21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise.
Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started.
So you're saying that 21.co/Earn.com bought BTC with some of the invested capital, held it as BTC rose, and then distributed it to its shareholders? One of which is A16Z.
This seems possible, because, as we know, the price of BTC has fallen recently from ~$16k to ~$7k. So the gains could be large if they did indeed buy BTC with some of the capital they raised, but probably not $1 billion, or at least I would guess against that. The timing and distributions would have to have been quite right.
But, I will say that at 11-50 employees[0] there should have been quite a bit of capital left over from the ~$150 million they raised, even after a few years of burn.
It seems like this would have leaked if Earn.com had earned this much, or if A16Z had earned a large distribution in one year (like last), it would have had to have been reported to their LPs in the net asset value update.
And perhaps it did leak, because we're talking about it. But then I would still guess there would be more discussion about this if an LP leaked it. There would be ample documentation of this.
21.co / earn.com is a serial flop, pivoting markets and functionality multiple times. I wouldn't be surprised if the funding was simply a way to secretly do something. Nefarious or not.
The story behind this theory (which is quite plausible imho) would be much more interesting than the public remarks from earn and coinbase. The actual products released by the company have always seemed pretty trifling considering the massive amount of funding. Things never really added up.
It's not technically insider trading but the managers of the companies (by way of the Board of Directors) have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Undertaking a bad merger to bail out a different company from one of your investors could be construed as a breach of that duty. Of course, it would take a long court case to determine fault / damages, so it's unlikely to happen, but there are some safeguards to prevent stuff like this (if that is what happened.. which who knows... ).
It sounds like they indirectly acquired BTC via mining:
> And to make matters worse, all the BTC returned to shareholders by the mining operation was in danger of being completely clawed back if the company entered a messy bankruptcy.
"21.co had been started as 21E6, a bitcoin mining company with a sizable data center footprint and a monthly bill to match. The company was set up to return mined bitcoin to its shareholders"
right, and if earn.com is sitting on a billion worth of bitcoin, why would they sell for 100mln and why would the founder take a CTO job? Doesn't sound plausible
Unrelated to this - I've heard that many VC funds were going through their legal paperwork with a fine-tooth comb to see if they were allowed to invest LP money directly into crypto or ICOs. Some were not permitted, and it definitely demonstrated how some of these funds lack the flexibility to pursue opportunities that do not pattern-match classic VC investments of the last few decades.
As per their LP agreement, the fund itself might only have been allowed to invest in equities / companies, such as this one. The company itself could then perhaps invest directly into cryptocurrencies without restrictions.
While that may or may not be lucrative, it wouldnt help them in future rounds when they are showing their track record bc the track record cant include non-fee paying accounts.
No. 21.co was a company that built custom chips for bitcoin mining. The founders and A16Z have been pretty transparent about that throughout, as well as in the blog post.
I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money.
I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.
Looking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain."
Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.
And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful to them?
>>Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.
By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where a payment system can operate.
Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users of the winning paid-email service would be locked into using the same financial intermediary, which would then have significant power over its users owing to its network effect.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Most people barely want to accept email from people they are likely to do business with. What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together?
Also, you're just wrong about traditional financial intermediaries. It's easy enough to provide a few different ways to transfer funds. Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.
>>What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together?
I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.
>>Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.
Making a wire transfer to use email? That'd be ridiculously expensive. You'd need a payment system built on top of the bank wire system, and it would need to be truly international in scope, and open, which no trusted third party based financial system is.
> tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic
The important word here being "seems". Seeming is a thing that happens in someone's head. So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".
It does not seem like that to me. Or to 99.9% of companies, who start out tying their companies to the reach of a specific national or regional financial system and then move happily beyond it.
In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their economic activity through that financial system than those in developed nations do.
> I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.
Email is already open and international and doesn't need bank accounts. This is paid for email solicitation, and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks, unless perhaps they wish to conceal their true identity because they're spear-phishing.
I guess calling it "email" instead of a task makes it sound new, but they do have competitors, Mechanical Turk probably being the most prominent.
Mechanical Turk pays out using Amazon payments or Amazon gift cards.
Google Opinion Awards pays out as either Google Play credit on Android. It looks like you can convert this to a gift card, at least in the U.S. They use Paypal on iOS.
ahh, thats the trick isnt it -- blockchain provides universal currency. No need for local currency handing, banks, cc processors, forex transfer providers, and all the things associated with local payment processors. While i dont think this is the first or is it truely useful, but yes, blockchain (specifically bitcoin) is providing a decentralized universal currency for use in decentralized systems like email. Its a valid point.
In theory, perhaps. In practice, it provides a universally inconvenient currency. If somebody wants to send me money to read an email, then I want to be able to spend that money. If they send me bitcoin, I can't spend it directly: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
Ergo, I am right back in need some way to convert it into my local currency. Except far less conveniently than just letting my bank take care of the exchange, as they would with an international wire transfer.
The reason I'd pay somebody to read an email is so that I can do business with them, and for a fair bit more money than I pay for the email. That involves one of us paying the other. Which in practice will mean a real currency, not cryptotulips.
> I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless.
What lead you to expect that people would want to pay to email you? The business model makes no sense; it's obvious that that wasn't going to happen.
I didn't really expect it, though I thought there was a chance that some ICOs with more money than sense might try it once or twice. I did expect, however, that they wouldn't spam me with non-paid messages. Obviously that was foolish.
Is it possible that spammers could spam their registration servers checking which emails had been already used? E.g. get a list of all the public emails off of github commits, then cross reference them with Earn.com registrations.
I been following 21.co since the early days, when they pivoted into Earn.com I lost trust in the whole company. Then they started spamming me about someone trying to pay me to read some message, which I never did lol.
Honestly this has been one of the shadiest investment of the a16z group, to my knowledge, as a "spectator". Not sure exactly how they went from 21.co's mission to Coinbase, I must be living in a dream-world.
This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1].
One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.
Actually, the one-to-one emails were only a small part of their business model. Earn has become popular among crypto companies for doing paid mass email campaigns.
If you are on the site as a user it's obvious. You get a lot of paid messages if you sign up for the right lists. Not sure if it will scale, but interesting use of crypto.
Instead of solving the spam problem and giving marketing/sales/recruiting people better tools, they just incentivized people to sign-up for mailing lists that they probably didn't care about.
I don't know why they just didn't go into email-based cryptocurrency payments. If they can really change currencies easily using it, it seems the simplest and highest-impact business they can do.
Yeah disappointing but not the attempt at using tokens / blockchain to eliminate spam. We're going to be experimenting with a few spam elimination models at Sendy: https://www.sendy.network/
I thought earn.com (formerly 21.co) was a clever idea and I signed up. Once or twice a quarter I would get an item incoming and I'd usually read and/or fill out a survey.
Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).
Would you be so kind as to show a few of those technologies in some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses?
> But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some light crime. As an example a New York Times writer just tried to spend the weekend living on Bitcoin and failed egregiously: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
I'm happy to admit that there's more activity in the space than I could possibly keep track of, so there could definitely be a pony in there somewhere. [1] But it shouldn't be any surprise that after so much hype resulting in no apparent useful effect on the rest of the world many people are skeptical that the cryptocurrency world will ever produce anything more than dubious claims, Ponzi schemes, and million-dollar thefts.
I'm head-down in writing NuCypher as we speak, but it's obvious to me how to do what we're doing without a distributed consensus mechanism, and I do think that the real world use cases will be pretty rad.
Our system allows an actor (Alice) to select any number of recipients (Bob) in a Policy. Alice can disappear from the network forever, and subsequently, any DataSource can encrypt data, using Alice's public key, which can then be decrypted by all of the Bobs.
That's pretty cool to me. I do think that medical devices / IoT are an obvious use case. I also hope that our tech is used to build selected consortiums of journalists, whom whistle-blowers can then encrypt for only by knowing the policy key.
Another interesting use case is for distributed ops: if you have a number of streams of operational data that you want to share only with a certain number of watchers, presently you need to trust a centralized service to do that.
I'll admit: I'm not really the use case guy. But I am waist-deep in the python over here, and I can tell you we have a good thing going.
So I'm sure you mean well this is an exact example of my problem with the cryptocurrency/blockchain space.
For years and years I've said, "Yes, that is a pretty cool technology, but what real-world value is it currently providing?" One common answer is, "But it's a really cool technology!" No argument, but that seems to miss the point. Another is, "I'm sure it will be amazing!" Which again, misses the point. A third is, "It might be great for X," but without any real proof that people doing X want the technology, without demonstration that the current alternatives are inadequate, and without apparent recognition that a future hypothetical does not in any way satisfy somebody looking for traction.
Plenty of technologists think they have a good thing going. Right up until the investor money runs out and customers have failed to show up.
As an example, look at 3D movies and TV. 3D has been about to change the way we see things since the 1950s. There is no denying the technology is very neat to technologists. Early adopters even get excited! And then it turns out once again that customers don't really care. This pattern goes at least as far back as the Brewster stereoscope in the 1850s.
So please, don't be shocked that people are tired of blockchain/cryptocurrency hype. That you find the technology interesting does not mean that anybody else will find the (lack of) actual deployed use interesting.
I've been using my bitpay card for over a year to handle every type of payment that you would want to make using fiat money. I know this isn't viable as a total replacement for dollars yet, due to the sometimes wild fluctuations in the price, but that is stabilizing over time. It is reasonable to think that the price of btc will eventually reach a more stable base, as more money (including institutional money) enters the space and options for shorting become more accessible. The NY times writer just didn't do enough research to figure out how to spend bitcoin. It's not that hard. These are early days, and this is still experimental technology, but is becoming more practical by the minute.
The NYT writer did more research than most people would. If you're blaming the user for not teching correctly, you've already lost.
If the review I read is correct, that's an ordinary debit card that one refills by selling bitcoin. Which has approximately no value to most people, because they already have debit cards that work just fine.
It could be that bitcoin will eventually end up being useful as a currency, but its high volatility means that day hasn't come yet, and won't come soon. Prominent bitcoin advocates are happy to give up on it as a currency altogether. E.g.: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
Claims that a previously-hyped technology is now uninteresting are pretty standard for this phase of the hype cycle.[1]
Of course, the fact that other technologies have gone through both a peak and trough before settling between them isn't confirmation that any particular technology will. (I bet Theranos won't rebound.) It should cause one to discount the sheer volume of disillusionment, where not accompanied by evidence, just as one should previously have discounted the volume of hype.
Cryptocurrencies right now are at the point where there has been lots of hype for years now but very little actual use (it's mostly just for speculation right now). I'm just burned out of the hype around it without it really delivering on a large scale.
It's what's known as a mid-brow dismissal. The average HN commenter feels a gratifying sensation of intelligence when they point out that "a blockchain is just a database". They can feel that they are debunking a con with their razor-like intelligence, like Neo, escaping from the matrix.
The "blockchain is just a database" critique is an application of Conway's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). The basic critique is: the problem being solved with the overwhelming majority of blockchain tech seems to be a political, not a technical problem. It's a critique that says the issue with this thing you are fixing isn't actually that the data layer doesn't match the existing political structure, it's that the political structure doesn't actually seem to support a demand for this kind of data layer.
The reason this critique is so prevalent on HN is because a lot of us just watched the last 10 years of the internet go from "that thing that is going to democratize technology and knowledge" to "a centralized management system for privacy invasion." The reason for this seems to be, loosely stated: "no one wants to run their own mail server." Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us. The reason for this is because our economy is based on specialization of labor: it's by design. I can choose to spend my time running a server, but allowing someone to do it for me is orders of magnitude cheaper due to economies of scale, so unless I have a really strong demand it's probably not going to happen.
The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain, because, referring back to Conway's law, there are fundamental political aspects to our culture that do not support this architecture.
> The blockchain allows for us the same effect as "running our own email servers," and most of us really don't think it's likely that people are going to want to host their own nodes in the blockchain
The way I see it, one of the big assumptions of the technologies in this space is that participants are only acting out of self-interest. Meaning, that there's a strong push towards designing systems where behaviours that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding.
Meaning that in theory, cryptoeconomics could be seen as an attempt at finding a solution to the problem you mention.
There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it."
It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation, in which case you calling us all idiots would be warranted. After 10 years of flops, the burden to show how interesting these technologies are is on you now.
> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation
I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?
Ethereum is still essentially in its "live demo" phase. The release of dApps and user-friendly-ish products in the blockchain space has had about 2 years of traction. Your application of skepticism is appropriate, the burden of proof is on the developers to show the value of these projects, but it typically takes a decade or so for disintermediating technology to reach the point of ready adoption. We are in the single prop plane phase not too far from kitty hawk.
I’ve checked NuCypher’s homepage and I find a bit strange to have that much emphasis on the blockchain on your homepage and at the same time only 5 occurrences of the word "blockchain" in your 21-pages whitepaper. Am I missing something?
1) The whitepaper describes the nature of our network and how Alice and Bob use it. It does not describe (and isn't meant to describe) node operation except as Alice and Bob need to understand it. We'll have an additional node operation whitepaper that describes the smart contracts in more detail. We - and I know this may sound strange - decided to build our cryptography and network first and foremost rather than race to build "something, anything, as long as it's blockchain."
2) Do you think that the whitepaper insufficiently describes how Alice and Bob use the blockchain? If so, do you have suggestions for how we can do this better? I think our whitepaper is pretty solid, FWIW. If you are Alice or Bob, I think this gives you exactly the understanding of the blockchain application that you need.
Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO.
As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.
It basically looks like a smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service, but the impression I got from their main page is that there isn't a specific end user or market for this yet, although that didn't stop the VCs from funding it.
> smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service
That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized.
We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0].
Several large applications are within the healthcare world. This allows patients to be in control of their own medical data and to share/revoke their data at will with other doctors, hospitals, etc. This lets them retain their own encryption keys without trusting another party.
Its market/end user is specifically anyone who has a need for a KMS. I Would also like to point out that NuCypher can be used as a consumer grade KMS -- something that I am exceptionally excited about.
No, there is a lot of original research on decentralized systems and consensus happening thanks to cryptocurrencies. It's just surprisingly hidden compared to ML research and other popular buzzword areas. Maybe the noise from scammy ICOs drowns it, I don't know, but if you're a researcher or developer interested in decentralized systems then you definitely can't complain about lack of innovation.
At first they were 21.co and they invited developers, startup CEOS and investors under the premise of much larger per-response rewards ($100 for investors, $20 for CEOs, etc). Since then, they've been sending mostly $1-$2 spam from Tokens and ICOs. The payment is in Bitcoin, so cashing out also takes a big chunk of the earnings. Coinbase sounds like a nice landing spot for a team that likely dreamt bigger than that.
This is an incredibly well spun tale of reducing cost and restructuring a revenue producing, albeit a super cash burning, business into a more efficient one.
This post is a glorified PR humblebrag, and the truth of the matter is that if they really did complete a turn-around, it would be stand alone business worthy of the incredible cash infusion that the VC community injected in to it. Ultimately it's likely a loss (perhaps a very large one) on the books for the investors involved, and pieces like this are just lipstick on the pig.
> Over the last several years, the primary way most people have obtained cryptocurrency is through buying it, with many of these transactions facilitated by Coinbase. With this acquisition, we allow users to also earn crypto by doing things they already know how to do — like replying to emails and filling out surveys.
Ick. Who'd have thought the future of technology would look like shitty direct marketing scams?
I get spammed by ICO offers every day almost from these people. Stopped logging in to claim my dollars since it is too much hassle to complete that captcha every time. Endless pictures of road signs and busses and roads...
Fiat means giving the payment processor significant leverage over the paid email service.
Fiat also means the email service couldn't be global, because Trusted-Third-Party-based payment processors can't operate globally owing to the global regulatory patchwork.
Contrast that with Bitcoin(Cash)-based international remittance, or Ethereum-based token sales, which are accessible to people in every country in the world.
Email is an open and global protocol, so cryptocurrency is a good fit for it.
They were a blockchain startup, so it'd have been embarrassing for them to base their service around the sort of money the average person actually uses. Also gave them a natural audience for targeted ICO spam.
Off the top of head, one reason is that there is no need to support multiple currencies for international users, or to worry about currency conversion.
Secondly it cuts out the need for middlemen (banks/payment processors).
I signed up for this platform early on but never felt like it was anything more than a convoluted engine for getting me to transact with spurious ICOs.
Earn.com has become a glorified airdrop platform, but even so they've got a good team there that are good additions to Coinbase. Maybe the most expensive acqui-hire?
Either way it's a huge nod towards tokenized attention economy projects by one of the biggest players in the space.
The coolest part about Earn.com is you could send a message for $100 to VCs like Marc Andreessen, when I finally finish my app I will be using Earn.com to find testers that have blogs that can spread the word
As someone with an formal education in Art despite a background in Tech, I'm growing more and more disillusioned with currencies beyond actual Legal Tender... I almost agree with the 1792 Mint Act's attachment of a death sentence to the devaluing of our coins (silver and gold in particular). Money is at best Artwork and even then it's only by devaluing it that it gets passed around like it's nothing. What is Bitcoin's value other than a secure means of Bank transfer again? It just seems like a means of reinforcing what from a religious context would be called Simony. Show me the Money.
> Earn.com allows senders to pay users for replying to emails and completing tasks
There was quite few sites with same idea 15 years ago. Back then it took me some time to understand that no serious business wants to show ads to people paid for watching them, since only people without significant income sign up for such programs and the incentive for fraud is high.
It's not baseless -- they want to help perpetuate the ecosystem and use cases for people to get utility in acquiring any incentivized crypto-assets. The same utility described on Earn.com however is possible by paying people fiat currency, instead of paying someone something then making them have vested interest in it maintaining a certain value or increasing its value (at the cost of society).
So I'm copying and pasting part of someone's comment I saw on mobile - which has since been flagged and removed for including their referral URL - because I wanted to reply to it.
They said:
"I've earned around 0.0060 BTC so far (~$50), mostly through airdrop offers -- without taking into account the airdropped crypto itself."
What I wanted to reply was, no, you earned ~$50 if you sold it off immediately, however otherwise you earned "~$50" MINUS whatever "profit" earlier adopters earned, the wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted toward the earlier adopters; e.g. that could be $50 minus $30 because you're paying for/legitimizing/realizing/covering the difference of their purchase price and their sale price. They know of course they can't dump it, however they don't care if the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme takes 10-20+ years to allow them to realize $100s of billions, or even potentially trillions of dollars, worth of "profit."
'When I get my paycheck, I earn my salary MINUS whatever "profit" my employer made from my work.'
This is disingenuous by ignoring risk and presupposing that (in this case) I have the same reach/clout/contacts/sales and marketing channels as my employer.
The profit your employer makes from your work isn't coming from an increase in demand [in the use of a transactional layer] causing the perceived value of a crypto-asset [USD] to go up, and therefore they also are profiting from that increased value -- that'd be "double-dipping" profit in a sense if that's the case, if they're also making money on the increase in demand of the currency.
Profit from what someone is willing to pay above actual cost vs. "profit" derived simply from an increase in perceived value because of demand are two different things; this is why I put profit in quotes to differentiate.
If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this. It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however
If you held onto your paycheck and didn't cash it for 5 years (assuming the check is still valid then), and the USD went up by 400% -- once you cashed it, that 300% difference in your buying power that you're depositing is getting covered by everyone else now (for no more work done by you). At the surface of it, does that sound fair? And that cash they were paid, it wasn't an investment.
If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this, they decide how much the other currencies are worth in comparison (the exchange rates). It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however not through reallocating wealth weighted to the earliest adopters -- you're taking advantage of the majority of society then.
The issue is whether reallocating resources/wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily is acceptable or not. I argue it's not. The incentivized structure is one way to get people working together, collaborating - at least to begin with - however at a certain "tipping point", let's say it's 50% -- everyone who adopts or must adopt the incentivized crypto-asset then is covering/realizing the cost of everyone who bought before. E.g. Their buying power is shifted weighted towards the earlier adopters, and if this is allowed then there will be a point where they will be forced to adopt it (and early bad actors are heavily incentivized to reach this goal).
One problem with incentivized crypto-assets is that USD isn't destroyed, instead it's being exchanged - given to someone in return for a digital crypto-asset. If USD was actually destroyed or rather transferred into a crypto-asset blockchain, that would be solving part of the problem.
If you see problems with what I'm writing, I would greatly appreciate hearing more of your thoughts - rarely do people engage with this line of thought on here, I seem to get enough downvotes though (to counter the upvotes I initially get).
It seems you have a problem with other people having large pieces of pie, rather than the more important point that all people that have pie have it grow.
I really don't see how you could make either of those assertions from what I wrote.
If I steal $100 from you, and now I have $100 and you have $0 - would you have a problem with that? That's a generally asinine accusation to make..
Isn't the most important part that something happens fairly - or is your argument that collaboration at all costs is okay?
All people having the pie and wanting it to grow (it's what we technically have now, except capitalistic for-profit structures suffocate distribution of and capture the majority of the value), that may be the case in the initial stages because of everyone "profiting" from the increase in value because of demand, however then that's totally forgetting or ignoring the long-term impact once you reach the "tipping point" - that everyone after "50%" now are subsidizing all of the previous "profits" that will want to be realized by the earlier adopters --- and the value can't keep going up unless you have unlimited people to scale it to, which there isn't. Late adopters won't be incentivized to collaborate, as they're not earning "profit" from the incentivized crypto-assets.
Also, your statement seems to be a straw man fallacy, whether you meant it to be or not.
I have no idea what you are talking about. People that buy crypto currencies are exchanging money for digital rights (which some believe are better forms of money). How that relates to you stealing $100 from me is beyond my comprehension.
People that hold USD have their pie diluted, and they are even lied to about it by using a CPI figured calculated from consumer goods and not a more rounded figure of all asset prices (or actual new money injected/ removed).
Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started.
Anyone else hear about this rumor?