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It'd be great for investors if they could just anoint winners. But in practice, consumers decide and investors follow.

• minimaxir 12y ago
  One of the tenets of competitive advantage is the ability of a business's competitors to enter the market. Running a Bitcoin startups has extremely high fixed costs that cannot be mitigated (contrast with typical startups with mostly variable costs); if VCs aren't giving them funding, as is apparently the case with Buttercoin, then there's no way they can even create a reasonable Bitcoin service, especially one that could compete against Coinbase and its mountain of funding.
• tim333 12y ago
  It's hard to compete with a similar company if they have a load more money than you. Take Uber. Maybe you build a better taxi app but they have $5bn raised and you don't. Then they can subsidise, run at a loss, spend loads on ads and so on.
  • JohnTHaller 12y ago
    ... make fake orders to competitors and try to steal their drivers, etc.
• s73v3r 12y ago
  And in reality, for a capital intensive business like this, those that the consumers get to choose from are decided by the investors.