[krzkaczor]

I work in crypto space myself and I can tell that this space is really interesting. Both technical and business challenges are quite unique.

Here's just a quick recap of different, new business models https://medium.com/abridged-io/web3-business-models-in-the-w...

IMO things like DeFi are finally a good use case for blockchain.

So yeah, I think this a good idea to create a startup school focused on new, different area witch can disrupt the finance sector.

Disclaimer: I work for MakerDAO.

[arcticbull]

...a list of new business models zero of which have shown an iota (pardon the pun) of traction in a decade. I feel the list of crazy startup ideas circulating on r/wallstreetbets is as valuable.

The technical and scaling problems are all self imposed due to leveraging a woefully inadequate storage mechanism. It’s basically coal-powered banking.

[lacker]

...a list of new business models zero of which have shown an iota (pardon the pun) of traction in a decade.

Bitcoin is worth $140 billion. What are you waiting for, before you believe it has traction?

[vertoc]

I'm on neither side of this debate, but citing how much Bitcoin is worth seems like a really weak argument in favor of traction.

I think a more convincing argument would be citing # of transactions or use cases (store of value, cheaper way of sending large amount of money or money internationally, etc.)

[blhack]

There were 320k transactions in the last 24 hours on mainnet alone (for bitcoin).

[arcticbull]

How many of them were fake? 95%. [1] While I understand that applies to exchanges and not mainnet, the reality is that each mainet transaction is impacted because it's the 95% of fake volume that sets the price and therefore the terms of exchange for the "real" transactions.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cbovaird/2019/03/22/95-of-repor...

[darawk]

None of them. There is no such thing as a 'fake' bitcoin transaction. What you are thinking of is fake trading volume on exchanges. Those are very different things.

[tuesdayrain]

I'm constsntly amused by the lack of technical understanding on HN when it comes to cryptocurrencies. That article says 95% of trading volume is fake. This is absolutely different from on chain transactions, 100% of which are real.

[arcticbull]

Market cap is not worth for a currency. There’s incredibly limited liquidity in the market relative to the market cap, and even the ETF trying to list recently showed 95% of all volume in the crypto space was fake.

Try and pull a few million dollars worth out and watch what happens. It did just plunge 33% on some small withdrawals, what exactly are you waiting for?

[tofurocks]

Selling a few million dollars worth of bitcoin would only slip the market a couple of dollars if at all. Go look at bitmex or bitfinex's order books - they have plenty of liquidity.

[arcticbull]

95% of that volume is fake [1] especially on bitfinex haha, they’re the scammiest. When they launched they were just importing order books from other exchanges to make it look like they had volume, and they launched Tether when they lost banking which also lost banking and had hundreds of millions seized for money laundering. Bitfinex is the biggest scam in the space and that’s saying a lot.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cbovaird/2019/03/22/95-of-repor...

[rapsey]

No one ever said the space is not interesting. It's just goes against human nature and how the world operates.

The difference between a failed idea and a successful one is very often simply timing. Things that were complete nonsense in the dot com bubble are billion dollar businesses now. The crypto space is not for this time (imo).

[nostrademons]

> It's just goes against human nature and how the world operates.

Is that actually true? Or just true for a certain subset of humans?

Human nature isn't actually fixed and immutable. Each generation redefines the world with culture, practices, and institutions that seem totally natural given the environment they grew up in. I remember my mom insisting that I wear a suit to every interviewer and send thank-you notes to every interviewer; I learned later that the former gets you dinged for culture fit at most Silicon Valley companies, and the latter seems creepy. Conversely, several practices that were decried as "entitled Millenials!" when I first entered the workforce, like expecting to change jobs every couple years or expecting your employer to provide lunch, are now fairly standard practice, and the economy has shifted to embrace that new business culture.

When I talk to people who graduated college after 2013, the vast majority of them believe that crypto & DeFi are right, natural, and will inevitably take over the global financial system.

Right now, that's 5 years of working people, in junior positions, vs. 40 years of people in senior positions who think that crypto is an affront to the natural order of things. This site is largely Gen-Xers and Xennials who are deeply embedded in the previous wave (the WWW) of remaking how the economy works; I doubt most of us have close personal friendships with people who graduated college in the last 5 years (I only hear about this through friends' younger siblings, recent alumni of my alma mater, and junior employees hired by my startup-founder friends - that and explicitly seeking it out on Reddit).

But if you look at this situation demographically, change is inevitable for the simple reason that we're going to stop working and die before they are. And even something that appeals only to 18-28 year olds still has the ability to support several billion dollar markets, given that this is the age group whose consumer preferences are still malleable with 50+ years of consumption ahead of them.

[rapsey]

> Is that actually true? Or just true for a certain subset of humans?

The strengths of cryptocurrencies are also exactly why they are unnatural and undesired for most people in the real world.

Who do you turn to when you get scammed, hacked or robbed when it results in lost crypto funds? No one. Everything is final with no recourse. No mistakes are permitted. People are not robots, software is not foolproof and people who write it are not perfect.

Ruthless peer to peer with no central authority or possibility of appeal is not how the world operates and it is not what people are comfortable with. Anyone who is comfortable with it is a short sighted fool.

> When I talk to people who graduated college after 2013, the vast majority of them believe that crypto & DeFi are right, natural, and will inevitably take over the global financial system.

Young people are dreamers and they have a whole lot of energy to pursue dreams. They take inspiration from other successful dreamers who have made it with a lot of hard work and tenacity. They take inspiration from ideas of the past that have revolutionized the world.

What they don't think about is the 90+% of people who have also worked their ass off in pursuit of their dreams or the world changing ideas that showed promise, but went nowhere. That is because those ideas are soon forgotten and the people never made it out of obscurity.

[nostrademons]

> Who do you turn to when you get scammed, hacked or robbed when it results in lost crypto funds?

The same thing has been said about self-checkouts ("Who do you turn to when you can't find an item?"), self-serve purchasing models like AdWords or AWS ("Who do you turn to when you need customer support?"), and self-employments platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, etc. ("Who do you turn to when you want time off or career development?")

The actual response to all of these is "Well, I'll figure it out myself." People who use self-checkouts generally know how the aisles are laid out in their favorite supermarkets, or they just walk until they find things. People who use low-volume AdWords, AWS, or SaaS vendors turn to forums & StackOverflow when things go wrong. People who drive for Uber just stop working when they want to. Similarly, people who want to avoid getting scammed, hacked or robbed with cryptocurrency do their research on vendors; they do Google image searches on headshots of ICOs and look up founders on LinkedIn to see if they're fakes; they keep their crypto on a hardware wallet in their physical possession; they use strong passwords and 2FA that they don't re-use for any other sites; and they don't talk about their Bitcoin holdings on the Internet.

All of these developments are controversial, because you actually are losing a human interaction that some people found helpful. That hasn't stopped them from growing quickly, because they take the human (and their associated salary) out of the loop. This lets firms offer a service to groups of people that it wasn't previously able to afford it. If you wanted to buy ads for a global, targeted audience before Google, you just couldn't do it. If you wanted to host software before AWS, you went to a colo or dedicated hosting provider and put in a lot more effort than their self-serve solution. If you wanted a side-hustle before the gig economy, it generally wasn't worth the search costs of trying to get an additional job.

If you have less than $10K in deposits (which is the majority of people these days), the bank is not your friend. They try to get you on little fees for everything, and pay you effectively zero interest, and occasionally go down for maintenance when it's exceptionally inconvenient for you (aside from many of their services only being available from 9:00-4:30). When the alternative is that, then the idea of a global, decentralized system that charges a flat fee per transaction and no fee to hold your wealth gets pretty attractive.

[numtel]

There's no reason a cryptocurrency cannot be paired with judicial institutions that provide recourse for lost or stolen funds.

The innovation of cryptocurrency is simple and undeniable.

Fiat money requires armed forces to secure its supply against counterfeiters.

Cryptocurrency uses math to defeat counterfeiting.

[rapsey]

> The innovation of cryptocurrency is simple and undeniable.

Yes but does the innovation have market value? For the amount of investment, there has been no real demand for the innovation.

> Fiat money requires armed forces to secure its supply against counterfeiters.

Yes fiat money lives in the real world. This is why it is used in the real world.

> Cryptocurrency uses math to defeat counterfeiting.

Counterfeiting is a minor issue in the real world at best.

[numtel]

Counterfeiting is a minor issue in our daily lives because so much resources have to be devoted to keeping it that way.

"By 1865, up to one-third or even one-half of American money in circulation was fake." [0]

Governments regularly have to redesign their bills in order to prevent counterfeiting.

Extreme punishments are given for the crime of counterfeiting.

It's not just private actors to worry about. Opposing nations could destabilize an economy.

When counterfeiting is not a concern and a currency system can be created with very little effort, we can make currencies that we have more agency over.

The demand isn't for a cheaper way to combat counterfeiting but for greater agency over how the money supply is formed.

There is a massive, global call for reduced wealth inequality that existing governments have not been able to address. I'm not certain that cryptocurrency can do it either but it does seem like a possibility.

[0] https://time.com/3774327/lincoln-history-secret-service/

[magna7]

What you're talking about is infrastructure. How does infrastructure get built if people aren't actively building it? Yeah, these things take time, but people have to actually build out these ideas first before others in the future can build on top of them. Amazon sold books online because it's all the internet infrastructure could handle at the time. That's why MakerDAO made DAI because it's a low throughput d-application that doesn't require scaling through upgrades in infrastructure. Give it time. This space isn't a scam, it's just very early, and people are enthusiastic, as they should be.

[rapsey]

> What you're talking about is infrastructure.

No I am not. A common story of wildly successful businesses is they stumbled upon a market and the makers themselves never thought it was something that has any chance of being big. Then they are surprised when people are begging them to take their money for their half-baked product.

From all the billions that went into the space. A truly demand driven business has still not appeared. That is a pretty damning result.

Crypto space is being kept alive purely from leftover money invested during the mass hysteria of those 6 months or so and sunk cost fallacy.

[magna7]

I disagree with you. There were plenty of ideas during the 1990s that were technically infeasible until further infrastructure upgrades allowed them to exist. Video streaming immediately comes to mind. It was unfathomable to have a video streaming service like Netflix exist in the 1990s. People would have ridiculed you, just as people ridicule some crypto ideas today. A modern example is video game streaming. Even 5 years ago, it was unfathomable that video game streaming high quality games was possible, and yet we are starting to see these services today.

[fcolas]

You're right that timing is key, however:

>> Crypto = Trust (100%) <<

which is why (in my viewpoint) it matters a great deal, and there's just no way back. Trust is required for monetary exchange, but not only. It also matters where very strong guarantees are needed, which is everywhere, e.g., when setting up contracts or when making statements (expert or regulated) about a product, service, or a status. Trust matters because then the whole value-chain gets more efficient, rapid, and cost-effective.

[simias]

>It also matters where very strong guarantees are needed, which is everywhere, e.g., when setting up contracts or when making statements (expert or regulated) about a product, service, or a status.

10+ years later and we're still having this discussion. Yes, blockchain technologies manage to achieve a trust-less consensus about "a product, service or a status" but only if all the parameters can be encoded in the blockchain itself. It breaks down as soon as real world objects and interactions are involved because then the nodes need some sort of trustworthy "oracle" to monitor the real world. Many people have been working on that problem but I don't think anybody has a solution that works at scale in practice. And of course then a single bug and everything breaks down catastrophically (see the DAO).

Then there's the problem of scaling that solution to the transaction rate needed for a world-class blockchain. That also remains an open question.

Cryptocurrencies are interesting in the same way fusion reactors are interesting, if they can really work they will change the world but it's unclear if the technology is truly viable (even more so for cryptocurrencies IMO). As such I'm wary of this "crypto startup school" in the same way I'd be wary of a "nuclear fusion startup school".

Unless of course the objective is to effectively make a "pump-and-dump startup school" in which case I predict a huge success.

[hbmprime]

You're absolutely correct that the single largest barrier to mainstream crypto apps is a trustworthy oracle and that it is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle framework that recently went mainnet that solves (almost) every issue regarding trustless external data. API providers can sell their data to be utilized as inputs to smart contracts. Large collections of nodes then aggregate this data to maintain decentralization. There are several mechanisms in place to prevent gaming the network (staking collateral, penalties, reputation). The one issue it does not solve is if few sources for the data actually exist. In that scenario, it does not matter if 2 or 200 nodes are reporting the data, as the API itself may provide bad data to the nodes. However, even in this scenario, it would be trivial to assign blame to the API operator, as all nodes would collectively report bad data.

I would encourage you to check out their solution. I'm shilling, but Chainlink is a product that actually works.

[rapsey]

Unfortunately people are not 100% trustable, devices are not 100% secure and code is not 100% perfect.

If someone steals my credit number, I will likely not be on the hook for the money and will not lose anything.

If I make a mistake during banking, I can turn to people at the bank about it.

[fcolas]

> Unfortunately people are not 100% trustable, devices are not 100% secure and code is not 100% perfect.

- which is actually why you use crypto.

> If someone steals my credit number, I will likely not be on the hook for the money and will not lose anything.

- because the bank guarantees the safety of the payment means you use. The fact that you don't have to pay (as a private customer) doesn't mean that stolen credit card numbers and fraud transactions don't cost money. Someone has to pay somewhere in the chain. If the principal is recovered (the stolen money), then someone still has to pay for the overhead of recovering the money (for you). There're insurance and liability-shift mechanisms in place, but the money transfer would be much safer, faster, and cost-efficient if crypto was in place.

> If I make a mistake during banking, I can turn to people at the bank about it.

- So? It's not because your infrastructure uses crypto that you give up of customer support.

[CaptainZapp]

Well,

https://coiniq.com/cryptocurrency-exchange-hacks/

So much for the safety, speed and cost efficiency of crypto currencies.

[devicetray0]

I'm sorry, but this is very naive about security, and cryptography, and blockchains. Allow me to quote some experts:

[0] > "Crypto is fundamentally unsafe. People hear that crypto is strong and confuse that with safe. Crypto can indeed be very strong but it’s extremely unsafe" -- Nate Lawson (Root Labs)

[1] > "We don't even really know how to build secure systems out of secure parts, let alone out of parts and processes that we can't trust" - Bruce Schneier

[2] > "If you think cryptography is the answer to your problem, then you don't know what your problem is" - Dr. Peter G. Neumann

[rapsey]

Where a single mistake will irrevocably send my money into the void or to a hacker.

[Stevvo]

Thank you for TypeChain, it's great. I remember last year, I got Gitcoin to give you some free money to put up bounties.

One reason I'm not building on ethereum right now, is you have no contact with customers/users, because for 90% of the projects, there aren't any. In my other software projects, you are talking with customers every week, it is hugely helpful.

What MakerDAO are doing is awesome; DAI is my digital cash.

[krzkaczor]

> Thank you for TypeChain, it's great. I remember last year, I got Gitcoin to give you some free money to put up bounties.

Thanks!!! I really appreciate it. I am actually wrapping up a new version of TypeChain for my Devcon talk (yes, I got a speaking slot! ;) )

> One reason I'm not building on ethereum right now, is you have no contact with customers/users, because for 90% of the projects, there aren't any. In my other software projects, you are talking with customers every week, it is hugely helpful.

Yeah... this space is definately over-hyped sometimes...

Btw. are you still in crypto space? If yes, what other blockchains than ethereum do you work on?

[Stevvo]

Not in Crypto anymore, now making X-Plane addons. I may well return to Crypto in a couple of years, it should be a more exciting and mature space then.