameless behaviour is reputational damage.
Y-Combinator exists to make Paul Graham and it's investors money. Morality is not money. Y-Combinator doesn't exist to make morality for its investors.
This is not a good argument. Of course companies can optimize for multiple objectives and to pretend that any company doesn’t is willfully blinding oneself to reality.
Maybe it'd be better if our society reprioritized so "these organizations are all amoral actors who exist for no other purpose except to fatten the wallets of their owners" isn't the assumed norm.
Clearly I shouldn't be the arbiter of world priorities, but I think there is something horribly fatalistic about people defending corporations as amoral entities as some sort of immutable property of the universe.
Perhaps the sarcasm here was not understood? Corporations should exist to serve people, broadly. Not the other way around. People over profit. We should all strive to be kinder as well where possible.
If you’re financially backing and providing direct hands on strategic guidance to an active and blatant scheme to commit securities fraud then you are doing something you should not be doing.
The previous sentence isn’t and shouldn’t be particularly controversial.
> If you’re financially backing and providing direct hands on strategic guidance to an active and blatant scheme to commit securities fraud then you are doing something you should not be doing.
As you wrote it as a generic hypothetical, no, it’s not really controversial to me. If however you are meaning to say it as a passive aggressive way to accuse YC, yeah, it very much is controversial.
To not be controversial (for me anyway), you’d need to meet some burden of proof with evidence. How much would be enough to meet that burden? I’m not sure at this moment, but as you’ve presented zero that I’ve seen, I think “more than zero” is a fair starting point.
By definition, a “YC Company” is given hundreds of thousands of dollars and direct hands on strategic advice on how to run the company. That’s the meaning of the concept.
The company in question has blatant securities fraud as their core business model.
QED
Here’s a logical construct in return. When people you like do unethical things they are still unethical.
I feel like there’s a lot of leaps in your “logical construct” there.
First and foremost, did YC approve of this “core business model”? Sure, the founders got into YC, but did they pivot during the program (frequently happens)? And while YC may be on the board, they don’t have controlling interest either.
So yeah, there’s a lot of scenarios where people “you know” and/or “partner with” do unethical things, but that fact alone doesn’t mean you are unethical. You very well could be, but guilt by association isn’t enough proof here imho.
It isn't particularly controversial, but who is to say that the founders in question took the advice being given, or even showed up for the feedback sessions? Has anyone ever been kicked out of YC?
Given the number of companies that have gone through the program, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one that completely ignored everything the founders didn't want to hear or do.
Hmm. Both those cases seem to be more along the lines of "said/posted things that made YC look bad" rather than "kicked out for ghosting their mentor" or "kicked out for scamming their users"
Scamming their users mostly makes the Founders look bad.
NOT kicking them out is what would make YC look bad. I wouldn't expect it to happen immediately, though, if YC does an internal investigation to see whether any principals, mentors, or advisors are implicated in the unethical behavior as well, whether by commission (giving unethical advice) or omissions (such as failing to raise red flags).
YCs public track record in terms of self-reflection on possible errors in judgement isn't particularly encouraging though. From the outside the org seems to focus on evolutionary changes though certainly at a fairly rapid clip (which means that cultural norms are hard to establish and maintain, giving the "carriers" of non-normative behavior opportunities to wriggle around avoiding scrutiny. For new extensions of the program YC favors rapid experimentation and iteration, which may fail to establish compatible norms depending on who is leading the effort.
It is worth contrasting one of the more stable outposts for YC culture, this very Hacker News site. YC has a very strong policy regarding not just avoiding a conflict of interest when it comes to moderation of posts critical of YC, but moderators have been instructed to moderate those posts and discussions considerably less than would otherwise be indicated, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. That's a pretty strong commitment, and one that can be difficult to live up to (avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest is a standard that judges are supposed to be held to, but not lawyers, for example). YC may or may not have always lived up to the spirit of that commitment (only insiders can know for sure), but it is reasonably plain that an ongoing effort is being made to live up to the letter of that commitment. Kudos to pg for establishing it early, and to dang for keeping it going.
The point I'm arriving at is that establishing and maintaining a cultural reference point like that is very difficult in an organization that is growing, changing, and sending out strange offshoots without a lot of explicit (even occasionally public) communication about similar bright lines and thou-shalt-nots, and outside of the HN context, we really haven't seen evidence for that.
> not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. You need to make bets everywhere and hopefully some stick.
Thats not how it works; VC's are allowed to pass on anything they want, and it turns out they dont cut a fat cheque to every idiot who knocks on the door.
And how many Porn companies has YC funded? Zero as far as I know, is that because porn related companies have zero chance of being profitable? Or is it that they take a moral stance against that industry?
Nor as far as I know are they in the asphalt industry, likely because they are focused on tech. I am sure some people out there find asphalt a moral issue (I personally dont) but I suspect they are not spraying some funding around in that industry because it isnt really of interest to them or their investors.
Lots of asphalt tech opportunity, just not so much electronic tech. And timelines are long.
I’m disappointed that we still do cold patches instead of heating the surrounding asphalt when filling potholes. That’s where I’d transfer soldering technology into asphalt.
> Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator.
That's why we have the concept of "due diligence". YC is absolutely allowed to make bets in the crypto world; but they have a brand name and a reputation of serious investors. I know that when I see the YC logo on a new product I discover, it serves as a signal. And having a fraud company being allowed to use the YC brand on their website, because YC wanted to work with them and gave them money to allow them to grow (meaning: "cheat on more people") is definitely a stain on their track record
Didn’t we have a absolutely massive thread about this just earlier this week? How much more can we talk about it? Is it the only thing we should be talking about?
Are you aware of the search feature? Or are you wondering why people aren't talking about something tangential in this thread specifically?
People talk about YC companies all the time. There is no weighting, no one flagging posts about YC companies. Most people here aren't part of YC, we have no reason to give them any more leeway than anyone else. The main reason no one in a random cryptocurrency thread is talking about one random cryptocurrency company is because that company is not a significant part of the industry, and no one except the people getting Goxxed even know it exists.
> Or is it bad to talk about such things around here?
Don't think if there is good reasoning and no name calling etc.
I would love to hear the explanation how these companies even got into YC from the people who picked them. Is this some type of divide between purely making money at YC (which can be dirty, immoral, bordering on criminal etc) and the tech community of HN who are generally against that sort of thing?
I mean it's not only crypto; it's dark patterns, privacy invasion etc; HN is generally against that, but probably many YC companies would be dead without them.
It's obvious YC would make some crypto bets. The same way Ark invest is doing on the public markets, YC will do at the seed stage to ensure they have exposure to a market segment that might turn into a big thing (I'm skeptical, but it's not impossible and I don't have a crystal ball.)
What I'm curious about is the initial pitch. Did YC have a way to know that company was a terrible (potentially fraudulent) idea, or did the founders mask it sufficiently that it would have been difficult to tell?
Either they are incompetent to realize that crypto is 99% a scam and should be avoided or they knew it was a scam but still thought they could make some money before it all fell apart (Coinbase investors)
Look, I tend to agree with you. Crypto has not found it's use case, it has a lot of scams, a lot of environmental issues, and other problems. It's been many years, it's fair to think if it hasn't found that killer application yet, that maybe it never will.
But it's also still possible that it will. If you make a living by making long bets, then it's completely reasonable to want exposure to crypto.
If you are in the business of promoting your brand to young entrepreneurs, so that they include you in funding rounds, then yes, it makes sense to have exposure to anything that young entrepreneurs are working on.
If you are in the business of owning a piece of any company that may go public via IPO or SPAC one day, then yes, might as well give money to anyone who seems like they may be able to get to that finish line.
If on the other hand you are in the business of predicting the future of technology, it doesn't make sense to have exposure to technologies that are 99% scams on the off chance that someone accidently makes something useful in an effort to get rich. There is a lot of real innovation happening in the world that deserve that funding.
That 99% number you're quoting is made up. It's a value call. I think it's a reasonable position to give crypto a small chance of becoming something really big. If you're in the business of making long bets on the future, you want a piece of everything that fits that description. Including crypto. You don't know which bets will pay off, and it's nearly impossible to make an educated guess. It's simpler to just invest in everything that has that potential.
If a group of people created a perpetual motion machine community, would they deserver some funding? How can you prove that they are not going to discover new physics that allow energy generation from nothing?
Obviously not. But are you implying that crypto has as much chance of turning into something as finding a way to violate the law of conservation of energy? That's ridiculous.
I sold everything when btc hit 23000 man that felt like it was never getting any higher. But then again I remember screaming to my wife in disbelieve when 1 btc was 10€, and then shortly after that 100! So I’m just waiting for a dip below 23000 now. Btw, I like swimming naked.
This is a good thing since it will make sure that mostly useful projects that have real applications will continue developing and improve the adoption.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadIt does, however, exclude DCA, which is almost always a sensible investment strategy.
It might make more sense to lump-sum invest, if volatility is small relative to the return.
At least for the stock market, it's not often worth sitting on cash.
You might owe more than you own, if the price rises, you fail the margin call, and they liquidate.
Yes.
> Why would that be particularly bad if the momentum is downward?
That is why. You are too late for justifying a short position if it is already going down as you can still get yourself liquidated quickly if the price jumps in one day after a correction.
https://twitter.com/BXRekt/status/1527462460457984000
Here's a million dollar short that got liquidated all of seven hours ago. Shorting Bitcoin is madness, partially because no regulation prohibits most exchange operators from frontrunning their own customers (besides the ones that voluntarily signed on to become the benchmarks for CME's Bitcoin futures price). Exchanges and market makers will collaborate to artificially push prices around to optimally liquidate shorts -- it happens all the time. They love people shorting Bitcoin.
Holding a short position can be profitable, but also know that a short squeeze is easy.
There was an incredible shorting opportunity with the recent Luna fiasco though. Literal millions made overnight.
Then beyond that, the more information, the better, but the rest is not essential.
I know one of them well, an individual who is up 9 figures over many years while staying market neutral.
Don't be fooled into thinking there is no such thing as knowing what you are doing.
I’ve been holding Bitcoin since 2013, and this 50-60% retracement from the all time high was nothing compared to what I (and other people) were living through. I advise people to look at past volatility of Bitcoin before making an investment decision.
Bitcoin solves one single problem of "digital cash" with the most robust and boring mechanism (known to mankind so far).
While the "cryptos" aim at satisfying demand for all sorts of p2p apps and moneymaking schemes that can be funded with the digital cash to avoid getting regulated out of existence.
Its volatility and UX, as well as how negatively it is perceived currently (by some people) look like bigger blockers to me.
Which that is not Bitcoin and neither is it on-chain.
The parent comment is correct on Bitcoin's failure as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and all it is instead, is a store of value. This is how you know it has failed in its intended purpose.
Lightning will definitely not solve it.
edit: tps -> transactions/day
Lightning is a way of using bitcoin. A way of cooperatively creating bitcoin transactions with multiple parties, in such a way that you can minimize the number of on-chain transactions required. It is bitcoin. It has the same security model as bitcoin. It uses the same technology. It is not in any way centralized (it's a p2p network of payment channel connections, with each operator running their own server).
Even worse, if you saw my transaction, then sent me 1BTC worth of goods, then your node becomes offline and I forcefully close the channel with the original balance, I still have my 1BTC and there is no proof anywhere except your node that the transaction ever happened. So no security, unless both nodes are online.
Finally, unless you open direct channels with everyone you want to transact with, you will rely on a 3rd party node that does have such a channel. In practice, this likely means you will use one of a few major nodes that you trust to stay online and not refuse transactions, so the payments are in effect highly centralized.
A system that validates new entries into a database can either be "very cheap and very fast" or "very fault tolerant and very decentralized". The speed of light in networking and the speed of modern CPUs make this unavoidable.
oh yeah, & this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BZoKH-hX_o
but yeah, bitcoin has no utility. you'd just have to wait until The Merge inevitably occurs, or use any of the few PoS cryptocurrencies that are generally better & more capable than bitcoin in every capacity, like Avalanche, Cardano, Fantom, Solana, etc.
There are new algorithms in late research phase though for much larger payments (like $5000) that are expected to go into production this year. I’m waiting for that before switching to using lightning network.
For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.
Am I right to assume that "use" here is in the same sense[1] that you can "use" "dollars" to pay your Big Mac in Paris with your US credit card? I.e. French McDonald's does not set the price in dollars but euros and does not need to touch dollars with a ten foot pole during the whole process and receives euros in their account?
[1] Which hardly makes any sense to me, to be honest.
Regarding hotels and flights, I book it on internet, and I don’t even know which country the travel agencies are located, and I don’t care.
> It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
I see your point. To be more precise I use the MasterCard payment network that uses a combination of Mexican Peso, USD, and EUR in the background to settle with the merchant’s bank periodically in the background (and as I use Revolut based Mastercard, it’s even more complex).
Last month the biggest POS company integrated the lightning network, an international payment network protocol, that uses Bitcoin as its settlement currency and Bitcoin network using Strike, and as the POS company does the settlement with the credit card company, the merchant in practice doesn’t see the difference between accepting credit card payment or lightning payment, as it doesn’t handle any of the two (the POS provider handles them).
What's the significance of that $100 dollar amount with the lightning network?
That competes pretty well with many bank transfer methods, especially international, which still take many days and cost sometimes $20+.
Not to mention that Bitcoin is so volatile that the transaction's value in real-world currency may be 10% higher or lower within that 24-hour window, and of course you still need to pay someone to convert it into money if you're not planning on being a crypto holder.
I haven't paid anything for international transfers within the SEPA area for years. Depending on the source/destination bank, the transfer can be completed within an hour or so.
Sometimes the solution is simply better banking infrastructure. The banking/payments system in the US is a mess but it doesn't have to be so.
Bank transfers do not cost me and happen instantaneous, not 24 hours.
I can also transfer to the US, and they receive it in 24 hours. It still doesn't cost me.
Right, e-banking is crypto.
The field of Speculative Blockchain solutions is a tiny part of crypto. But your examples sound like they either are or anchor to speculative Blockchains so Bitcoin is the leading implementation of infrastructure for your examples.
Either way, you personally benefit from belief in Bitcoin and crypto being generally positive, which has implications for your objectivity even if well meaning.
Just wondering as I'd have thought a "peak" is only evident in retrospect?
Then, one or twice a year, you an reallocate assets as they drift away from the ratio. Doing it too often is detrimental, so my guess is once a year is "enough", and may be keep an eye on any fluctuations and if it grows bigger than some threshold, you do a second rebalance.
Let's say in 2021, crypto had a huge bull run, and went from just being 10% of your allocation to something close to 20%. It makes a lot of sense then, to sell the 10%, and rebalance back into the other assets you hold.
At the end the only experience I got is that I’m still a bad trader, and I won’t do it :)
Financial instrument trading is always gambling. Imvesting is what it's not.
> Just an example last year I had a target of $150k when it was at $50k, and also (like most people) I got a BTC based loan (it made sense for tax purposes as well).
That doesn't sound like a good idea in the middle of a bull run and everyone being in profit on Bitcoin when it was at $50K last year or even $69K. I have a different strategy - taking profits and taking advantage of the hype.
It's better to get in when the market crashes so that you can buy it significantly lower, (Like say <$10K) and sell some of it during the height of the euphoria, than it is to enter when everything is going up and end up bag-holding and waiting months, or years in an unrealised loss for it to go back up again.
Hence being against anyone jumping in at >$60K last year [0] and warning another person about DOGE going all the way up and bag-holding it at $0.6; thinking that it will go to $1 by August. [0]
Anyways, Good luck with your strategy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206314
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046019
The people who bought in at around >$40K and higher just did that and are now bag-holding in drawdown.
> PP got a loan at 50 which is a bearish trade, halfway to shorting.
Well no wonder they received multiple margin calls when the smart traders were taking profits or shorting from >$60K with him ending up on the wrong side of the trade or entering at higher prices and holding into unrealised losses.
Progressive selling on the way up is emotionally very hard to do, as it feels like you're losing money whilst actually being in profit. It's tempting to fully ride the top. Don't.
Next, when the inevitable crash comes, you're uniquely positioned to buy in heavily as you have the dry powder to do so. This too is emotionally hard as everybody is fearful, "blood in the streets". Here too you can progressively buy in rather than try and predict the bottom.
This strategy only works for things that bounce back, which is not true for almost every altcoin or shitcoin.
You can also take permanent profits. Once I made my first significant profit, I took out my initial investment so that effectively I'm in crypto only with profits. I could lose it all and whilst that wouldn't make me happy, it wouldn't truly affect me either.
I also sold most my investments in January because I wanted to buy a house. Moral of the story: be a lucky bastard like me
I believe crypto doesn't need to "go to the moon" to succeed. If bitcoin hit a stable price of 1k it still works. If I were to make another play in the crypto space I'd probably do something stupid like buy 32 eth & stake it in eth 2.0
Or 4.75% running it yourself, & figuring out how to run a validator seems more fun than handing coinbase your funds. I strongly disagree with people having their crypto held by third parties
Was just mentioning it in case you (or someone else on HN) weren't aware it was an option, but clearly you are.
The meltdown in cryptocurrencies is raising alarm about the future of digital assets — or is it?
Fears over soaring prices and slowing economic growth have sent investors fleeing from risk assets, notably cryptocurrencies. In the latest Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs, explains the drivers, evolution and the outlook for crypto assets and the broader digital assets ecosystem.
Recent volatility underscores that crypto assets are still an emerging asset class with a large number of retail participants, McDermott explains to Exchanges host Allison Nathan of Goldman Sachs Research. “The move so far has been correlated to the broader macro market moves,” notes McDermott, who points out that nearly every asset class with discounted cash flows has been hard hit by inflationary pressures.
Blockchain, crypto and digital currencies are gaining broader acceptance among investors, companies and institutions. “Maturity across both the market participants and the infrastructure has given not only confidence to many different institutional sectors, but also has enabled many more traditional traders to really look forward in how they trade this marketplace because of this maturity in the product suite,” McDermott says.
Venture capital investments in digital assets are surging. While valuations are pretty high, there continues to be “high levels of interest because people continue to see exponential growth opportunities and are keen to deploy that capital,” says McDermott. “I think valuations have got a little out of kilter, so perhaps we'll see some more sensible valuations in terms of investment opportunities, too.”
If you follow that reason then it's rational that there are crashes after peaks (cashing out), and it's still rational that it will keep rising to a point that it reaches its true value (whatever that is).
The peaks and troughs will flatten out as that happens.
Could well all be wrong. But so far that seems to be the pattern.
Don't ignore the possibility that its "true value" is (or becomes) zero.
I guess it will crash to zero when governments start rolling out their own and declaring illegal all the other cryptocurrencies.
This is not true of normal investments. For example the dollars you get from selling McDonald’s stock 30 years after purchasing it come from people buying hamburgers.
The fact that there’s no such mechanism with Bitcoin demonstrates that it’s not actually an investment at all.
So when you get your profits out who will have given them to you, and what’s their story?
So from money someone else put into this whole hamburger thing and won't get it back?
> For example the dollars you get from selling McDonald’s stock 30 years after purchasing it come from people buying hamburgers.
Some dollars not all, and most likely bot even the most.
So the Bitcoin doesn't have this merchandise based mechanism for sucking the money out of the rest of the economy, so what? Only a part of the cash of the investors comes from it anyways. The rest comes from other investors who gambled wrong. Same as with Bitcoin.
Your argument is just a version of intrinsic value argument tgat crypto bros dismiss with a wide smile.
They got a hamburger and ate it. People need food.
People invest and trade in gold. Which effectively means "gold paper", you don't physically own the gold. In fact, there's 4 times more paper gold than actual gold mined. This type of gold isn't productive. It's not going to be used to make jewelry, it doesn't even exist. It's just a number on screen and a shared belief that it has value.
To a degree you can extend that idea to stock. Sure, you can consider Apple stock to be "productive", as they make desirable products. Explain to me then how stocks are so volatile? It's because the value of the stock is largely believe-driven.
It's all just a bunch of numbers on screen. And they're all investments, regardless of personal opinions on actual value.
Apple stock on the other hand takes raw materials like people and chemicals and produces computing devices that are extraordinarily useful. That transformation is the definition of production. The stock value is a NPV calculation of the future earnings of that productive enterprise, which is the interaction of expectations of the enterprise as well as a guess what the cost of capital will be, iterated over many years into infinity.
Just because of the math involved and the iterative nature of the calculation tiny changes in expectations can cause large present value changes, but that isn't really material to the general concept of the enterprise as an ongoing means of producing new, novel, value in the world.
What a piece of opinion. So not overgeneralizing and down to earth.
>In fact the picture is rather different: a sorting process is under way
And talks more about the process of penalizing weaker crypto assets, focusing on Tether. So it's actually a balanced and interesting overview of the fallout of the current selloff on what is now becoming a rather large and very complex market all of its own.
I only mention this as your comment seems a bit dismissive based on that one sentence.
https://archive.ph/4x3je
> “… The trouble is that a draconian crackdown would put at risk the benefits that crypto eventually promises, including new financial products that bypass stodgy banks; innovations in property rights; and the possibility of a less centralised financial system.”
As is with pyramidal schemes, which most of crypto are.
I pretty much think all real news articles are completely dead.
Historically, there were always catchy headines in newspapers. But they had some factualality to them, and if not they were trash rags like the National Enquirer, a newspaper sold at grocery checkouts, often explaining how a celebrity was really an alien, or time traveller, or some such.
Real newspapers had to adhere to some standards, and usually ran mostly on sales for revenue.
They sold ads, and classified ads, but they were paid papers, and each paper sold meant more profit, and for advertising revenue.
This meant that if the paper had a headline, but the headline was a lie/untruthful, some people would get upset and demand their money back.
And if this continued, people would stop buying it, because they were paying for it, and who wants to buy something which lies to get sold?!
Beyond that, if the article was poorly written, if the article was poorly researched, many would be annoyed at wasting cash. If the newspaper ended up with a reputation for this, sales would likely drop.
Point is, when paying hard cash for something, people typically demand something of value in return.
Compare that to today, where modern news is like a poster someone stuck on a lamp post. Are you gonna complain, if the free poster is just made up drivel?!
Modern news is this. Nothing you read has any incentive to be true, the only incentive is to get you to click, and look at the ads.
So you do, because OMG! Bad thing happened!
Modern democracies depend upon pillars of society to hold it up, news being one of them.
And news used to serve this purpose, being primarily consumer facing.
And now it's not. Now, it's gone.
Will confidence shatter completely if it doesn't go up in the next cycle?
Hard to tell. Important to remember that BTC has only existed in an easy monetary environment. Will risk assets like this still go up if there is no cheap money available?
I appreciate the core ideas behind it and I've profited a lot from crypto. But I don't know if the narrative can hold true in a tight monetary environment
Tou can do that here https://www.barchart.com/crypto/quotes/%5EBTCUSD/interactive...
https://twitter.com/fatmanterra/status/1527153694218797058
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stablegains
Or is it bad to talk about such things around here?
We already knew YC's ethics -- they proudly look for "naughty" founders who "hack real world systems" for personal gain.
I’ve got no idea what their original pitch is, I certainly wouldn’t back a crypto startup that ostensibly aims to do something like what it looks like they tried to do, but if I was making 300 bets a couple times a year I’d be silly not to do something in the space.
Whether a ycombinator seal of approval lead to investment which lead to consumers getting fleeced and culpability in that situation, I don’t know. It’s crypto. If you’re silly enough to think it’s a safe investment, you’re blind. A company can also say a lot of things differently from first pitch to accepting millions from consumers. As an investor with 10%ish equity, you’ve got some sway, but you don’t have much sway. And who is to say their bet isn’t the right one.
A stain, but I don’t know about righteous indignation, I don’t know how much culpability transfers back to yc… but I don’t feel it’s a whole lot
The previous sentence isn’t and shouldn’t be particularly controversial.
As you wrote it as a generic hypothetical, no, it’s not really controversial to me. If however you are meaning to say it as a passive aggressive way to accuse YC, yeah, it very much is controversial.
To not be controversial (for me anyway), you’d need to meet some burden of proof with evidence. How much would be enough to meet that burden? I’m not sure at this moment, but as you’ve presented zero that I’ve seen, I think “more than zero” is a fair starting point.
The company in question has blatant securities fraud as their core business model.
QED
Here’s a logical construct in return. When people you like do unethical things they are still unethical.
First and foremost, did YC approve of this “core business model”? Sure, the founders got into YC, but did they pivot during the program (frequently happens)? And while YC may be on the board, they don’t have controlling interest either.
So yeah, there’s a lot of scenarios where people “you know” and/or “partner with” do unethical things, but that fact alone doesn’t mean you are unethical. You very well could be, but guilt by association isn’t enough proof here imho.
Given the number of companies that have gone through the program, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one that completely ignored everything the founders didn't want to hear or do.
"Dark CEO Paul Biggar said YC booting him for tweeting about internal posts on skipping COVID-19 vaccine lines.
Prolific CEO Katia Damer said she was cut after calling out misogyny by YC founders.“
https://www.businessinsider.com/ycombinator-katia-damer-paul...
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/09/does-what-happens-at-yc-st...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27399581
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
“Croupier: Your winnings, sir.”
“Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.”
Scamming their users mostly makes the Founders look bad.
NOT kicking them out is what would make YC look bad. I wouldn't expect it to happen immediately, though, if YC does an internal investigation to see whether any principals, mentors, or advisors are implicated in the unethical behavior as well, whether by commission (giving unethical advice) or omissions (such as failing to raise red flags).
YCs public track record in terms of self-reflection on possible errors in judgement isn't particularly encouraging though. From the outside the org seems to focus on evolutionary changes though certainly at a fairly rapid clip (which means that cultural norms are hard to establish and maintain, giving the "carriers" of non-normative behavior opportunities to wriggle around avoiding scrutiny. For new extensions of the program YC favors rapid experimentation and iteration, which may fail to establish compatible norms depending on who is leading the effort.
It is worth contrasting one of the more stable outposts for YC culture, this very Hacker News site. YC has a very strong policy regarding not just avoiding a conflict of interest when it comes to moderation of posts critical of YC, but moderators have been instructed to moderate those posts and discussions considerably less than would otherwise be indicated, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. That's a pretty strong commitment, and one that can be difficult to live up to (avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest is a standard that judges are supposed to be held to, but not lawyers, for example). YC may or may not have always lived up to the spirit of that commitment (only insiders can know for sure), but it is reasonably plain that an ongoing effort is being made to live up to the letter of that commitment. Kudos to pg for establishing it early, and to dang for keeping it going.
The point I'm arriving at is that establishing and maintaining a cultural reference point like that is very difficult in an organization that is growing, changing, and sending out strange offshoots without a lot of explicit (even occasionally public) communication about similar bright lines and thou-shalt-nots, and outside of the HN context, we really haven't seen evidence for that.
Thats not how it works; VC's are allowed to pass on anything they want, and it turns out they dont cut a fat cheque to every idiot who knocks on the door.
I’m disappointed that we still do cold patches instead of heating the surrounding asphalt when filling potholes. That’s where I’d transfer soldering technology into asphalt.
Porn companies don't have exits.
That's why we have the concept of "due diligence". YC is absolutely allowed to make bets in the crypto world; but they have a brand name and a reputation of serious investors. I know that when I see the YC logo on a new product I discover, it serves as a signal. And having a fraud company being allowed to use the YC brand on their website, because YC wanted to work with them and gave them money to allow them to grow (meaning: "cheat on more people") is definitely a stain on their track record
Are you aware of the search feature? Or are you wondering why people aren't talking about something tangential in this thread specifically?
People talk about YC companies all the time. There is no weighting, no one flagging posts about YC companies. Most people here aren't part of YC, we have no reason to give them any more leeway than anyone else. The main reason no one in a random cryptocurrency thread is talking about one random cryptocurrency company is because that company is not a significant part of the industry, and no one except the people getting Goxxed even know it exists.
Don't think if there is good reasoning and no name calling etc.
I would love to hear the explanation how these companies even got into YC from the people who picked them. Is this some type of divide between purely making money at YC (which can be dirty, immoral, bordering on criminal etc) and the tech community of HN who are generally against that sort of thing?
I mean it's not only crypto; it's dark patterns, privacy invasion etc; HN is generally against that, but probably many YC companies would be dead without them.
So is that the reason? YC!=HN?
What I'm curious about is the initial pitch. Did YC have a way to know that company was a terrible (potentially fraudulent) idea, or did the founders mask it sufficiently that it would have been difficult to tell?
But it's also still possible that it will. If you make a living by making long bets, then it's completely reasonable to want exposure to crypto.
If you are in the business of owning a piece of any company that may go public via IPO or SPAC one day, then yes, might as well give money to anyone who seems like they may be able to get to that finish line.
If on the other hand you are in the business of predicting the future of technology, it doesn't make sense to have exposure to technologies that are 99% scams on the off chance that someone accidently makes something useful in an effort to get rich. There is a lot of real innovation happening in the world that deserve that funding.
If a group of people created a perpetual motion machine community, would they deserver some funding? How can you prove that they are not going to discover new physics that allow energy generation from nothing?
Without the paywall