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a16z does not believe in crypto. If they do, they're misguided about its potential. It has a very limited usage. Even in crypto world, people are desperately dr

a16z does not believe in crypto. If they do, they're misguided about its potential. It has a very limited usage. Even in crypto world, people are desperately drawn to centralized entities despite the risk because they're faster, more convenient, and has customer support. No body wants to put their house deed on the blockchain, gets hacked or phished, and then get evicted by the police the next day via the hackers. No body wants to be their own bank through self-custody. Banks were invented so you don't have to self-custody. No one wants to risk their funds on a decentralized protocol where it can be hacked without any way of recovering the funds. Instead, what a16z believes in is using their reputation to pump the tokens of their crypto investments. Next, they dump most of the tokens onto retail. a16z is in on the scam. I've been extremely disappointed in Y Combinator bringing on Garry Tan as the CEO. I like him personally. I respect him. But he's a crypto shill. He made a very profitble investment in Coinbase, rode it to prominence, and now he thinks crypto is the hill to die on. The worst thing is the human talent and energy resources wasted on crypto. Imagine if the billions were invested in useful products and services instead of pumping scams, ponzis, and other money schemes.

dikaio 4y ago
Why talk in absolutes? “Nobody wants to be their own bank” wrong, I prefer to be my own bank. Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain.
- senttoschool 4y ago
  Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain. Go ahead. Put your house deed on the blockchain. Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. Got hacked or phished and hacker transferred your deed? Get evicted the next day. We have better systems in place for house deeds.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Keep in mind that bitcoin was almost literally invented yesterday. It’s going go be around for a long, long time. In the scope of a thousand years, do you grow more certain about your words or less? History shows that what people believed even 200 years ago was often mistaken. I don’t have a stake in the game either way (learned my lesson after gox), but being able to hoard your own digital gold all by yourself is genuinely new, and is at least one valuable use case. We’ll see if there are more, but it seems too early to tell.
    - ygjb 4y ago
      Immutable, decentralized ledgers are useful for things (oh, hey CT logs, how do you do?). Immutable decentralized ledgers are not useful for legal constructs like ownership, since in the current (and foreseeable) legal construct of property ownership is held by centralized records for which the state is the arbiter. This arbitration happens through either registries (for example, automobile, real estate, business ownership, etc), or through the courts. In order for blockchain technology to replace this legal construct in a meaningful way, there would need to a mechanism for a central authority to provide clear arbitration and resolution. If the state can't meaningfully and authoritatively reassign those ownership rights through a legal process, then blockchain is simply a non-authoritative ledger, at which point it's existence is marginally useful since it is expensive, technically challenging to operate, and fraught with risk due to potential abuse cases from implementation errors. This is one simple example, and doesn't dig into the fact that implementing laws as code is also problematic in countries where those laws can be rewritten by elected officials and courts. Blockchain and bitcoin might become more useful in the future, but so far almost all blockchain uses that have gained traction have done so by grifters and the remora like folks who have attached to the bellies of the blockchain industry to enrich themselves while throwing around terms like legacy finance until their employers implode.
      - sillysaurusx 4y ago
        That’s the point, though. We can’t foresee the changes that can come from blockchain. Yes, right now it’s filled with scams. But we’re what, 14 years in? That’s the lifetime of a teenager. It’s way too early to know whether that teenager might think of a new use case, let alone the rest of history. Investing in the ecosystem makes sense from a theoretical point of view. Personally I wouldn’t, but that’s due to personal preference rather than some fundamental disagreement with the tech vs society. Condemning others for investing at all always struck me as odd.
        ipython 4y ago
        Fourteen years after Tim Berners Lee released his www app was, let’s call it 2005ish. I’d say the impact of http on the world was pretty damn life changing by 2005. Linux? Fourteen years after it was released it had entirely disrupted not just the commercial Unix world but was on its way to becoming the most widely deployed operating system on the planet. Bitcoin? Eh. I suppose ransomware authors would still be using green dot to try and collect their take if it hadn’t shown up. YouTube creators would have a harder time financing their passion without the sweet cash infusion from random vc backed crypto currency exchanges. Many quadrillion hashes would have sadly been skipped in the small chance they would have resulted in the correct number of leading zeroes.
  - shemnon42 4y ago
    > Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire. And title fraud is already a thing without DLTs, just listen to all the identity theft surveillance pitches.
    - senttoschool 4y ago
      House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire. So why the heck would you bother putting your house on a blockchain if you still need the county clerk and other entities?
    - ipython 4y ago
      What was the point of the blockchain if I have to … trust the county clerk? Why are they involved? Heck, why is there a “clerk” at all? Isn’t the point to have a trust less, decentralized system?
      - idlewords 4y ago
        Since you need a centralized trusted party to enforce the property right, you might as well register the deed with them and save a lot of pointless steps. There's no such thing as decentralized, trustless ownership of tangible property.
        ipython 4y ago
        I think we are arguing the same point, as I vehemently agree. My questions were rhetorical.
    - duxup 4y ago
      If we have other parties who can act outside the blockchain… isn’t that what we have now? Why use the blockchain at all then?
- idlewords 4y ago
  A deed is just a fancy hyperlink to property. Unless you register it with the same entity that is in a position to enforce it, you're in the same dubious position as the owner of an NFT. Owning a pointer to something is useless without some off-chain mechanism to enforce the link, and once you start positing off-chain trusted parties to enforce your rights, the whole exercise gets a bit silly.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    It’s terrifying how many people lack an understanding of what a state entails. For anyone reading and wondering, a state (not to be confused with a government) is defined as a monopoly on violence. It’s literally that simple, but the repercussions are immense.
    - zztop44 4y ago
      A claimed monopoly on violence. And I know everything else flows on from that, but that’s still a very narrow definition of a state.
      - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
        It is not narrow. It is the realist definition of the word and the most common definition throughout history. Some phrase it differently but the meaning is the same.
    - junofan 4y ago
      Well these days the definition commonly includes some sort of international recognition. Warlords don’t count anymore.
      - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
        They do if they have a monopoly on violence. Whether or not your favorite state acknowledges another state is a different question. And of course once a state is defeated, it ceases to be a state.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  A deed is a piece of paper, plus big guys with big guns who enforce what the paper says. The paper is the least important part of the equation.
- twelve40 4y ago
  > a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain It's annoying when people throw non-obvious things in your face as absolute truths. Can you please explain why? Like, why, why, what kind of tangible benefit at all does putting a deed on the blockchain bring?
gfodor 4y ago
People who are anti-crypto are expressing the privilege that comes when you assume transactions you want to do will never be illegal. Crypto and trustless systems like DeFi are essential technologies to help in protecting the freedom to transact in the face of authoritarian regimes or other similar threats.
- duxup 4y ago
  Is anyone operating under authoritarian regimes easier with blockchain now? Compared or cash or anything else? This seems like a scenario where there are other issues and blockchain isn’t really solving anything for you… And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > And if you get caught it’s all on the chain.. I'd imagine in those circumstances, once you are caught you are in trouble regardless of the medium of exchange once the authorities note you are doing something. Up to that point, something like Monero [0] probably mitigates the risk, they have some insanely good obfuscation happening to make it hard to figure out who is trading with whom. [0] https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/ https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/
    - duxup 4y ago
      You could get caught because the other guy you paid got caught.
      - roenxi 4y ago
        That'd probably happen with cash too though, it my thinking.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    If you need to leave your country quickly, perhaps because you are being conscripted into a war that you don’t want to die in, are you going to pack your bag full of cash on your way out? It will be confiscated.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
> The worst thing is the human talent and energy resources wasted on crypto. Imagine if the billions were invested in useful products and services You mean like Twitter, Meta, and TikTok? Even though 99% of crypto is scams, I prefer people working on figuring out a better financial system than figuring out more ways to steal human attention and get people addicted to ads. Probably crypto will crash and burn and not succeed, but I'd rather take that chance instead of building better addiction engines for our children. Just look at the top SV companies. Do you really believe they are such a positive to humanity?
- nine_k 4y ago
  I think Sturgeo's law applies here. The problem with crypto scams is that they don't usually require some novel engineering work, but rather con artistry on top of well-known, open cryptocurrency technologies.
sneak 4y ago
> a16z is in on the scam. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think this is an unsupported claim, that also happens to be factually false.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think "You should invest in make-believe internet money because it'll moon" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be supported. Cryptocurrency is rife with scams and scammers and even proponents would likely agree that the vast majority of all cryptocurrencies are transparent scams.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

dikaio 4y ago

Why talk in absolutes? “Nobody wants to be their own bank” wrong, I prefer to be my own bank. Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain.

senttoschool 4y ago
Secondly, a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain. Go ahead. Put your house deed on the blockchain. Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. Got hacked or phished and hacker transferred your deed? Get evicted the next day. We have better systems in place for house deeds.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Keep in mind that bitcoin was almost literally invented yesterday. It’s going go be around for a long, long time. In the scope of a thousand years, do you grow more certain about your words or less? History shows that what people believed even 200 years ago was often mistaken. I don’t have a stake in the game either way (learned my lesson after gox), but being able to hoard your own digital gold all by yourself is genuinely new, and is at least one valuable use case. We’ll see if there are more, but it seems too early to tell.
  - ygjb 4y ago
    Immutable, decentralized ledgers are useful for things (oh, hey CT logs, how do you do?). Immutable decentralized ledgers are not useful for legal constructs like ownership, since in the current (and foreseeable) legal construct of property ownership is held by centralized records for which the state is the arbiter. This arbitration happens through either registries (for example, automobile, real estate, business ownership, etc), or through the courts. In order for blockchain technology to replace this legal construct in a meaningful way, there would need to a mechanism for a central authority to provide clear arbitration and resolution. If the state can't meaningfully and authoritatively reassign those ownership rights through a legal process, then blockchain is simply a non-authoritative ledger, at which point it's existence is marginally useful since it is expensive, technically challenging to operate, and fraught with risk due to potential abuse cases from implementation errors. This is one simple example, and doesn't dig into the fact that implementing laws as code is also problematic in countries where those laws can be rewritten by elected officials and courts. Blockchain and bitcoin might become more useful in the future, but so far almost all blockchain uses that have gained traction have done so by grifters and the remora like folks who have attached to the bellies of the blockchain industry to enrich themselves while throwing around terms like legacy finance until their employers implode.
    - sillysaurusx 4y ago
      That’s the point, though. We can’t foresee the changes that can come from blockchain. Yes, right now it’s filled with scams. But we’re what, 14 years in? That’s the lifetime of a teenager. It’s way too early to know whether that teenager might think of a new use case, let alone the rest of history. Investing in the ecosystem makes sense from a theoretical point of view. Personally I wouldn’t, but that’s due to personal preference rather than some fundamental disagreement with the tech vs society. Condemning others for investing at all always struck me as odd.
      - ipython 4y ago
        Fourteen years after Tim Berners Lee released his www app was, let’s call it 2005ish. I’d say the impact of http on the world was pretty damn life changing by 2005. Linux? Fourteen years after it was released it had entirely disrupted not just the commercial Unix world but was on its way to becoming the most widely deployed operating system on the planet. Bitcoin? Eh. I suppose ransomware authors would still be using green dot to try and collect their take if it hadn’t shown up. YouTube creators would have a harder time financing their passion without the sweet cash infusion from random vc backed crypto currency exchanges. Many quadrillion hashes would have sadly been skipped in the small chance they would have resulted in the correct number of leading zeroes.
- shemnon42 4y ago
  > Lose your key? Lose the ability to sell your house forever. House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire. And title fraud is already a thing without DLTs, just listen to all the identity theft surveillance pitches.
  - senttoschool 4y ago
    House deeds won't be simple NFTs, there will have to be other parties that can move the deed to handle things like foreclosures and eminent domain. So if your hardware wallet burns down in the neighborhood wildfire you just get the county clerk to move it for you, much like if the physical deed burned in the same fire. So why the heck would you bother putting your house on a blockchain if you still need the county clerk and other entities?
  - ipython 4y ago
    What was the point of the blockchain if I have to … trust the county clerk? Why are they involved? Heck, why is there a “clerk” at all? Isn’t the point to have a trust less, decentralized system?
    - idlewords 4y ago
      Since you need a centralized trusted party to enforce the property right, you might as well register the deed with them and save a lot of pointless steps. There's no such thing as decentralized, trustless ownership of tangible property.
      - ipython 4y ago
        I think we are arguing the same point, as I vehemently agree. My questions were rhetorical.
  - duxup 4y ago
    If we have other parties who can act outside the blockchain… isn’t that what we have now? Why use the blockchain at all then?
idlewords 4y ago
A deed is just a fancy hyperlink to property. Unless you register it with the same entity that is in a position to enforce it, you're in the same dubious position as the owner of an NFT. Owning a pointer to something is useless without some off-chain mechanism to enforce the link, and once you start positing off-chain trusted parties to enforce your rights, the whole exercise gets a bit silly.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  It’s terrifying how many people lack an understanding of what a state entails. For anyone reading and wondering, a state (not to be confused with a government) is defined as a monopoly on violence. It’s literally that simple, but the repercussions are immense.
  - zztop44 4y ago
    A claimed monopoly on violence. And I know everything else flows on from that, but that’s still a very narrow definition of a state.
    - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
      It is not narrow. It is the realist definition of the word and the most common definition throughout history. Some phrase it differently but the meaning is the same.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Well these days the definition commonly includes some sort of international recognition. Warlords don’t count anymore.
    - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
      They do if they have a monopoly on violence. Whether or not your favorite state acknowledges another state is a different question. And of course once a state is defeated, it ceases to be a state.
spoonjim 4y ago
A deed is a piece of paper, plus big guys with big guns who enforce what the paper says. The paper is the least important part of the equation.
twelve40 4y ago
> a deed is exactly what could go on the blockchain It's annoying when people throw non-obvious things in your face as absolute truths. Can you please explain why? Like, why, why, what kind of tangible benefit at all does putting a deed on the blockchain bring?

gfodor 4y ago

People who are anti-crypto are expressing the privilege that comes when you assume transactions you want to do will never be illegal. Crypto and trustless systems like DeFi are essential technologies to help in protecting the freedom to transact in the face of authoritarian regimes or other similar threats.

duxup 4y ago
Is anyone operating under authoritarian regimes easier with blockchain now? Compared or cash or anything else? This seems like a scenario where there are other issues and blockchain isn’t really solving anything for you… And if you get caught it’s all on the chain..
- roenxi 4y ago
  > And if you get caught it’s all on the chain.. I'd imagine in those circumstances, once you are caught you are in trouble regardless of the medium of exchange once the authorities note you are doing something. Up to that point, something like Monero [0] probably mitigates the risk, they have some insanely good obfuscation happening to make it hard to figure out who is trading with whom. [0] https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/ https://www.getmonero.org/resources/about/
  - duxup 4y ago
    You could get caught because the other guy you paid got caught.
    - roenxi 4y ago
      That'd probably happen with cash too though, it my thinking.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  If you need to leave your country quickly, perhaps because you are being conscripted into a war that you don’t want to die in, are you going to pack your bag full of cash on your way out? It will be confiscated.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

> The worst thing is the human talent and energy resources wasted on crypto. Imagine if the billions were invested in useful products and services You mean like Twitter, Meta, and TikTok? Even though 99% of crypto is scams, I prefer people working on figuring out a better financial system than figuring out more ways to steal human attention and get people addicted to ads. Probably crypto will crash and burn and not succeed, but I'd rather take that chance instead of building better addiction engines for our children. Just look at the top SV companies. Do you really believe they are such a positive to humanity?

nine_k 4y ago
I think Sturgeo's law applies here. The problem with crypto scams is that they don't usually require some novel engineering work, but rather con artistry on top of well-known, open cryptocurrency technologies.

sneak 4y ago

> a16z is in on the scam. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think this is an unsupported claim, that also happens to be factually false.

ALittleLight 4y ago
I think "You should invest in make-believe internet money because it'll moon" is the extraordinary claim that needs to be supported. Cryptocurrency is rife with scams and scammers and even proponents would likely agree that the vast majority of all cryptocurrencies are transparent scams.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]