You fell for the most basic narrative of the fiat schemers who are destroying our society and manufacturing artificial inequality on a massive scale. Do you want to be ruled by criminals, be surrounded by crazy people? If not, then you see the utility of crypto.
The utility of crypto is to enable a fair, functioning society. That is literally, the most important utility of all.
By allowing capitalism to exist on top of sound, probably scarce, voluntary monetary systems as opposed to an unfair system where one's social proximity to the money printer determines all outcomes of faux-capitalism.
By putting pressure and providing an alternative. Without alternative, there is zero pressure or incentive to improve anything and gross injustice will become normalized and get worse. IMO, without crypto, we would already be living in feudalism. Especially with all the surveillance tech we have today.
Yes. Unfortunately for some of us it's the only chance we have to contribute to society as current system is too centralized and deprives us of all opportunities. You'd have to be in our shoes to understand how weird things are for some of us. Like you could build something that's 100x better than any alternative and can't get more than a few users because of algorithm censorship. Users will tell you how great your product is but it won't move the needle because the information about the product's existence just won't propagate. There are no mediums for it to propagate and there is just one monoculture which works against you and, worst of all, gaslights you constantly.
Are you describing cryptocurrency or fiat money? Because "social proximity to the money printer" describes an awful lot of cryptocurrency, e.g., FTX or Tether.
Yes, that's the current reality. Only scams have been allowed to succeed and I would not be surprised if the people who propped them up have special access to money printers as it is an extremely wasteful scheme. I feel like crypto has been a giant money laundering operation for corrupt governments. Still, it posseses the capacity to solve our monetary issues. I don't know how many more waves of scams it will take to solve the problem though. It depends how far fiat proponents are willing to go bribing away the crypto competition decade after decade. But I'm quite sure that crypto will not go away.
It's really best to do both. People opposed to government surveillance tend to use E2E encryption (tech) and also lobby their government for change (policy). Same with cryptocurrency.
If they could just shut down money printing, that would solve the problem... But they won't do that unless there is a way to verify that money printing is not taking place in secret. People who live under corrupt governments are familiar with this reality.
People should be able to have total confidence in the integrity of their monetary system to ensure that they are not unwittingly supporting actions that go against their morals. Blockchain would allow precisely that.
Which governments are money printing in secret? From what I can tell, countries with excessive money printing issues are all too happily to advertise their excessive money printing.
I can somewhat see the appeal of a system like the gold standard in that it tries to imposes a monetary straitjacket on government. Except that the course of history shows that, when faced with the choice of continuing their monetary policy or abiding the the straitjacket, the straitjacket loses very nearly every single time. This includes times where losing the straitjacket meant physical adulteration of the currency--it is, after all, the literal act behind the term 'debasement'.
Are you under the impression that governments lack the technology necessary not to print money? They're in charge, you don't get to disagree unilaterally. That's not an option.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution.
For one, there is no electronic alternative for 69% of the global population. That's how many people are unbanked and/or do not have access to a financial institution.
That's because it's either illegal or legally too expensive to give them banking services. You're not describing a tech problem. Banking tech exists. You don't get to decide what random countries want to do with their monetary policy or financial service regulations.
Unbanked people who use Bitcoin do not care whether it's a tech or policy problem. They just care that it solves their problem. Here's your lawful utility.
The law doesn't care whether it solves their problem. It doesn't make it lawful to circumvent banking regulations. Governments have bills to pay and it's illegal to disobey.
Using Bitcoin is not equivalent to circumventing banking regulations. Banking regulations concern money transmitters and banks. Since Bitcoin involves neither, those regulations do not apply, at least not for regular payments between individuals or businesses. It is therefore perfectly lawful for unbanked people to use Bitcoin, at least in most countries.
I agree with that. Neither mailing beanie babies nor sending Bitcoin is "circumventing banking regulations". That was pretty much my point. What's yours?
That bitcoin and mailing beanie babies have no meaningful and lawful utility. By utility I mean benefit. It will be a dead giveaway that you're biased and intellectually dishonest if you ask for the definition of utility.
How do we establish the parameters for defining 'utility' in this context? I posit that if an individual finds value in Bitcoin (or Beanie babies) for legal purposes, it serves as an indication of its 'meaningful and lawful utility.' I, for one, belong to this category of users. It leads me to suspect that your interpretation of 'utility' might be deviating from the conventional understanding. Could you please elaborate? Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that what you really mean is that you don't personally have a use for Bitcoin in your own life?
Re. "notoriously awful," I also think people underestimate how useful it is to go through a financial institution for any legal transactions thanks to the protection that those institutions (generally) offer.
If you accidentally run your credit card through a skimmer at the gas station, and the skimmer's owner tries to rack up a bunch of expenses with that card, you can dispute the charges. If your BTC wallet accidentally gets compromised... that's it. No recourse.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
A "financial institution" is just an entity that is legally allowed to engage in sending money from one party to another. So the vision is just "let's make something illegal"?
That's historically wrong. When Bitcoin was initially launched, it took a long time before it started being used in economic transactions (see the famous 10,000 BTC pizza). It took an even longer time for some merchants to start accepting it directly or through a payment processor. Adoption by merchants was close to zero for a very long time.
Today, you can not only easily trade BTC against other currencies but also spend them at many merchants. There's even a country (El Salvador) that has adopted it as legal tender. These days, the daily transaction volume is in the multibillion dollar range (and that's just counting transactions that are settled "on-chain").
Is your objection that since it is less commonly adopted than USD, it therefore has lower utility than USD? Or that its utility was higher in the past? I am not quite sure I understand your question or argument.
> Billions per day is basically wash trading by quants.
Trading is done on centralized exchanges and doesn't show up in the figure I mentioned ("on chain" transactions). So close to 100% are for goods, services or value transfers.
> Everyone seems to hate bitcoin in el salvador
It's obviously not true that everyone hates Bitcoin in El Salvador. Perhaps some percentage of the population? But I've just seen several videos on the URL you linked that were quite positive. The president, Nayib Bukele, obviously doesn't hate Bitcoin and is still hugely popular in El Salvador[0].
Oh well then you're just talking about drug revenue (and worse). lol @ 90% approval lol yeah me too
It seems you've reached a conclusion based on a gut feeling, and are constructing arguments to back your viewpoint. This hints that you might not be interacting with this topic with the necessary objectivity and investigative spirit to truly understand it.
You quickly shifted your attribution of the transaction volume from wash trading to drug revenue. It seems you've reached a conclusion based on a gut feeling, and are constructing arguments to back your viewpoint. This hints that you might not be interacting with this topic with the necessary objectivity and investigative spirit to truly understand it.
It’s not a bad idea to have trailblazers exploring a parallel financial system. Once mature, it may help us solve problems humanity has encountered repeatedly. Global financial crises have a history of toppling governments and provoking conflicts; a neutral system could serve as a release valve instead of fighting over who gets to play policeman. In the far future, adopting a dual-currency model may be preferable for whichever nation hosts the world’s reserve currency.
This is the standard Web3 type delusions of grandeur that hypes everyone up. Developers don't have a say in such matters. They're not policymakers. Wrong profession.
Sending money to people internationally without the blessing, permission or fees of your government or central bank is the primary utility. It is simply astounding to me that otherwise intelligent people can't understand this simple and incredibly useful function.
If I want to send $10 to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar, how do I do that exactly without crypto? Sending him $10 in litecoin takes a few minutes to process through the blockchain, and costs just a few cents in processing fees. What is the alternative, especially if he doesn't a bank account or ready access to a bank? Paying high fees to Moneygram or Western Union, waiting an extended period of time and undergoing an onerous KYC process that often ends up in your funds being returned or rejected from many foreign countries?
If you are wealthy, live in the United States, have a bank account, no interest in privacy, and are looking to send and/or receive money from other wealthy people from the United States who also have bank accounts and don't have any interest in privacy, then crypto holds no allure.
It isn't illegal for me to send $10 in litecoin to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar without the blessing, permission or fees charged by the government, the banks or fiat currency companies like Moneygram (as much as they would like to make it so).
Suggesting that sending $10 in litecoin to my cousin in another country cheaply and easily (which would otherwise be impossible in the traditional banking system) while at the same time arguing that crypto should be illegal because it has no utility is absurd on its face.
It's also not unlawful for you to flush it down the toilet. What's your point? We're looking for a use case that can't be done with a regular database.
Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
>We're looking for a use case that can't be done with a regular database.
If by, "regular database" you mean the traditional banking system, I've already laid it out for you. You can't send money from a bank to someone without a bank account. The cost to use a legacy payment system like Moneygram is prohibitive - you can't send $10. The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system, even if the cost wasn't prohibitive, often prevent you from doing so, even when everything is totally legal and legitimate.
>Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
The transaction costs are very low, and the blockchain transactions take place relatively quickly. Sending $10 to anyone in the world might cost you 10 or 15 cents and take 10-30 minutes. I am far from a crypto wizard, but was an early adopter for exactly the reasons detailed above.
You didn't give an example of sending money. You gave an example of database transaction of an exchange traded token. Sending IOUs that need to be changed into money isn't the same thing as sending money.
> The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system ...
=> Become a policy maker and change the regulation. You're not allowed to just evade regulations with crypto tech just because it's your opinion that democratic law was improperly legislated. That's crazy talk.
Why do you think Moneygram is expensive? Ever thought maybe it's due to legal compliance? You're not allowed to evade that.
> without the blessing, permission or fees of your government
That’s not lawful.
There’s no use of crypto that isn’t gambling or the evasion of laws.
There’s probably a few unjust money transfer laws out there in the world. So you could make a case that the specific special use case of evading those is legitimate.
There's no law against sending $10 in crypto to your cousin in another country. It isn't a crime, and it is a perfect example of the utility of crypto.
The value of crypto has always been in its ability to take the power to control the financial freedom of individuals away from government and put it back in the hands of people.
Whether you agree that is a good thing or not, depends on your political views towards authoritarian governments.
My "hand" is expressing that nobody has successfully been able to explain the lawful utility of crypto. Whatever you're doing now is certainly no exception. It's not my fault that you can't explain, but you simultaneously have strong feelings about it.
THIS man. Even if there's not presently a visible one-to-one correlation, this is the EXACT sort of sketch language used against efforts like, e.g. the Civil Rights Movement.
The uncensorable transmission or store of value anonymously/pseudonymously; is pretty close to the promise of the original whitepaper. But with something like the evm, there is much more.
As a lower bound, it's at least as useful as other things that people regard as valuable mostly because, historically, people have regarded it as valuable. Gold is in this category -- but so would be Awesomium, a substance I just made up but which myself and my associates are certain is gonna be the Next Big Thing, so get in now before it gets big, YOLO!
If you trust institutions like banks, tax departments and reserve banks, and transacting with them is easy and cheap, the value of crypto as a medium of exchange is very low. This is how the majority of people feel in the developed world, though whether this is rational (given things like the fact a government can just unilaterally change the rules by printing, or burning, a bunch of money) is disputed. To the extent you don't trust these institutions, or they make transacting hard, the value of alternatives, like cash notes and coins, barter, or crypto increases.
You claim that the only possible uses of cryptocurrency are to circumvent the law. If that were the case, governments would have simply made holding or trading it illegal -- but with few exceptions (bitcoin in China), they have not done so.
This is not your original question -- you have smuggled the word "impossible" in there, hoping I wouldn't notice.
Plainly a thing can have value even if what it can do can be done in other ways. It might be more convenient than those other ways, or cheaper, or be more reliable. It might involve having to trust fewer commercial third parties like banks -- which, you'll notice, has no implications for lawfulness.
As I already stated, crypto can be used as a store of value like gold, or for exchange like cash or barter. Neither of these uses are necessarily illegal.
"Legality" isn't a prerequisite to utility, even utility that can be good for the world?
I believe that the presence of "exchange of value outside of government control" is potentially a valuable thing even if it can be used for bad. I believe the same about free speech and encryption.
You're absolutely correct. It's also true that, historically, "fringe, law-breaking activists" have sometimes been on the better side of history. Which is why one needs a better argument than "it's illegal" to restrict the freedom of individuals to transact with money.
1. Store of wealth for ordinary people in badly governed countries (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka) - provably beyond the control of any government, easy to conceal, easy to transfer. See real examples of how individuals are using it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
2. Store of wealth for countries who do not want to keep their reserves in other countries fiat currencies. Gold is one alternative and Bitcoin is a good second option.
3. International settlements - if Pakistan wants to buy cheap oil from Iran, what currency do they transact it? Neither one wants to keep each other's currency on their hand because of a low level of trust. USD/EUR was one alternative but it is increasingly weaponized and anyway one cannot buy Iranian oil with it. That leaves only Gold, which is too hard to transport.
Happy to engage further if you want to discuss in good faith.
1. Badly governed countries still have laws you are required to obey - regardless of your opinion.
2. Beanie babies would be the only third option. There is no 4th option.
3. They could use beanie babies.
> Badly governed countries still have laws you are required to obey - regardless of your opinion.
That's determined en masse by the citizens of those bad governments - regardless of your opinion. There is a reason why black markets thrive, societies decay and revolutions happen. Repeatedly.
It's quite clear to me that much of the current crypto industry was set up for scandal. Literally only scam projects have been allowed to gain any exposure whatsoever. There are tons of great projects that you don't know exist. I bet almost every popular project today is headed by scammers and whoever orchestrated this whole thing holds them on a tight leash.
Mattereum.com/land is a legally acceptable way of doing fast transfers of real estate. Also works for gold bars etc.
Wow it’s hard to get any airtime.
You’d think “we’ve built the core tech for a global electronic exchange for the world’s largest asset class” would be easy to get publicity for but no.
Interesting because I also worked on a real estate + crypto project and the social media algorithms suppressed us big time. There must be thousands of such projects by now being censored.
AI World is the same right now, but more aimed at VCs.
Most of the cool projects outside of FAANG are, like, lone starving devs aggregating stuff, or sometimes a research paper that kept on hacking at their repo.
Many of the projects getting investor money are startups with fancy web pages full of promises that look strikingly similar to crypto hustles. Maybe they have another SOTA huggingface finetune that probably has some lies in the card.
In some cases, it’s the same people moved on to a new hustle. Sometimes I’ll google a scammy crypto project that raised $xx million in VC money during the boom times, and more often than not they’re an AI company now.
Because I worked there and literally witnessed founders going from "I will do whatever it takes to change the world" to "I will do whatever it takes to waste as much money as possible." from one month to the next around 2017.
Wasn't that just a cash grab? Everyone threw some buzz words in a white paper and made a pretty landing page hoping to take advantage of the hype.
I don't understand what you mean by "waste" or how that led to coordination. Most of those founders didn't even spend the money raised on anything, they just pocketed it.
Many early projects which are scams are still pocketing the money today. They are regulated by government entities which appear to be preventing them from actually doing anything useful with the funds. Founders just pay themselves big salaries to do nothing since years. Not only that, if someone from the community makes a meaningful contribution in their own time, founders will take steps to shut it down and suppress such projects. That has been my personal experience and one I know others have had.
Considering how long she's been running the Web3 Is Going Great project (at least since 2021, if not longer?), it must be kind of wild to be in a position where you can truly say "I told you so" about all these collapsing houses of cards. Especially when so many other people turned a blind eye or didn't see them coming.
Holy shit, I just read the most recent articles for ~30 minutes. Must have read 30 or 40 headlines and thought that covered a year. I only made it to September of this year.
I haven't been following what's happening in crypto and was generally aware it was bad, but the last 3 months (that is how far I scrolled down) seems bad than I anticipated. The number of security issues, money stolen, and number of fraudulent cases is unbelievable. How are people still invested in this?
It was even worse before. MtGox failed in 2014 and it had an even bigger market share than FTX. Almost all the issues are related to centralized services and projects, not issues with the blockchain technology itself.
The industry has repeatedly and intentionally been kept on the fringes. Yes, this will happen again and again. Look where the exchange was operating out of? Sure the outlines on capital gains tax came swiftly, but regulatory framework has been crickets.
The only way there won't be more crypto crimes are if crypto no longer exists. Where there is money to be made, there will be crime. Crypto has attracted all the people looking to get rich quick, which happens to overlap a lot with those looking to work on the edge of the law to maximize profits.
The most mindboggling thing is that Tether is still alive and printing, and that nobody associated with it has gone to jail. Alameda was apparently also an early and large Tether customer.
Federal Reserve inadvertently bailed out Tether - they now earn 4-5% on billions of USD deposited with them for more than a year. Enough to plug the hole they might have been in.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadOh, there are definitely more coming. Or there need to be, and I say this as someone who generally believes in crypto.
Please, lets get the ball rolling here.
The utility of crypto is to enable a fair, functioning society. That is literally, the most important utility of all.
People should be able to have total confidence in the integrity of their monetary system to ensure that they are not unwittingly supporting actions that go against their morals. Blockchain would allow precisely that.
I can somewhat see the appeal of a system like the gold standard in that it tries to imposes a monetary straitjacket on government. Except that the course of history shows that, when faced with the choice of continuing their monetary policy or abiding the the straitjacket, the straitjacket loses very nearly every single time. This includes times where losing the straitjacket meant physical adulteration of the currency--it is, after all, the literal act behind the term 'debasement'.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
But even setting those aside, what's the actual point? Why does a normal person care about making online payments without involving a bank?
If you accidentally run your credit card through a skimmer at the gas station, and the skimmer's owner tries to rack up a bunch of expenses with that card, you can dispute the charges. If your BTC wallet accidentally gets compromised... that's it. No recourse.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Today, you can not only easily trade BTC against other currencies but also spend them at many merchants. There's even a country (El Salvador) that has adopted it as legal tender. These days, the daily transaction volume is in the multibillion dollar range (and that's just counting transactions that are settled "on-chain").
Is your objection that since it is less commonly adopted than USD, it therefore has lower utility than USD? Or that its utility was higher in the past? I am not quite sure I understand your question or argument.
Billions per day is basically wash trading by quants. What % of that is actual merchant transactions for goods or services?? Almost 0%
> Billions per day is basically wash trading by quants.
Trading is done on centralized exchanges and doesn't show up in the figure I mentioned ("on chain" transactions). So close to 100% are for goods, services or value transfers.
> Everyone seems to hate bitcoin in el salvador
It's obviously not true that everyone hates Bitcoin in El Salvador. Perhaps some percentage of the population? But I've just seen several videos on the URL you linked that were quite positive. The president, Nayib Bukele, obviously doesn't hate Bitcoin and is still hugely popular in El Salvador[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
It seems you've reached a conclusion based on a gut feeling, and are constructing arguments to back your viewpoint. This hints that you might not be interacting with this topic with the necessary objectivity and investigative spirit to truly understand it.
Weird gatekeeping, bro.
If I want to send $10 to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar, how do I do that exactly without crypto? Sending him $10 in litecoin takes a few minutes to process through the blockchain, and costs just a few cents in processing fees. What is the alternative, especially if he doesn't a bank account or ready access to a bank? Paying high fees to Moneygram or Western Union, waiting an extended period of time and undergoing an onerous KYC process that often ends up in your funds being returned or rejected from many foreign countries?
If you are wealthy, live in the United States, have a bank account, no interest in privacy, and are looking to send and/or receive money from other wealthy people from the United States who also have bank accounts and don't have any interest in privacy, then crypto holds no allure.
= "unlawful"
We're looking for lawful use cases that cant' be done with a regular database
It isn't illegal for me to send $10 in litecoin to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar without the blessing, permission or fees charged by the government, the banks or fiat currency companies like Moneygram (as much as they would like to make it so).
Suggesting that sending $10 in litecoin to my cousin in another country cheaply and easily (which would otherwise be impossible in the traditional banking system) while at the same time arguing that crypto should be illegal because it has no utility is absurd on its face.
Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
If by, "regular database" you mean the traditional banking system, I've already laid it out for you. You can't send money from a bank to someone without a bank account. The cost to use a legacy payment system like Moneygram is prohibitive - you can't send $10. The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system, even if the cost wasn't prohibitive, often prevent you from doing so, even when everything is totally legal and legitimate.
>Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
The transaction costs are very low, and the blockchain transactions take place relatively quickly. Sending $10 to anyone in the world might cost you 10 or 15 cents and take 10-30 minutes. I am far from a crypto wizard, but was an early adopter for exactly the reasons detailed above.
> The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system ...
=> Become a policy maker and change the regulation. You're not allowed to just evade regulations with crypto tech just because it's your opinion that democratic law was improperly legislated. That's crazy talk.
Why do you think Moneygram is expensive? Ever thought maybe it's due to legal compliance? You're not allowed to evade that.
That’s not lawful.
There’s no use of crypto that isn’t gambling or the evasion of laws.
There’s probably a few unjust money transfer laws out there in the world. So you could make a case that the specific special use case of evading those is legitimate.
The rest is just crime.
The value of crypto has always been in its ability to take the power to control the financial freedom of individuals away from government and put it back in the hands of people.
Whether you agree that is a good thing or not, depends on your political views towards authoritarian governments.
>futile
How did these words get there?
IOW, you showed your hand.
If you trust institutions like banks, tax departments and reserve banks, and transacting with them is easy and cheap, the value of crypto as a medium of exchange is very low. This is how the majority of people feel in the developed world, though whether this is rational (given things like the fact a government can just unilaterally change the rules by printing, or burning, a bunch of money) is disputed. To the extent you don't trust these institutions, or they make transacting hard, the value of alternatives, like cash notes and coins, barter, or crypto increases.
This is not your original question -- you have smuggled the word "impossible" in there, hoping I wouldn't notice.
Plainly a thing can have value even if what it can do can be done in other ways. It might be more convenient than those other ways, or cheaper, or be more reliable. It might involve having to trust fewer commercial third parties like banks -- which, you'll notice, has no implications for lawfulness.
As I already stated, crypto can be used as a store of value like gold, or for exchange like cash or barter. Neither of these uses are necessarily illegal.
I'm done here.
"Legality" isn't a prerequisite to utility, even utility that can be good for the world?
I believe that the presence of "exchange of value outside of government control" is potentially a valuable thing even if it can be used for bad. I believe the same about free speech and encryption.
2. Store of wealth for countries who do not want to keep their reserves in other countries fiat currencies. Gold is one alternative and Bitcoin is a good second option.
3. International settlements - if Pakistan wants to buy cheap oil from Iran, what currency do they transact it? Neither one wants to keep each other's currency on their hand because of a low level of trust. USD/EUR was one alternative but it is increasingly weaponized and anyway one cannot buy Iranian oil with it. That leaves only Gold, which is too hard to transport.
Happy to engage further if you want to discuss in good faith.
That's determined en masse by the citizens of those bad governments - regardless of your opinion. There is a reason why black markets thrive, societies decay and revolutions happen. Repeatedly.
Mattereum.com/land is a legally acceptable way of doing fast transfers of real estate. Also works for gold bars etc.
Wow it’s hard to get any airtime.
You’d think “we’ve built the core tech for a global electronic exchange for the world’s largest asset class” would be easy to get publicity for but no.
Let’s hope that Musk fixes it.
What makes crypto businesses scammy is not the technology.
Most of the cool projects outside of FAANG are, like, lone starving devs aggregating stuff, or sometimes a research paper that kept on hacking at their repo.
Many of the projects getting investor money are startups with fancy web pages full of promises that look strikingly similar to crypto hustles. Maybe they have another SOTA huggingface finetune that probably has some lies in the card.
What makes you think there is coordination rather than natural incentives that drive individuals to act in similar ways?
Wasn't that just a cash grab? Everyone threw some buzz words in a white paper and made a pretty landing page hoping to take advantage of the hype.
I don't understand what you mean by "waste" or how that led to coordination. Most of those founders didn't even spend the money raised on anything, they just pocketed it.