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> Whatever the structure, it isn't new. But now maybe it's order of magnitude or two cheaper and so you can do a whole bunch of them where you used to be able

> Whatever the structure, it isn't new. But now maybe it's order of magnitude or two cheaper and so you can do a whole bunch of them where you used to be able to only do a few. Does that change anything? I really don't know, maybe, maybe not. Maybe it makes it practical to break a company up into many many smaller pieces and allow investors to provide more specific investments, or many smaller companies in general, due to greatly reduced legal/operational fees? And maybe that let's you do something cool? Imagine if facebook (or more likely whatever is post facebook) had hundreds of smaller investment vehicles that mapped to teams and projects, and we could all choose not to invest in the privacy invading ones? Or at least had to more explicitly do it? Sure, it's not philosophically completely novel: structural changes like this fractalize throughout technology and ultimately boil down to "that's just this, but one level of abstraction up," which makes it easy to understand, but doesn't necessarily make it useless. Sure, there's nothing new under the sun, the internet is, after all, just a really fast xerox machine, and we already have libraries. I don't look at crypto currency and think, "Oh this is obviously the future, fiat currency and banks are bullshit" and I don't even fully buy the argument I made above myself. But when I look at all the criticism to crypto, it looks a helluva a lot like 1993 and "The internet is a fad" all over again. "It's slow, it's shitty, it wont scale, it doesn't solve any real problems for real people, it's better having publishers/banks intermediate this stuff anyway" etc. etc. We'll see.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> now maybe it's order of magnitude or two cheaper Keeping track of investors and paying them dividends isn’t even close to the most expensive part of fundraising. This is akin to starting a car company differentiated solely by the material of the muffler.
- wdewind 9y ago
  Sure, that's true if you are raising from a few, relatively speaking, large investors, and also only if you care about fundraising as a one time event, instead of funds management as an ongoing process. The entire point of ICOs seems to be to raise from many small investors at once, perhaps skirting, among other things, accredited investor laws. Even for large companies: say we want to do my crazy invest at the team level idea: I don't really agree it would be simple to operationalize all of that money flow, and I do actually think having a blockchain could help if that is your goal, which is a big if. I'm not here to hard sell anyone on crypto, but I also am not comfortable with the wholesale dismissal of it either, so I'm definitely hoping a lot of people disagree with me and we can tease some of this stuff out.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Accredited investor laws are disgusting. Personally, I'd much prefer to hold securities, tokens, equities, currency on-chain than via some broker. Similarly as a way to accept dividends as well. Having a compliant way of performing this would be fantastic. Edit: Since we have the downvoters here, does anybody want to defend accredited investor laws? Here is some stimulus material - https://qz.com/431198/this-is-not-a-typo-only-3-of-americans-are-legally-allowed-to-invest-in-start-ups/ https://qz.com/431198/this-is-not-a-typo-only-3-of-americans...
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > Accredited investor laws are disgusting. Personally, I'd much prefer to hold securities, tokens, equities, currency on-chain than via some broker These are unrelated. You can hold stocks, bonds and commodities in your own name. It’s inconvenient and carries no advantage over owning them in “street name”. But that isn’t an accredited/un-accredited difference.
      - hndamien 9y ago
        Sure they aren't related, but they are related to the parent comment which mentions both. I was just stating that the former is a form of discrimination to restrict opportunity and increase wealth disparity. The latter is just a preference. Both were being discussed in the parent comment.
    - monochromatic 9y ago
      Most startups fail.
      - hndamien 9y ago
        I fail to see the point. Investors manage their risk-reward profile by investing different percentage amounts of their net worth. The measure of how much money you have or make per year is in no way an indicator of how capable you are in assessing these opportunities. The fact that only 3% of Americans can invest in this vehicle that by your admission mostly fail may be an indicator of this (I'll admit it's not causal, I'm just being cheeky).
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  Typical crowdfunder sites, e.g. Kickstarter, charge 8% + 20p per contribution. With the blockchain you can almost entirely eliminate this down to just raw transaction fees + cost to write the smart contract. Kickstarter brings some value (e.g. neat landing page, network effects etc.), but 8% is a lot to leave on the table.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> now maybe it's order of magnitude or two cheaper Keeping track of investors and paying them dividends isn’t even close to the most expensive part of fundraising. This is akin to starting a car company differentiated solely by the material of the muffler.

wdewind 9y ago
Sure, that's true if you are raising from a few, relatively speaking, large investors, and also only if you care about fundraising as a one time event, instead of funds management as an ongoing process. The entire point of ICOs seems to be to raise from many small investors at once, perhaps skirting, among other things, accredited investor laws. Even for large companies: say we want to do my crazy invest at the team level idea: I don't really agree it would be simple to operationalize all of that money flow, and I do actually think having a blockchain could help if that is your goal, which is a big if. I'm not here to hard sell anyone on crypto, but I also am not comfortable with the wholesale dismissal of it either, so I'm definitely hoping a lot of people disagree with me and we can tease some of this stuff out.
- hndamien 9y ago
  Accredited investor laws are disgusting. Personally, I'd much prefer to hold securities, tokens, equities, currency on-chain than via some broker. Similarly as a way to accept dividends as well. Having a compliant way of performing this would be fantastic. Edit: Since we have the downvoters here, does anybody want to defend accredited investor laws? Here is some stimulus material - https://qz.com/431198/this-is-not-a-typo-only-3-of-americans-are-legally-allowed-to-invest-in-start-ups/ https://qz.com/431198/this-is-not-a-typo-only-3-of-americans...
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Accredited investor laws are disgusting. Personally, I'd much prefer to hold securities, tokens, equities, currency on-chain than via some broker These are unrelated. You can hold stocks, bonds and commodities in your own name. It’s inconvenient and carries no advantage over owning them in “street name”. But that isn’t an accredited/un-accredited difference.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      Sure they aren't related, but they are related to the parent comment which mentions both. I was just stating that the former is a form of discrimination to restrict opportunity and increase wealth disparity. The latter is just a preference. Both were being discussed in the parent comment.
  - monochromatic 9y ago
    Most startups fail.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      I fail to see the point. Investors manage their risk-reward profile by investing different percentage amounts of their net worth. The measure of how much money you have or make per year is in no way an indicator of how capable you are in assessing these opportunities. The fact that only 3% of Americans can invest in this vehicle that by your admission mostly fail may be an indicator of this (I'll admit it's not causal, I'm just being cheeky).
crispyporkbites 9y ago
Typical crowdfunder sites, e.g. Kickstarter, charge 8% + 20p per contribution. With the blockchain you can almost entirely eliminate this down to just raw transaction fees + cost to write the smart contract. Kickstarter brings some value (e.g. neat landing page, network effects etc.), but 8% is a lot to leave on the table.