htormey

"When you trade gold, you trade “loco” Hong Kong and end up receiving a claim on a stock there, which you might need to move to New Jersey. Banks control the custodian game and governments control banks (or, rather, bankers and government officials are, to be polite, tight together). So Bitcoin has a huge advantage over gold in transactions: clearance does not require a specific custodian. No government can control what code you have in your head."

Regardless of what you think of BTC and its ilk, I think this is a pretty good point about investing in gold.

I think exit times are taking longer across the board, especially compared to earlier periods in SV history:

http://www.angelblog.net/Venture_Capital_Exit_Times.html

The big problem I have with startup equity compensation these days is the time it takes to get to get to liquidity.

Going from founding to an IPO takes what, 8-10 years? Even assuming things go that well if your equity doesn’t have terms like early excercise or a long time to decide if you want to exercise it’s not a good deal. It’s easy to get locked into working with below market compensation in scenarios like that.

Also very few companies allow for things like secondary markets.

It’s going to be interesting to see how or rather if this gets addressed in the coming years.

I agree with a lot of your comments on this post but I'm not sure if you want to include LTC in that list of examples.

I can see BTC and ETH having long term value but I'm not so sure about LTC.

LTC'S main claim to fame seems to be that Charlie (it's creator) was working at Coinbase and managed to get it listed there.

Apart from that it appears to be a bunch of copy pasta code from other projects.

If you want to see a perfect example of this, check out this post on why LTC is "faster" than BTC:

https://twitter.com/r_Buttcoin/status/951585800147390464

The main thing I use LTC for right now is buying ALT's from other exchanges because its network fees are cheaper than ETH/BTC/BCH. I don't see this situation lasting forever especially considering Charlie (LTC'S creator) recently unloaded all of his LTC.

A significant portion of my time as software engineer is spent either debugging or optimizing existing code. Having a solid mental model of how my tools or the frameworks I use work saves me a lot of time.

I think anyone who works with React or React native should have a rough idea of what’s going on under the hood.

The above article series seems to do a decent job of this for a framework people use day in and day out.

I’d also add that buffet hates the concept of gold. Aside from a socially acceptable form of modern middle class gambling in my opinion the primary use case of crypto currency is a store of value.

Aside from the amount of time it’s been in existence what is the difference between gold and something like bitcoin? Only ~4 of gold is used for industrial purposes the remainder is used for jewelery and stuff like bullion. Basically stores of value. It trades at a premium above its cost to extract, store and transport.

So what is the liability of someone in the USA investing in an "extrajursidictional company"?

The parent is doing an ICO for an escort service, if I was to say do an ICO for an assassination service would the people who invested be in anyway liable? Is it legal to raise funds for an expressly illegal purpose?

In regards to bitcoin I believe he is correct. About 97% of the activity appears to be people on exchanges:

https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4122695-bitcoin-series-...

This mainly appears to be due to transaction times and high fees.

I’d be interested to see a similar analysis for monero but that’s probably not easily doable due to its privacy features.

Sure. I had been waiting for someone else to do this as it seems very obvious to me.

In the above comment I didn’t even get into the big war that’s looming between Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat for video ad revenue.

I also didn’t talk about how crypto currency factors into all of this either.

I think 2018 is going to see some pretty big shifts in the online media landscape.

This article is very anecdotal and it doesn’t talk about the underlying reasons for why niche communities are making a big comeback.

It mentions that Patreon has risen in popularity but doesn’t talk about the YouTube adpoocalypse or the reasons why that occurred.

The adpocalypse and it’s impact on everything from news commentary to comedy channels is one of the biggest factors driving creators and hence users onto YouTube alternatives.

It doesn’t talk about said Youtube alternatives such as minds, steemit etc or why vidme shut down. It doesn’t talk about their differences or why one is better than the other.

It doesn’t talk about the economics of video hosting or how sustainable these platforms are.

It mentions the alt right but it doesn’t talk about twitter giving tons of those guys the boot or the rise of gab.

It mentions the alt right & Patreon but it doesn’t talk about how many of those people and other right wingers got booted off of that platform. It doesn’t talk about the cottage industry of Patreon alternatives that sprung up to cater to those people.

It also doesn’t mention mastodon or anything that’s going on with similar technologies.

It doesn’t mention why mastodon got big in Japan or talk about any similar niche services.

It also doesn’t talk about the possibility of advertising on twitter/Facebook/google being regulated by the USA/EU. It doesn’t talk about the testimony all three companies gave in front of congress nor its implications for the future of niche communities.

In summary this article provides neither a survey of the niche community landscape nor an explanation for why 2017 was the year niche communities made a comeback.

Here is an interview with the person who claims to have made the call that prompted the swat:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cCHOI39nJPM&feature=youtu.be

Apart from writing blog posts another good way to get clients is to give relevant high quality talks at meetups and conferences.

This has worked for me on multiple occasions. Pretty much every conference I have spoken at as a consultant has resulted in several leads or a contract.

Well ~78% of gold is used for jewelry and only ~19% is used as a store of value:

https://goldprice.com/facts-about-gold

“While other payments networks typically charge the greater of ~3% and $0.15, Bitcoin’s transaction fee tends to be a negligible fraction of the transaction, if any at all.”

That article seems quite dated (2015). The fees and transaction times for btc today are much worse:

https://bitcoinexchangerate.org/fees

This is not a good article on bitcoin as it focuses on valuing it as a medium of exchange.

Seeking alpha has a better series on the subject which provides charts and sources to back up its analysis.

The above article just cites a Morgan Stanley paper without providing access to it.

This part of the seeking alpha series focuses on btc usage:

https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4122695-bitcoin-series-...

If you look at btc usage, it seems like about 97% of blockchain transactions are speculation. I.e buying/selling on exchanges as opposed to it being used to pay for goods and services.

When you factor in transaction costs and the time it takes transfers to go through, it seems pretty safe to say that btc in its current form is not being used as money. This is nothing new.

The question now is what if anything is btc worth as a store of value? I’d love to see an article dig into that question a bit more. All the parent article has to say on this topic is:

“Like digital gold? Maybe. Does not have any intrinsic use like gold has in electronics or jewelry. But investors appear to be ascribing some value to it.”

Which really doesn’t tell you much.

Just in case someone reads the above comment the wrong way: Rent control in San Francisco is not tied to a tenants income but rather the age of the building.

It’s entirely possible for someone who works in a wealthy person job (tech) to have a rent controlled apartment.

I do mobile software consulting. To give you an idea of the level of crypto currency mania: Every single one of my clients in San Francisco have some kind of slack or group chat devoted to crypto trading.

I was waiting at the front desk of a client who has a floor in a fancy building downtown. Whilst waiting I overheard the end of a conversation between the door guy talking to the maintanence man: “I put in a bunch of money like you said and it went up!”. The door guy was gesturing at his phone and I vaguely saw a blue and white interface that looked like coinbase. I’m 95% sure this conversation was about bitcoin or etherium. This occurred about two weeks ago.

It really made me think of that old story about the shoe shine boy talking stocks promoting a guy to exit the stock market prior to the 1929 crash:

http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...

Again, playing devils advocate, but plenty of cash heavy small businesses (bars, restaurants, laundry services) keep things off the books to avoid taxes and get away with it. So why would this be any different with crypto?

Instead of a shoebox or an off-site safe you would just use a wallet and deposit crypto into that. The crypto could be purchased using something like localmonero or anonymously deposited by a friend who you give cash to.

Crypto currencies like monero have built in privacy so it’s possible to have anonymous transactions where it’s hard for police to trace the origins:

https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin

It’s also possible to obtain monero without going through a bank or showing identification (as mentioned above):

https://localmonero.co

Now I’m sure some people will be caught doing stuff like this in the same way that some people get caught today avoiding paying taxes. My point is that it’s possible to do and it’s likely going to get easier to do.

The big change with crypto is that it makes it much easier to do the above and move it across borders. It will be interesting to see how governments try to restrict this.

Devils advocate: That assumes they know about all of your wallets? It would be relatively easy to hand over one but keep another they don't know about right?

Here’s a question. I’m a permanent resident (green card holder) who lives in the USA. Is it legal for me to invest in ICOs?

The problem with that is that they become a talent pipeline for Facebook/Google/Apple/Netflix.

I met tons of people who did 2 years at amazon and departed to Facebook for a fat offer that was worth far more than the remaining unvested amazon stock.

Trying to nickle and dime people when they come in the door just leads to people departing early. Employee turnover is a massive cost.

Isn’t the average tenure at amazon and most tech companies 2 years these days?

http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-t...

Not saying it’s a bad thing just that vesting schedule is Something to think about when comparing offers. Liquidity is worth something.

Well you gotta factor in the cost of living. A 2 bedroom house in a decent area in SF is like 1.3 million. Having kids is also incredibly expensive so you really need to think about that when comparing salaries.

Tangentialy I have heard that Amazon has a vesting schedule for stock where everything skews towards the last two years.

I worked on the core audio team. It’s kind of hard to find another company that pays as well as Apple where you get to continue doing that kind of work. The only other companies I can think of are either lab126 (Amazon) or google. Lab126 doesn’t pay as well as Apple.

Also, apples 401k match and internal stock discounts are amazing.

I meet a number of people at Apple in this category (i.e 20-30 years + experience). At a certain point salary tends to flatten out unless you go into management or do something incredibly specialized.

Definitely true for Apple/Facebook/Linkedin/Google (I worked for 2 of these).

I live in SF. Uber pool to Costco is ~$5. I have a Safeway around the corner and instacart isn’t that bad re price.

Apparently an AG that Thiel gave money to is investigating google for antitrust stuff in Missouri:

“But it’s not the first time Thiel has handed cash to an AG who went after Google over monopoly concerns.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley announced Nov. 13 that his office was investigating Google to see if the Mountain View tech giant had violated the state’s antitrust and consumer-protection laws. The Missouri attorney general said he had issued an investigative subpoena to Google. He’s looking at the firm’s handling of users’ personal data, along with claims that it misappropriated content from rivals and pushed down competitors’ websites in search results.”

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/15/is-billionaire-vc-pete...

A lease or rental agreement can be valuable depending on the terms.

An example: my mother managed to significantly negotiate down her commercial lease after a court case with her landlord.

The price that she now pays is significantly below market rate. It’s also locked in for the next decade or so. That lease is quite valuable.

The same is true for rent controlled apartments. I have had one in San Francisco for the last 5 years and pay significantly below market rate.