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Trade Dollars with other startups. Book it as revenue
- mytailorisrich 5mo ago"This is a parody website. Any resemblance to real companies wash-trading their revenue is purely coincidental and also definitely happening."
- hliyan 5mo agoThe best bit of tongue-in-cheek is in the FAQ: > We take 2% of every swap. Then we swap our revenue with another platform.
- randometc 5mo agoObligatory Michael Lewis quote, from Boomerang (2011): > Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoThat's just a variant of this old one: Two economists are walking through a cow pasture. The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit. They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit. Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing." "That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"
- lesuorac 5mo agoWell while the pile of shit makes it a joke, isn't there a real advantage here of legibility? Like you have a measure (GDP) and it can't accurate measure things unless a sale occurs. So even if the money is a wash there was an actual activity occurring in the economy and now it's recorded.
- jerf 5mo agoExcept the GP quote actually happens. For example, if you've ever wondered why useless art trades at such eye-watering valuations, the answer is that the high valuations are fictions that governments will accept for tax purposes, from which you can derive a variety of exciting tax consequences: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-fine-art-market-how-the-wealthy-use-art-for-tax-evasion https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f... more-or-less because they agree among themselves what the art is valuated at for their own benefit.
- lotsofpulp 5mo agoThat scenario does not work for this discussion because the first economist has no reason to expect the second economist will ask him to eat shit for $100.
- thelastgallon 5mo agoI like this bit: Read the whitepaper* *there is no whitepaper
- Lucasoato 5mo agoSome of the text can't be read if opened in Firefox with dark mode as default. Kudos to you guys for making it anyway!
- jwr 5mo agoI find this amusing: I'm from Poland, where after the VAT tax was introduced in the 1990s, there were famous "VAT carousel" crimes, with people ending up in prison. The basic idea was similar, except you also collected VAT refunds from the state. If you search for "vat carousel" today, it seems this is still a thing.
- debarshri 5mo agoVAT carousel is fraud. This is pre-legal.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoVAT is a joke of a tax. It's quite incredible why the government concerns itself with chasing people's accounts around. What a waste. If something can't be monitored with minimal effort, it only serves to enrich the legal/accountancy/hr/admin priest caste. The amount of labour wasted on moving numbers around numbers is staggering. edit: Between the government and businesses, VAT costs 5% in admin fees to raise. In a modern world where most transactions are digital, is this a great use of resources?
- ww520 5mo agoVAT is a regressive tax. It hits everyone along the way, rich or poor. It hits the poor especially hard proportionally.
- Arodex 5mo agoVAT is a progressive tax. https://taxfoundation.org/blog/value-added-tax-vat-progressive/ https://taxfoundation.org/blog/value-added-tax-vat-progressi...
- whynotmaybe 5mo agoSource for the "5%"?
- derriz 5mo agoVAT is trivial for businesses to deal with. You add x% onto every invoice you issue. The VAT due to be paid to the government is a simple sum of the amounts distinctly shown on each invoice you issue minus the sum of the VAT amounts on invoices you’ve paid. Income/employment taxes, corporate tax, import taxes, etc are orders of magnitudes more complex, dynamic and subject to legal interpretation. I was a small business owner for a while years ago and did the VAT myself. But there was no way I would even attempt employment or corporation taxes - covered by endless legislation and changing every year - that was a job for the accountant.
- testing22321 5mo agoI pay you a million dollars to eat dog shit. You pay me a million dollars to eat dog shit. The result? The GDP goes up two million and we both have shit eating grins.
- Havoc 5mo agoThe FAQ is amazing....pre-legal haha This is why substance over form is a thing in revenue accounting. Unless you're an American AI company ofc.
- baggachipz 5mo agoIs there a way we can leverage the Gig Economy to book large gains?
- debarshri 5mo agoWhat are the types of ARR the platform support? Can it also generate SOC2 certifications in days?
- random3 5mo agoThey gotta become a platform, so likely more will come
- janderson215 5mo agoI heard they started a hardware unit operating in stealth, but the rumor is they’re working on a box.
- grey-area 5mo agoActivities like this are a good sign of a bubble close to bursting. The circular deals Nvidia and OpenAI have done are good examples of this. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals
- FergusArgyll 5mo agoIt's a joke
- grey-area 5mo agoIt’s a funny joke because it is truly happening (without the fraud as a service middleman). This sort of trade has been rampant the last few years in the AI and GPU space, as you can see from the link above, which details people doing exactly this in the real world with armies of accountants to make it appear legal.
- spwa4 5mo agoIsn't this highly illegal, and worst of all: this is cheating taxes ... Let's just say if you really want to commit crimes, don't start with challenging the IRS. Just don't. There's so many horror stories about that.
- HumblyTossed 5mo agoAs the FAQ suggests, it's "pre-legal". But it's all for mocking the current market... so.
- luke5441 5mo agoLet no one have the excuse of "this was so unexpected" once it burns down.
- Frozen_Flame 5mo agoWhat if instead of trading dollars I want to promise to trade dollars in the future? My investors need to see me capturing the market. Might even create some panic for added fun.
- conorcleary 5mo agoYou'll be the mayor of Foursquare in no time!
- everfrustrated 5mo agoAKA YC companies buying from each other.
- stego-tech 5mo agoI don’t see anything topping the internet today better than this. Perfect, no notes.
- rizza 5mo agoThis took me far too long to figure out that it was parody. I'm sure some VC has at least thought of building a SEC Violations as a Service platform. This is truly the dumbest timeline.
- alansaber 5mo agoReinventing tax litigation from first principles
- whatever1 5mo agoIt’s down already. The fund exceeded its capacity.
- Swizec 5mo agoServices in kind is a pretty common business practice. You see this a lot at the SMB level especially outside of the US. Small businesses are cash strapped. So you find someone who needs your services and you need their services. Instead of exchanging cash, you exchange invoices and do the work. You build them, say, a $5000 website, they perform, say, $5000 of landscaping. At big boy levels this is often structured as “strategic partnership”. The part that makes it not fraud is that both parties do actually do the work.
- skeeter2020 5mo agothe last thing you should do in this scenario is book that as revenue. Of course I would never do this, but you could keep it off the books.
- ebiester 5mo agoIt depends if your goal is to sell the company or evade taxes, of course.
- atomicnumber3 5mo agoThis feels very adjacent to the story about the whole town in debt, and the rich guy leaves a $100 bill on the table, [and so on], in a way that I can't quite put my finger on.
- throwaway667555 5mo agoYou can't put your finger on it because money is merely an accumulator and medium of exchange of economic performance. The performance of services in exchange for other services without money is a perfectly valid economic exchange that can and should be booked to revenue of each of the parties, if actually performed. Loans without any economic performance of services generate circular meaningless cash flows yeah, but that's not the case when services are actually performed. Loans are promises to pay. Business deals are promises to perform services or deliver goods. The difference is easily lost in the details even for accountants and economists.
- sscaryterry 5mo ago(Pending) Crime-as-a-Service
- RobotToaster 5mo agoAnyone else getting "SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP"
- 1attice 5mo agoYes. :/ GrapheneOS over here
- RobotToaster 5mo agoI'm on firefox on windows.
- 0xffany 5mo agoVisiting the website's url (revswap.ai without www) redirects me to revai.com which is for sale on godaddy... Fastest enshittification ever?
- RobotToaster 5mo agoMaybe the IRS didn't get like the joke?
- Kim_Bruning 5mo agoConfirmed. Firefox and Chrome.
- cactusplant7374 5mo agoHas anyone here actually viewed the page? Seems strange that it got upvoted if no one can view the page.
- clearstack 5mo agoSEC calls this round-tripping. ASC 606 requires commercial substance — if both parties just book offsetting transactions, auditors flag the net cash flow as zero
- whatever1 5mo agooffsetting in what horizon? I give you 100 in q4 2026 you give me 100 in q1 2027
- skeeter2020 5mo agoThey're already ahead of you; you have to consistently book revenue (accrual or cash basis) which means they both go at the same time (which would offset) or that real money is being exchanged. You can't accrue the 100 you're (supposedly) giving me now and THEN accrue the 100 I'm giving you next year.
- bandrami 5mo agoYou could but the other guy would have to book 100 of goodwill in the interim, matched by me booking goodwill later, and that brings it's own problems
- duzer65657 5mo agoGoodwill almost always raises concern with authorities and audits, so I'd imagine so sort of quid pro quo version is equivalent to loudly yelling to be audited!
- RobotToaster 5mo agoWhat if they buy each other's NFTs instead?
- felipellrocha 5mo agoThis can’t be legal, can it?
- LNSY 5mo agoIt's legal if you get invited to Epstein parties, illegal for everyone else
- 12_throw_away 5mo agoWait wait wait. Jeff Epstein? The New York financier?
- david927 5mo agoI remember in the couple years before the dot com crash in 2000, there was a lot of satire being written which was being taken very seriously. You couldn't tell what was serious and what was humor because both were absurd.
- desireco42 5mo agoDomain is down?
- zoba 5mo agoReminds me a bit of the NFT parody site https://nfd.miami https://nfd.miami
- titanomachy 5mo agoThank god, it's satire https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revswap.ai/#how https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revsw...
- fancyfredbot 5mo ago"This is a parody website. Any resemblance to real companies wash-trading their revenue is purely coincidental and also definitely happening."
- outside1234 5mo ago"Any comparison to OpenAI is totally valid"
- frangonf 5mo agoRelated: https://xcancel.com/haridigresses/status/2055107567429292081 https://xcancel.com/haridigresses/status/2055107567429292081
- orthecreedence 5mo ago> "Closed a $40M Series B in 11 days. Have not spoken to a customer since 2022." That gave me a chuckle. Too real.
- theartfuldodger 5mo agoNever seen that particular SSL error before!
- PeterStuer 5mo agoIt's weird to keep referring to these AI behemoths as "startups".
- outside1234 5mo agoThey have no scalable business model that yields profit outside of raising more investment, so yes, somehow they are still startups
- mcmcmc 5mo ago> They have no scalable business model that yields profit outside of raising more investment Yeah that doesn’t sound Ponzi-adjacent at all
- marcosdumay 5mo agoA startup is a small, agile company that is trying to grow. Those things have more money than the world, and can't change anything about their business without the house of cards of their investment image falling down.
- outside1234 5mo agoThe classic definition of a startup is "A temporary entity in search of a scalable business model." This incredibly still fits all of these entities.
- cog-flex 5mo agoIf you doubted that we are in a bubble…
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nottorp 5mo agoInteresting. It's probably a parody website as the comments say. But wtf is up with Firefox? It doesn't like the site's SSL. Okay, they missed points 7, 18 and 24 to 31 in the current security theater checklist. An error occurred during a connection to revswap.ai. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP Whatever? Hmm if i edit the link to http i get a cloudflare error page. Someone censoring? And what does it say about the modern internet that the first two things i thought of are security theater and vendor censorship?
- felooboolooomba 5mo agoWouldn't "cookthebooks.ai" be a better name?
- time0ut 5mo agoPre-legal. That is gold.
- pduggishetti 5mo agoDo it among a group of companies to make it more legal, yc way
- frankfrank13 5mo agoI interviewed at a startup, really early stage, who claimed to be on track for $100k ARR. We all know "ARR" is bullshit, but I didn't suspect the ~$10k monthly to be bullshit. It turns out this was $10k pre-discount, and this product was ~FREE for YC companies, who made up ~100% of this companies customer base. So revenue was $0, or very close to it.
- tonymet 5mo agoFAAS fraud as a service.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoDon't do this unless you like eating prison food and performing slave labor for having conducted investor fraud.