[KnuthIsGod]

Sounds like a camouflaged IQ test for the founders...

Or perhaps Y Combinator is great at funding startups, but incredibly bad with financial decision making.

In which case it is an IQ test for Y Combinator, which they have failed.

[j2kun]

As with all things cryptocurrency, the goal is to bypass financial regulations and external scrutiny.

[groundzeros2015]

By putting it on a realtime auditable database available to the public?

[AmbroseBierce]

A small amount of plausible deniability while they can move to pocket someone in congress and elsewhere to make it fully legal.

[groundzeros2015]

Now it’s a congressional conspiracy?

[rchaud]

How do you propose auditing an anonymous alphanumeric wallet address?

[groundzeros2015]

Too many trivial ways to list. Google can fine some for you.

[throwaway290]

Tumblers + monero are legal now so yes Google finds all, just not what you suggest;)

[rglover]

"Ask for forgiveness, not permission."

[transitorykris]

This isn't meant to be cynical. But, two of YC's success stories, Stripe and Coinbase, has a stable coin product.

[wmf]

Stablecoins have their uses. I'm not saying never touch crypto. But the question is what is the point of stablecoins in VC funding specifically? People don't seem to have good answers.

[rtpg]

YC companies are constantly spending the money they get from YC right? Why get money, then put it in some stablecoin, only to then immediately cash out on salaries or whatever?

How does that make any sense to the company? Who's out here wanting their salary in stablecoin? And who among those want that and can't receive dollars and then turn them into stablecoin?

There's a sliver of talent that won't have access to the US banking system, but I can't imagine that making it worth putting up with risk + txn costs of stablecoins for the whole company.

[theyregr8]

This only makes sense to YC, to try and prop up interest in digital assets they heavily inveterate in.

The majority of humans are losing interest in digital ephemera South Park-WoW guys are desperate sell them on, otherwise South Park-WoW guy might have to work to live not just shill hallucinations like a priest.

[chasebank]

Two of the fastest growing YC companies are crypto companies built on solana, Kalshi and Axiom. I'm pretty sure Axiom was the fastest to $100m in revenue, ever.

[mplewis]

Making money doesn't make your thing not a scam.

[TacticalCoder]

One of the biggest YC success story is Coinbase. It has literally got "coin" in its name.

It also trades under the ticker "COIN": https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COIN/

And after a serious beating it's still value at $48 billion.

Put it another way: of all the companies YC funded, both those who succeeded and the countless who failed, only two companies, AirBnB and Doordash, are valued more than Coinbase.

I don't think YC hates cryptocurrencies as much as the typical commenter on HN.

[PlatoIsADisease]

If you rejected economic orthodoxy and bought Bitcoin/Gold over the last.... decade or so... you won over the economic orthodox believers.

I don't really care about short term gold gambling with ~1-2 year market spans or altcoins if you want to disagree.

The biggest threat to bitcoin and gold is something breaking their scarcity. Gold, nuclear chemistry. Bitcoin... quantum computing or something(ignoring rollback).

[IsTom]

Bitcoin is completely removed from fundamentals and if there's a major sentiment shift it will be race to the bottom to sell first or lose more money.