High Fidelity tried to build this and failed. I think one of the issues they had was that the whole hosting thing was pretty tricky and created barriers to having worlds up all the time, this meant there were never as many places to explore as other more closed systems like VRChat. I'm not totally sure how you solve for that, maybe they should have hosted some sites themselves?
It's not about trading pairs, those can easily switch to USDC or other stables. The big challenge will be the futures markets which are nearly exclusively with USDT. If tether collapses so do all those futures, which presumably will cause chaotic algorithmic driven effects as hedging positions evaporate.
This is optimistic, it would require traditional financial service regulators like the SEC to ceed power to a new agency. That's very unlikely to happen. Most of the regulatory institutions in America work to increase their power not hand it off to a new agency. We see this in coinbases own fight with the SEC and other agencies about who regulates yield earning stablecoins.
Their claim that the shares were below market value doesn't stack up. They did this when they founded the company, the company has no value at formation so it's fair priced. Just because they raised money a few months later doesn't mean it was worth anything at formation.
It's very counterintuitive, but actually the more unbanked you are the more you needs loans/savings and the more complicated your personal financial balance sheet is. I'd recommend the book 'the poor and their money'[1] for the details on this, but essentially if you haven't got savings you are constantly borrowing and lending informally with your community to meet life needs like a new roof or school fees.
Depends where you live and if you have to heat or cool your house to work from home. Homes are much more inefficient to moderate temperature than offices. That may or may not offset the benefit from commuting, and even less so if done on public transport with lower emissions.
There's a ton of tech behind Beyond Meat. Their core science is based on research from an RNA professor at Stanford. That proteomics research is the reason their burger tastes so much better than previous generation veggie burgers.
> [3] When a company IPOs, it opens ownership up to anyone who can afford a share. Imagine, for a second, an investor arguing that this is a sign of low quality.
I thought this note was important, this is precisely what investors signalled when startups started being able to crowdfund equity under Regulation CF.
Energy is the largest cost in bitcoin mining. Mining moves to the cheapest electricity locations. Renewables are already the cheapest energy source globally, and getting better. So in the mid-term bitcoin mining will move to renewable energy sources, problem solved.
He's a major investor in my company, and can 100% attest that's true. What's most astonishing about him is how responsive he is even two years after making that investment. He must have so many companies and he's still always showing up and encouraging and providing value. He's pretty direct when he thinks we are doing the wrong things, but that's always appreciated. His super power is handling all that over email (mostly).
It depends what happens in congress. Trump might win the whitehouse, but lose congress. congress makes the rules around social media and breaking up big tech.
Zuckerbery has talked about the strategy here for ages. It's not about VR, it's about AR. The tech to build realtime, always on AR is just a more advanced VR tech.
AR will be all about the ads as facebook can serve them everywhere you go. That's where they will make $100BN in ad revenue.
Yes, it's called 'biomining' and there have been several startups working to engineer organisms to do this. eg Universal Biomining working on copper (with bacteria) and a team at University of Washington who took an enzyme from rat's livers and put it in a plant to remove VOC's from the air (successfully!)!
Curiously, you just listed a lot of good reasons to do YC. Until the last few weeks of the program you will be encouraged to focus on your business except for the Tuesday evening talks and short meetings with the partners. As this is remote you won't even have to waste time traveling to Mountain View from wherever you live.
Then at the end you focus on demo day which I promise you is the most concentrated and efficient way to meet investors and raise a round on the terms you are looking for (caveat being I don't know how it works remote). Then it's back to grinding on the company. The further along you are by demo day the easier and more efficient your raise will be.
Is that worth 7%? Lots of founders think so. In our batch we had a company that had more than $8MM revenue previously that went on to raise millions on an uncapped note that converted really high. Pretty sure it was worth it to them.
How to create a social networking event remotely for a happy hour or business networking event or party is an interesting unsolved problem. Here are a few other early protypes from teams working on it. Both of these have a UI where you walk around a 2d space and can communicate with groups nearby:
Last year High Fidelity took one of these tombs and built a VR version that they had an Egyptologist doing tours in. Was pretty cool, sad that they closed the platform.
It's less that they won't spend it, and more they won't invest it. As you point out if you can get exposure to global capital growth by keeping your money in cash you will do that. This starves the world of risk capital being invested in new projects, the net benefit of which is responsible for capital growth. So nobody invests and technological progress drives to a halt (well maybe governments invest in military technology ands whatso but net investment in risky tech drops).
This comes up a lot, nobody is literally chained to their desks. Democracy in the workplace comes from voting with your feet and taking another job at another company. It's not perfect, particularly for lower income people, but it's also not slavery and generally the arc of worker rights is improving through time.
You could make a case that some of the current anger in the united states is because COVID's destruction of the economy has removed that freedom to switch jobs (as the jobs have gone) demonstrating how important it is.
That's what the article says, human trials in fall this year and then a regulatory filing a year later. There is basically no chance of a vaccine for this being widely available before 2022. That assumes that one of these vaccines works, despite no vaccine for a coronavirus ever passing regulatory approval (hence this is a hard problem, and plenty of incentive to vaccinate against things like common cold which would be a nice money earner for a someone).
It will be interesting to see what they fund and how much the companies fit the current environment. I'm guessing quite a lot of remote working tools. The one I really want is something that allows 'many to many' conversations. I haven't found a tool for social events that get above 5 people. Normally in real life groups dynamically break into smaller groups and it's hard to replicate that at a networking event or friends birthday or something. That would be powerful to prototype at the Tuesday night dinners as well. Someone's going to get funded with a tool that becomes a default networking tool for the batch and that will then see huge success from getting that group of early adopters using it.