190 karma · joined November 10, 2013
It would seem like a 0x liquidation preference would provide protection in this scenario. i.e. VC is guaranteed to get his original investment back, but not a multiple of it.
"Say the VC puts in 5M, gets 20% equity. The founder sells for 5M"
VC could just get the 5M back in this case.
The FCC polices the tv/radio/satellite/cable industry, but it also writes regulations that affect the business.
It is preferable to have a head of FCC with industry knowledge. Having industry experience does not automatically make one corrupt or criminal, which seems to be your line of thinking.
>Contrary to what the Republicans tell you, ours is not a planned economy in which government bureaucrats are making operational decisions.
Ours is not a centrally planned economy, but regulators can still enact policies that positively or negatively affect how an industry functions.
Though I agree that investment banking advice would be irrelevant here.
[1] http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations...
Yes, absolutely. I think it's ridiculous to suggest that competent and strict regulators are not in demand by the private sector. They clearly have valuable experience, advice, and skills. A timely example is Ben Lawsky, former head of the NY DFS, who is often referred to as one of the "most feared" regulators in banking. I have no doubt he will find himself in demand by the private sector. Another example is Mary Shapiro, former head of the SEC, who now works for Promontory Financial (along with dozens of former regulators) providing consulting services and regulatory advice for the private sector. [1]
>Well, yes, my point exactly. "Lots of people doing it means it's okay" is one view.
So after one does public service, they should not be allowed to work in the private sector? How is that not okay? I think that people should be free to work whereever they like, provided the do not break laws. There is nothing illegal about taking a profitable position after public service.
I didnt know this. Source please?
I personally hate the idea of career politicians who have no practical experience in the private sector trying to write laws. (We see examples of bad legislation all the time from people who are clueless about tech, for example). Finance and central banking are very complicated areas, and I'd prefer to see regulations written by those who have an intricate and practical understanding of how those industries/markets work.
It makes sense to me that the most qualified regulators would be those who spent years in the private sector working at places like GS.
And on the flip side, it makes sense that private firms would be interested in hiring former govt officials and regulators who best understand how compliance and regulation work from the inside. It's like wanting to have an ex-IRS guy do your taxes. Regulators and public officlas who spent years earning little pay and doing public service also want to monetize their experience and finally get a good paycheck after leaving office. (Lots of examples of this in the bitcoin space lately.. e.g. Arthur Leavitt.. it's not just happening at goldman sachs).
In this article, it sounds like a foolish (and possibly illegal) decision by a 29 year old former Fed guy, and as soon as it was identified by Goldman, they self-reported the issue to make it public. What else are they supposed to do?
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-29/high-speed-...
"Is this bad? I mean, look, one: It doesn't matter at all. We'll get to that. But, two: Sure, it's bad! It's symbolically stupid. The point of the Form 4 is that the SEC wants everyone to know when corporate insiders buy or sell stock, so that all the little investors can compete on a level playing field. As a goal, this has its problems, but it's a goal. For the SEC itself to give this disclosure to the little investors after professionals get it is not a great look. " ...
"But when I say it doesn't matter at all, I mean, it does not matter at all. The idea here is that subscribing to a news service or data terminal gives "professional traders an edge over mom-and-pop investors." The article really says that. Now, this seems pretty obvious. Most of the time, professionals using professional tools will be better at doing things than amateurs using amateur tools. There are very few fields of human endeavor where professionals do not have an edge over moms and pops. But investing might come closest! You and your mom and your pop can just index! It is great, you will beat the majority of professional fund managers every year." ...
"if you are a mom-or-pop investor, and you are day-trading the stock of a $950 million specialty chemicals company based on your instant reaction to news that a non-executive director has bought $194,000 worth of stock,5 then you have already lost all your money. Nothing that I, or the SEC, or Eric Schneiderman, could ever do will help you. You are doomed."
This is just one of several mandates that the Fed has. The Fed also exists to supervise and regulate banking institutions, in addition to running the national payment system.
The author's post could fall under the latter responsibility.
good point. A company also can always issue more shares to dilute existing holders. But no company (to my knowledge) has ever promised to do so at a fixed annual rate.
When a public company does a secondary offering and releases more shares, that clearly doesn't result in an increased market cap. The market already knew that those shares existed, even if they weren't publicly traded yet, and things are priced accordingly.
The convention for BTC and cryptocurrency in general seems to be to calculate market cap based on the total number of BTC that have been mined so far (~13mm). That's like the float. I'd argue that we should be using 21mm to calculate BTC market cap, since that's effectively what the "bitcoin treasury" has authorized. (To follow the anology, I think of BTC as doing a small secondary offering every 10 minutes.... but the market already knows this information and prices things accordingly. It should not result in an increasing market cap every time a new block is mined).
Accordingly, I'd argue that this is a more accurate representation of market cap (view by total supply): http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/market-cap-by-tota...
You can find a lot of stocks in the market with a very low float. For example, Pandora and LinkedIn only IPO'ed ~9% of the total shares.[1] i.e. The float is ~9% but the market cap is calculated based on the full 100% shares that are authorized by the treasury, even if they are held by the company and not publicly traded. The market still knows that those shares exist and can be released to the market at a future date.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230393670...
disclaimer: i work on the ripple project
[disclaimer: i'm an employee of ripple labs]
From a 3rd party summary: "...Kenneth Ahern at the University of Southern California and Denis Sosyura at the University of Michigan, reviewed 2,142 articles written about 501 rumors between 2000 and 2011. Of those rumors, only 167 were followed by a public bid for the company. The Wall Street Journal was the most prolific publisher of such articles, with 158 during the time period. It was followed by Dow Jones Newswires with 67 and the New York Times with 38.
“The rumors published in the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News Service are also more accurate than the average rumor, with accuracy rates of about 39%, compared to 33% for the average rumor,” wrote the researchers. “In contrast, the Los Angeles Times and NYT Blogs have accuracy rates less than 20%.”
So... it's wrong to work for a company? I dont understand your argument, sorry.
>It's generally considered proper (at least here on hacker news) to disclose any potential conflicts of interest
I wasn't aware of the HN disclosure policy, but I'm not trying to hide something. Does this disclosure policy also require people who own bitcoin or work on a bitcoin related project to disclose the conflict of interest before posting on this thread? I find it hard to believe that this is the standard.
If you have a constructive argument on consensus, still happy to hear it...
Here is a youtube explanation of consensus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj1QVb1vlC0
and here is an explanation on the Ripple wiki: https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus
and a brief explanation on stackexchange: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-does-ri...
You are correct that I am involved in the project. I think Ripple consensus is a more practical, faster, more secure, and less wasteful solution to the double spend problem than proof of work. Happy to entertain your arguments to the contrary.
If that's why gold has value, then $1290 an ounce seems quite pricey for fillings!
Ripple consensus keeps a distributed database in sync without requiring mining. And the network's security has no correlation to the amount of hashing power involved. (There's no 51% attack on Ripple)
I actually think PoW based systems, because of the 51% attack, present an extremely undesirable amount of systemic risk for broad adoption in the financial system.
As a separate point -- by your logic, bitcoin is a complete scam created by Satoshi Nakamoto who created a currency then gave himself $400mm worth of it. [1]
And Google is a complete scam created by Larry and Sergei, who created equity and gave themselves all of it.
[1] http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto....
Yes.
Ripple servers only need the current state of the ledger (as opposed to requiring the entire history of transactions, as Bitcoin does). This eliminates the problem of needing to download GBs of history to run a server. You can optionally download the full ledger history if you want access to the data, but it is not required for your server to participate in transaction processing. It's a much lighter weight design in general.
Then later in the letter: "[Deflation] makes Bitcoin's value to the US economy suspect, if not outright detrimental".
So.. he's concerned that bitcoin is either extremely inflationary (going to zero) or extremely deflationary. But he's not sure which.
https://ripple.com/blog/ripples-distributed-exchange-and-the...
When there's no central location towards which orders need to race to get time stamped, the whole low latency arms race seems unnecessary.
There's also no central place to co-locate servers.
Some of the existing traditional (centralized) exchanges are making 20-30%+ of their revenues from co-location and data fees. So they have little incentive to change. They cater to HFT because it's a big driver of their bottom line...