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Comment by throwoutway | Hacker News Reader

Never heard of Future.com but I guess he needs to cut costs everywhere as he's been losing money betting huge on crypto and probably is realizing he is losing money on Adam Neumman too. Probably lucky he missed getting scammed on FTX as he supposedly could not invest due to being an investor in Coinbase

https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitz-went-all-in...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/business/dealbook/adam-ne...

https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/30/andreessen-horowitz-do...

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I’m not sure that’s true. Semafor reported that a16z's returns were 15x at the beginning of 2022 [1]. Obviously that’s probably lower now but the reason they were so high is that they got inside access to their companies’ tokens and dumped them on retail before the crash. Crypto has been an upward transfer of wealth on an unprecedented scale.

[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/11/16/2022/andreessen-passed...

Chris Dixon and those crooks 100% let retailers hold the bag for all the worthless tokens they were able to dump on the public.

But still the 15x is surprising to me, then again if its based on last years mark to market it makes sense.

Fairly certain all their investments in crypto are going to zero though.

Running a publication like future.com costs peanuts. If they are pinching pennies like this, a16z must be in big trouble?

Maybe more along the lines of if your freely accessible vanity press gets no readers does that reflect well.

Not necessarily. Now that Twitter is in friendlier hands, they simply may not feel the need to shovel more SEO blogspam into the furnace.

You are probably right. It does look like a SEO spam site!

It still comes down to cost/benefit -- no matter how small the cost monetarily, there's still the conceptual/attention/time aspect, and it's always possible for the benefit to be so little that the cost isn't justified.

Their business model is even more sinister according to Nicholas Weaver.

"New A16Z: Securities Fraud as a Business

• Invest in several "blockchain" startups

• Startups issue new tokens promising something, eventually

• These are unlicensed securities and this is blatantly illegal in the US, just not enforced by the SEC!

• A16Z gets a ton of these tokens, sells to retail suckers

• Ideally gets listed on Coinbase, but sketchier exchanges will do • They did that just now with "APE" token!

• If SEC ever wakes up...

• It is the startups that committed the securities fraud, not A16Z! So they are safe with their money!

Link: https://su22.cs161.org/assets/lectures/cryptocurrency.pdf

My suspicion is that Coinbase may not be as solvent as we would like either. There have been too many exchange scams to truly believe anyone is clean.

We now know that outright market manipulation at a massive scale was happening through ftx, there is minimal reason btc can’t fall back to 2013 levels with such schemes out of the picture.

https://cryptoslate.com/kraken-coinbase-and-gate-io-publish-...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021...

Since Coinbase is a publicly traded company and under the SEC, it is actually the exchange we probably have the best and most accurate info on.

Should have invested in Shorts.com

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