bachback's comments

richard, do you think a DAO would be better for this than traditional non-for profit organisation? notably newlimit is a for-profit. given the aubrey de grey was ousted from sens in suspicious way after the capital injection, its time to rethink traditional legal entities for this kind of work?

The article doesn't say much about it in relation to a16z. There is a16zcrypto.com . I am very involved in this space, I am wondering how a16zcrypto is structured compared to traditional VC. For many crypto startups it probably doesn't make much sense to base in US.

Great post. In a recent interview this is exactly what Masa Son is talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDpdcWz_F_0 What I don't fully understand - isn't this covered by GAAP accounting in some way?

Lykke.com is applying for MTF license in the UK. no exchange so far is regulated as a market.

no, its nowhere near professional level. for that you'd need clean price data, which is a business in itself.

Oh, it is a great work of art, this financial engineering. Anyone who has put in money is down 90% already and will never see that price again. I'm not surprised at all - Cryptographers without knowledge (pun intended) of economics shouldn't be designing these systems. Zooko and everyone involved made a great fool of himself.

Launches are happening everyday. Best performing Altcoin is Ethereum. It went to 1,000,000,000$ this year very quickly. On average investing in Altcoins will likely lose money.

Great job - the currency is down 97-99% since launch 2 weeks ago (depending on what prices one takes from the first day of public trading). I've been following Altcoin launches since 2013, and this was the most ill-advised and corrupted so far.

true. I'm looking for something where I can potentially build the whole IaaS myself on baremetal at some point. Vultr looks great - thanks!

thanks, but I don't think hetzner is cloud based. most hosters still speak about servers as physical machines as in 2005.

Google is not as general as AWS and therefore has serious vendor lockin. Azure only recently has decided to support docker and is not rooted in opensource.

The big downside of AWS: to difficult to use for many. It seems to me a new entrant which combines easy of use, embraces opensource, would have a good chance in the market.

+ Rackspace. But like many these don't come from the cloud market and still think in terms of servers mostly.

1) Read the original blockchain article: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

2) Longest lecture Nick Szabo, inventor of blockchains, ever gave was in the money museum in Zurich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWuN2R2DC6c

3) Study the original source code (bitcoin version 0.0.1).

4) https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

Yes, absolutely agree. In LISP its obvious.

1. Every function is a tiny VM already. Every macro is a layer on top of a "compiler" to let you redesign a language. LISP gives much more power, precisely because every program is its own DSL, and all power of the language within that DSL is available. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

2. In SICP they show how to build anything from LISP constructs. The elegant thing is that LISP actually only needs very few machine primitives. https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-30.htm...

The most powerful constructs I've seen is a combination of these 2: Clojure/async is a macro which transforms any program to state machines. I think that kind of power gives you 20-30x advantage in business type applications. In fact I've seen C++ programmers spending a decade on discovering similar things by themselves. I strongly believe everyone should know at least a little about LISP.

ever heard of cryptocurrencies? no banks are neeeded, and identity on blockchain will actually happen.

How should ZeroMQ replace TCP? Internet runs on TCP/IP (last time I checked). In private networks many problems of public networks don't appear. I'm aware that organisations use it for their internal systems. As soon as one bridges to the outside world, one is going to hit with a problem.

ZeroMQ wants to be a neutral wrapper in any language but in the end its a C++ library enforcing C++ concepts. You can't map in a straightforward way process concepts from C++ to other languages (also the OS and VM sits in between that). In the end its just mapping programming logic to state machines. There are much better ways to do this and end up with something much more powerful (with first class meta-programming).

With ZeroMQ I had the worst possible results and experience. Honestly much of what it claims is bogus. It is highly optimized for certain cases and utterly useless for distributed systems. Try and find out in PUB/SUB what the IP addresses of the subscribers are. Not possible. In many cases you will be much better off learning TCP/IP yourself. In the mentioned case you simply iterate over the vector of subscribers - much more powerful and the sane default. It seems at some point people confused internal networking solutions with the Internet.

SQL is horrible for many use-cases. have a look at http://datomic.com

other approach is issued ColoredCoin by banks - Lykke.com does this. then you get pricing of assets. fiat money are already "settlement coins", the question is about liquidity, risk and openness.

Great question. An optimal strategy doesn't exist, because it is so circumstantial. The employee and founder (the seller) need a good idea about the price and probability of success. Making a buy/sell decision either way certainly effects outcomes, independent of the ultimate success. It really depends how the seller values the stock, and how that differs from the buyers valuation. Knowing a lot about (startup) stock valuation will certainly help. Probably its more political than anything, because the price of a 100M$ company can fluctuate wildly, and so being in similar situations should help as well. I don't know much about Silicon Valley, but there you have a lot of investor driven companies (people raising money to push the value, to raise more money, etc. without a real business seems much more common). The 10B$ outcome is exceedingly rare, so the employee should think really hard about the value (see Moskovitz talk about it here at 36:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI)

Usually 1M$ will be much more valuable when going from 0 then the next 1M$. In the example it seems irrational not to sell for 1M$, if the employee doesn't have already a lot of money. But usually people are not given the choice and need a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition). If one assumes that shares could be liquid from day 1 the dynamic changes. Most likely options will have vesting.

The real issue here however, in most cases, is that there is no liquid market until very later stages. So the company might be worth 100M$ in its entirety to sell, but employees can't sell options. Also simple options might actually not be the best instrument, but it is too costly to customly define an instrument for every employee. Say an employee could be an option which maximizes wealth for 0-1M$ (1%). If the total value hits 100M$ the other owners could buy out those options cheaply, and both sides win. Having only one strike price makes the potential value curve extremely steep, making startup shares more like lottery tickets.

To consider an extreme case - Google. Page almost sold Google for 1.6M$ in 1997 Luckily he didn't. In many cases it really depends on the belief of the founders/employees/investors. For employees it seems that their problem is more that they can't sell earlier than the liquidity event, which is due to the fact that IPO's are so expensive.

With Crypto-finance there will be the potential to create a market for stock at almost no cost, which will change the game, because it allows to float stock from the earliest stages when the most wealth is created. It will be much more common for employees to exit early and for the wealth to be more widely distributed. Getting to 10-100M$ is magnitudes of order more common than the 1B$+ exits.