[HN Gopher] Announcing a16z crypto research
___________________________________________________________________
Announcing a16z crypto research
Author : picture
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-04-21 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (a16z.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (a16z.com)
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Science-washing a gigantic pump and dump.
| labrador wrote:
| The company I worked for in 2000 got hooked up with Enron and the
| VP of Engineering, a man of middling talent, became obsessed with
| taking this windfall from Enron and making his mark in the world.
| He began dreaming of all kinds of big projects with the cash,
| except he didn't involve me or some of the engineers because he
| knew we would shoot down his ideas. He wanted to be a big player
| in Web1. He grabbed some mediocre engineers who he could bedazzle
| to implement his big designs. I got bored with nothing to do and
| quit. Right after I left it all came crashing down. Web2 rose
| from the ashes and it was good. I'm feeling the same vibes now,
| so I'll wait for Web4.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/updates/enron-scandal-summary/
| asasidh wrote:
| "research" is a way to fund a PR machine to legitimize the scams
| they fund in the first place.
| tzumby wrote:
| It's great to see respected cryptographers like Dan Boneh behind
| stuff like this.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| And Joseph Bonneau! Hard hitting team of quality math wizards
| hsavit1 wrote:
| I have lost respect for anyone involved with a16z at this point
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| This is an absolutely killer team. Congrats to a16z.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I thought wasting the smartest brains on adtech was bad, but it
| seems like we're at the point of capital chasing _any_ old fad
| now.
| boringg wrote:
| Let me add my 2 cents. I thought wasting some of our smarter
| brains (smartest didn't fall for the bait) on ad tech and
| business school (to consulting sweatshops and now product
| managers) was bad but it seems like we're at the point of
| capital chasing _any_ old fad now.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Fair enough!
| jdrc wrote:
| What kind of research is needed in cryptochains?
| sillyinseattle wrote:
| Very wide range. On the cryptography side: new signature
| schemes, cryptographic proof systems. Research on voting
| systems, economic incentive design, coordination and trust
| problems with value transfers (bridges) across different
| chains, VM + compiler design for smart contract execution
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| all things crypto has been pretending to work on for more
| than a decade while riding the work of an individual research
| paper from the 1970s which explained, at the end of the
| paper, why this should never be used for money
|
| y'all some junior koch brothers
| shafyy wrote:
| None. They are noticing the NFT hype starting to die down, and
| now need to keep the ferris wheel running with something.
| Crypto is only marketing, there is no actual value created.
| cato23 wrote:
| https://cryptorating.eu/whitepapers/Aave/aave-v2-whitepaper..
| ..
|
| Decentralized lending markets
| [deleted]
| jp42 wrote:
| I wish you go through Foundation of Blockchain lecture series
| by Tim Roughgarden and also understand what cryptography is.
| I bet you will change you mind on - there is no math in
| crypto.
| qorrect wrote:
| He did not say anything about cryptography.
| Daishiman wrote:
| So how has that mapped into actually useful projects?
| trzy wrote:
| Research on finding a legitimate use case ;)
| cinntaile wrote:
| To get an idea you can search for blockchain on Google Scholar.
| There is plenty to be done. Some naive questions could be...
| How to scale them, how to increase privacy, what are the right
| incentive structures, what happens if you change those
| structures, how can you reduce the size of the chain while
| still keeping the chain secure, what kind of attacks are
| possible and how do you mitigate or prevent them and so on.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why doesn't anyone make a _legal_ application or service that
| exclusively uses crypto?
| bspear wrote:
| Another day, another A16Z announcement
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I'd be better if more resources, attention and research were
| dedicated to decentralization technologies like ActivityPub, Tim
| Berners-Lee's Solid (trying to rescue some ideas of the Semantic
| Web), or even their eldritch cousin Urbit. because all of those
| have the benefit of not trying to ram random things through a
| global state machine with the computational capacity of a
| microwave so people can make billions of dollars selling
| DeviantArt pictures of monkeys.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| This is the funniest and most succinct definition of crypto
| things I've seen. Definitely going to borrow that analogy.
|
| If we continue the analogy, crypto fans usually respond by
| asserting that the problem will be solved any day now by making
| the platter spin faster and having 30 new defrost modes, but at
| the end of the day, it's still just a souped up microwave.
| exdsq wrote:
| I can't wait for another series of fruitful discussions HN has on
| front-page crypto articles! It's great how people discuss the
| article itself and not pre-conceived prejudices for/against this
| topic in general.
| version_five wrote:
| This is approaching the end game of what happens when "deep tech"
| or "business translator" types that have no actual technical
| education but "get it" because they understand a parable or
| analogy about something get too much away.
|
| It's almost like a vertical integration to be able to control the
| whole value chain of BS instead of having to find legit sources
| to cite. Somehow this has shades of Enron or Theranos, where a
| non-specialist's misconception of an idea results in a gigantic
| scam.
|
| In some ways, at least those people are mostly just genuinely
| ignorant. The folks like the faculty they have lined up
| presumably know better, but are still going along with it.
| firloop wrote:
| Clearly a response to Paradigm funding much of the best crypto
| research. Hoping that, like Paradigm's efforts, this actually
| leads to meaningful new research and public goods.
| fuddle wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the work Paradigm is doing. Foundry is a great
| project: https://book.getfoundry.sh/ It makes sense for them to
| create these open source tools if it can improve the
| development productivity of their portfolio companies.
| Kalanos wrote:
| Please work with David Recordon to make anonymous blockchain-
| enabled voting happen.
|
| It puts the tamperproof feature to work, and there are some
| measures in place for voting that help ensure the data being
| placed on the blockchain is actually authentic.
|
| Maybe the press too
|
| EDIT: would love to hear opposing downvoting views. our votes are
| already digital and tamperable
| nullc wrote:
| > EDIT: would love to hear opposing downvoting views. our votes
| are already digital and tamperable
|
| So instead of making them less tamperable you instead want to
| make it seamless to buy and sell votes as well as less private?
|
| Blockchains solve precisely _zero_ of the hard problems in
| voting, and instead add tons of problems.
|
| Cryptography for voting? Absolutely-- sure. There is plenty
| that cryptography has to offer, but not the blockchain part.
| Bitcoin is useful, but blockchain voting is a receipt for
| corruption.
| Kalanos wrote:
| what problems would it add? you haven't actually made a point
| yet.
|
| the blockchain would provide a tamper-proof record of each
| vote. that is an improvement.
|
| i don't understand what benefits hashing would add.
| ekr____ wrote:
| Do you mean on HN or in real elections? In real elections, the
| situation is actually quite complicated depending on where you
| live. Specifically:
|
| - Many people vote on paper with hand counting, which is of
| course not digital. - Many people vote on paper with machine
| counting, which is straightforwardly auditable. - Many people
| vote on Direct Recording Electronic (touchscreen) machines.
| Some of these have paper trails which can be audited and some
| do not.
|
| Some background here on conventional voting systems:
| https://educatedguesswork.org/tags/voting/
|
| There has been quite a bit of work on cryptographic voting, but
| the blockchain feature doesn't really help that much, because
| the votes are signed and there is a public record of who voted
| and who did not. The complicated piece is ensuring the votes
| haven't been tampered with while keeping them secret, but
| again, the blockchain doesn't help here. The deployment
| problems around cryptographic voting are largely about endpoint
| security and user comprehension of what's happening.
| Kalanos wrote:
| "vote on paper with hand counting" how is the sum
| communicated and stored?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| By phone and on paper, for example. Depending on which
| country you are in, these systems are very robust and
| difficult to tamper, as granular results are published and
| counting is decentralized. And here's the kicker: where I
| live, people can get pretty randomly drafted into counting
| and support duty for election day, i.e., not easy to insert
| enough malicious actors into those emptying the boxes,
| counting the ballots etc.
| [deleted]
| thesausageking wrote:
| a16z have pumped and dumped dozens of crypto projects, often with
| retail investors getting screwed over. They the main investors
| behind the "Internet Computer" (ICP) project which was dumped on
| retail at $450 and then crashed to $30 weeks later and never
| recovered. a16z partner Chris Dixon promoted it to retail
| investors, saying "The Internet Computer is on track to become a
| critical piece of the future technology stack. This is
| groundbreaking."
|
| https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/internet-computer
|
| Any crypto "research" group they're doing is to whitewash all of
| the shady projects they're profiting from.
| cagr wrote:
| It's Chris Dixon's job to pump and dump bags on retail
| investors. I've muted his account on Twitter.
| memish wrote:
| Is there evidence they dumped their share?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| yes. tons. go look.
| Comevius wrote:
| "social networks that empower artists and creators (via NFTs)"
|
| That's totally what happened. We are in a renaissance of
| artistry, of artists creating meaningful art out of conviction,
| and making a living.
|
| "innovation in the space is only accelerating"
|
| They mispelled infinite exploitation of people who are greedy or
| desperate to believe in something. A common mistake. Pushing
| ticking timebombs on people as investment and fanning the hype
| machine, if not outright manipulating the markets can be called
| innovation, but innovation should involve societal gain too.
|
| Let me share an example of actual innovation. Imagine if you will
| a database technology that allows encrypted data to be searched
| and the server to be untrusted, not having the ability to
| compromise the data regardless of how curious or malicious the
| server is. This is a very complicated problem, but it would allow
| for companies with services like Facebook to not have access to
| your data, unless you shared it, while still being able to
| operate the service. You would still have to trust third parties
| or the government to store your encryption keys, and perhaps to
| ensure the freshness of your data, there is no such thing as zero
| trust, but we wouldn't have to trust as many parties. We could
| create a trust infrastructure every new service can benefit from.
|
| This kind of technology would compromise the business model of
| many companies, but isn't it the goal of Web 3.0 to give ordinary
| people more control over their lives, their data? I suspect the
| actual goal of it is to create a use for cryptocurrencies, or
| maybe find another avenue for growth and exploitation. Don't get
| me wrong, make as much money as you can, but do something useful.
| Do something people actually want or need. Don't just wantonly
| and reclessly exploit them. Create some damn value, something
| your mama would be proud of.
| TimPC wrote:
| Your database technology is interesting but has the problem
| that there is a legitimate use case for a company having access
| to at least some of the data on its servers. It is impossible
| to optimize a service without transparency into what it is
| providing and which of those results are useful. Companies
| spend a good deal of time and effort, arguably even over-
| optimizing for this, but many applications which don't do it at
| all are crap. Any product based on this technology lacks the
| data to do any form of recommendations and most services these
| days consider recommendations an essential component.
| Comevius wrote:
| The point is that people would have the option to opt-out of
| or opt-in to privacy, when that makes sense. Not every
| company would offer those options, but no company can today,
| except for cloud storage where client-side encryption can be
| considered practically secure in many, but not all cases. For
| a database client-side encryption unfortunately cannot
| provide adequate protection.
| TimPC wrote:
| Fair but the parent comment referenced Facebook as an
| example and I think it's fair to say Facebook is rather
| dependant on content recommendation to the point where they
| wouldn't use the technology at all.
| api wrote:
| > It is impossible to optimize a service without transparency
| into what it is providing and which of those results are
| useful.
|
| People created excellent UIs in the "shrink wrap" software
| era before people even had network connections. In fact, many
| would argue that some of these UIs were simpler and cleaner
| and overall better.
|
| Oh wait... if by optimize a service you mean optimize it for
| _engagement_ (addiction, triggering, controversy) then I
| agree.
| TimPC wrote:
| Excellent UIs for shrink wrap software. I think we can
| agree that the UI for Netflix or YouTube depends on content
| recommendation in ways that shrink wrap software doesn't.
| One person's engagement (addiction, triggering,
| controversy) is another person's usability. If YouTube is
| going to recommend entirely Fox News videos to an
| apolitical user it's not going to provide a good interface.
| Even search is hard to do properly without data. How is
| YouTube useful if it can't do recommendations and you can't
| search it?
| Comevius wrote:
| Youtube or Netflix content that's publicly shared would
| not have privacy protections aside from encryption in
| transit. The same goes for Facebook content that's
| publicly shared.
|
| But running a service like Youtube that keeps Google in
| the dark about what you are watching is not possible.
| It's not even that content creators would have to upload
| their content padded and encrypted, and privately share
| the content with their audiences, but the entire audience
| would need to privately aquire the content each time. A
| statistically or computationally secure solution like
| read-only ORAM is out of question at that scale, well any
| scale that's larger than a few gigabytes. Anything with a
| constant overhead would only amount to I downloaded five
| videos, guess what video did I end up watching? And
| Google would have a one in five chance to tell, if the
| requests are random, but over time they could still piece
| you together since your privacy equals to watching five
| videos at a time, revisiting videos, visiting popular
| ones, visiting certain ones at a certain time in a
| certain order. The client could throw in a few fake
| requests, but such constant effort would still be
| defeated.
| api wrote:
| > I think we can agree that the UI for Netflix or YouTube
| depends on content recommendation in ways that shrink
| wrap software doesn't.
|
| I can imagine a lot of interfaces for sites like that
| which do not require personalized feedback at all. In
| fact, a rich search feature allowing me to say what I
| want to find would usually be preferable to an opaque
| recommendation engine designed to steer me toward content
| the site wants me to visit.
| TimPC wrote:
| Sure, but how do you build a rich search feature if you
| are unable to extract features from the private content?
| api wrote:
| The idea the OP put forward is a database that allows
| "blind" searches. So I could, for example, search for
| articles between dates X and Y without revealing X or Y
| or the content or actual date of any article. The results
| of the search would be encrypted.
|
| There is disagreement in the cryptography community about
| the extent to which this is actually possible. I've seen
| a few proofs that the obvious "magic" version of this
| where you can directly but blindly search is impossible
| because you could use search criteria to reconstruct the
| content, but that only rules out the most obvious
| implementation strategies. There's a lot of research
| going on with this kind of thing in the cryptographic
| community that involves leveraging zero knowledge proofs,
| homomorphic encryption, and so on. Nothing practical
| enough to make anything like a blind SQL database though.
|
| In any case I was arguing against the claim that this
| would preclude good UI/UX design if it were in fact
| possible.
| TimPC wrote:
| Most search in modern projects isn't things like date
| ranges though it's often things like machine learnt
| mappings that identify similarity scores with words.
| Failing that it's some sort of ML to learn tags and
| keyword matching on those tags.
|
| When I search YouTube I'm seldom looking for all videos
| made on August 29th. I might instead be looking for
| videos of a black cat. Or videos containing music with
| certain lyrics that I search for. This is what I thought
| you meant by rich search. I contend it's unlikely you can
| design a privacy respecting service that can also extract
| the features necessary to train a search model.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Imagine if you will a database technology that allows
| encrypted data to be searched and the server to be untrusted,
| not having the ability to compromise the data regardless of how
| curious or malicious the server is. This is a very complicated
| problem, but it would allow for companies with services like
| Facebook to not have access to your data, unless you shared it,
| while still being able to operate the service._
|
| dualitytech.com | cosmian.com | inpher.io | enveil.com |
| apheris.com | capeprivacy.com
|
| I was hoping a16z had invested in one of these companies
| working on privacy-enhancing technologies (PET)... but no. May
| be, the tech is not quite there yet, or a16z doesn't yet have
| an "investment thesis" for it.
|
| > _This kind of technology would compromise the business model
| of many companies, but isn 't it the goal of Web 3.0 to give
| ordinary people more control over their lives, their data?_
|
| A counter point to this is web3 institutions like the Algorand
| Foundation which employ some of the best cryptographers and
| security researchers who have gone on to make non-trivial
| contributions in PET and MPC (multi-party computation) fields.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I think there is perhaps a bit of irony in that your example of
| "database technology that allows encrypted data to be searched
| and the server to be untrusted" has already, to some degree,
| been invented in several competing and production strength
| crypto implementations: ZCash (Equihash) and Monero
| (RandomX/CryptoNight).
|
| I am stretching the truth a little bit here and it's more like
| "allows encrypted data/messages to be bidirectionally sent and
| exchanged two parties while the server is untrusted" because
| neither of these protocols allow for search. However, they /do/
| allow for fully anonymous transactions + data storage, upon
| which you could build the rest of your social networks on top
| of.
|
| So IMO the actual pace of technological innovation in crypto is
| quite strong. I'm not such a big fan of the NFT space, but DeFi
| and the truly anonymous coins are extremely interesting to me.
| Comevius wrote:
| The closest technology we have are verifiable databases,
| usually immutable ones. They can detect the server modifying
| the data, either with a Merkle or vector commitment tree,
| which blockchain technology also relies on.
|
| The difference is that those databases are much more
| efficient than blockchain technologies. The whole proof of
| work (voting power depends on computational effort) song and
| dance is unnecessary for a database. Even for a distributed
| database you only need a Byzantine agreement such as Paxos,
| which can only tolerate a certain number of faulty or
| malicious nodes. This would not work for cryptocurrencies,
| they need to tolerate arbitary number of such nodes (also
| known as a Sybil attack) to avoid the double spending
| problem. Cryptocurrency transactions are not I-confluent
| (invariant confluent), but certain database transactions are
| and they don't require consensus at all, so there are
| specialized databases that can tolerate arbitrary number of
| faulty or malicious nodes without Sybil countermeasures.
|
| The problem with crypto is that a solution to a specific
| problem (eliminating the double spending problem trustlessly)
| can't be applied to every problem. There are trade-offs
| involved. Solving the double spending problem will let you
| have cryptocurrencies, but will lock you out of efficiently
| solving a lot of other problems.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > I am stretching the truth a little bit here
|
| long past its breaking point
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| The database problem the GP describes is actively being
| worked on and is extremely difficult. There's Etebase, which
| is a product that's attempting to provide some of what they
| hope for, but without very modern (and usually very slow)
| encryption techniques it's not workable for most use cases.
| For example, on Etebase it's impossible to return rows in
| order from lowest to highest without using complicated hacks
| involving client-side indices. (In general, the field of
| doing operations on encrypted data is called homomorphic
| encryption.)
|
| ZK-tech, while super cool, is not super related IMO, but it
| is seem strange that the GP doesn't seem to consider it a
| worthwhile side effect of cryptocurrency hype.
| kmangutov wrote:
| > "social networks that empower artists and creators (via
| NFTs)"
|
| > That's totally what happened. We are in a renaissance of
| artistry, of artists creating meaningful art out of conviction,
| and making a living.
|
| From the home page of https://www.sound.xyz/, "$2,688,130.20
| Earned by artists from fans using Sound Records"
|
| You can debate whether PayPal or cash would be more efficient
| than using Ethereum here, but this is a new channel for artists
| to focus on the art and make a living.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| It's really weird how you're holding up 2.3 million paid out
| to 7,000 artists over a year and a half as if it's somehow
| empowering artists or creators
|
| That's $16 a person a month. That isn't even a movie ticket
| in most cities.
|
| .
|
| > You can debate whether PayPal or cash would be more
| efficient than using Ethereum here
|
| No you can't. There are individual sales larger than this on
| PayPal and cash.
|
| This is just a crypto bro trying to sound deep by throwing
| out numbers and not really thinking about if they're any good
|
| .
|
| > but this is a new channel for artists to focus on the art
| and make a living.
|
| No it absolutely is not
|
| It's not even a compact disc monthly
|
| Please do the math first next time
| Comevius wrote:
| My feeling is that this does something to the discoverability
| problem, to music patronage that's completely superfluous and
| doesn't serve the artists or their audience. It's being
| pushed by NFT enthusiasts and a16z, but yet to gain
| mainstream appeal.
|
| I think this would be much more successful without NFTs,
| cryptocurrencies and all that. It would make it possible for
| ordinary people to understand the service better, especially
| when it comes to payment. The involvement of cryptocurrencies
| is simply a barrier. Scarcity isn't the best incentive
| either, it's an extrinsic motivation associated with logic
| and ownership, whereas for music you want an intrinsic
| motivation associated with self-expression, creativity and
| social aspects. These NFT platforms are suprisingly bad at
| presenting a social influence incentive, you would think it
| would be their bread and butter. Basically you want that and
| empowerment, with a bit of epic meaning mixed in. You want a
| creative playground of artists and their audience both
| feeling that they have an impact. None of this scarcity crap,
| instant turn off, it's completely on the other side of the
| spectrum. The point of music and any creative endevour is not
| the scarcity of the end product, it's sharing it. It's
| connection. There is no point in ownership. That's not the
| kind of connection people trully want, it's bragging rights
| at best.
| mbesto wrote:
| Which is an absolute drop in the hat when you compare it to
| people selling computer generated monkeys and those
| arbitraging crypto.
|
| Look, maybe the art renaissance is coming soon(tm) but it
| sure as hell is not here now, especially relative to the
| financial one.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >That's totally what happened. We are in a renaissance of
| artistry, of artists creating meaningful art out of conviction,
| and making a living.
|
| This is irony right? Because a guy made some money selling ape
| drawings there's now a renaissance?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I'm pretty certain that paragraph is meant to be read with a
| heavy serving of sarcasm.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > This is irony right?
|
| you needed to ask?
| aww_dang wrote:
| >Don't get me wrong, make as much money as you can, but do
| something useful. Do something people actually want or need.
| Don't just wantonly and reclessly exploit them. Create some
| damn value, something your mama would be proud of.
|
| We're at a place in some circles where cryptocurrency projects
| and any _subjective_ _value_ they may provide is preemptively
| dismissed with prejudice. Ultimately the customer decides what
| he values. As tech types it is too easy to sit back and claim,
| "Oh these consumers don't know what they want". Perhaps that is
| true. Perhaps what we find useful or interesting isn't what
| interests consumers. If we really know what will satisfy them,
| then we should provide it.
|
| Knee-jerk condemnations are a bit easier.
| Comevius wrote:
| I'm certainly open for suprises.
|
| There may be subjective value, but there is also fraud and
| exploitation. Calling it out is not wrong. I would be very
| interested in a16z honestly writing about the actual problems
| in this industry, how are they combatting them, but hype is
| the only language they know. They pretend that NFTs or games
| with token economies are utopias, because an utopia is easy
| to sell. They are very far from an utopia, in fact a lot of
| nasty things are going on with them.
| jancsika wrote:
| So why is the current definition of "cryptocurrency" so
| narrow? It seems to imply either a) blockchain, or b) some
| decentralized alternative to blockchain that tries to fill in
| the basic features of blockchain and one day scale it.
|
| But there must be dozens of other approaches to doing
| cryptocurrencies in a sane and safe manner. E.g., in all this
| crazy buzz, has _anyone_ in this space tried to do an updated
| version of digicash? That was a digital payment system
| created by one of the grandfathers of modern crypto. I 've
| never heard a counterargument to its fundamentals-- unlike
| Bitcoin, you got your cashlike properties of anonymity wrt
| the issuing back through the use of blinded signatures. And
| I'm pretty sure it could also scale much better than
| blockchain-based stuff. It just pre-dated ecommerce so it
| didn't have a market.
|
| There must be dozens of other non-blockchain approaches that
| also route around all the scaling problems of trying to do a
| blockchain or decentralized approach.
|
| I mean, even in the realm of anonymous messaging researchers
| like Len Sassman came up with remailers that could make use
| of some number of centralized servers without relying on them
| to play nice for the anonymity properties. Hell, Moxie even
| went full centralized and still gets what I think a lot of
| commenters on HN would have to admit are decent privacy
| properties. Or, at least better privacy options than you'd
| get with doing transactions through Bitcoin.
|
| Are there equivalent non-blockchain, non-decentralization-
| zealotry cryptocurrency experiments going on right now in
| this same space? If so, I'd love to know about them.
|
| If not, then it sure does look like a bunch of people either
| copy/pasted Bitcoin's hashcash hack or put an experimental
| stop-gap in there to surf atop this ocean of cash that seems
| to only chase this incredibly small niche.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Cryptocurrency projects have squandered a decade of good
| faith with no useful product.
|
| They've done a great deal of harm in that period, so I can't
| see even the current level of mild negative sentiment as
| sustainable.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Storj is pretty useful. But, it's definitely an exception
| not the norm.
| [deleted]
| RC_ITR wrote:
| And what's amazing is that the coin has a market cap of
| $450m (probably still expensive if comped to someone like
| Dropbox).
|
| If something with that utility is so lowly valued, then
| imagine the true intrinsic value of BTC!
| Comevius wrote:
| Storj is genuinely useful. It is however regular cloud
| storage, except the storage nodes that must be trusted
| will survive the company somehow. However the
| authenticated client-side encryption will protect your
| data, so the safety claim checks out, not sure about
| liveness.
|
| Slapping a decentralized sticker on and having a
| cryptocurrency apparently worked out for them. This is
| how you successfully differentiate a product.
| api wrote:
| There's an easy way to win this argument. Show me where I can
| easily find good cryptocurrency stuff that is not:
|
| (1) Gambling (including "investing" in speculative non-
| corporeal assets)
|
| (2) Scams (this includes misattributed art)
|
| (3) Obvious mediocre junk created to cash in on a fad
|
| I'm sure you can dig and find a couple of examples. The
| problem is that you have to dig. BBSes, the Internet, and the
| WWW protocol were instantly useful. One did not have to dig
| at all to find dozens to hundreds of legitimate use cases. We
| are in year 14 of cryptocurrency and you have to dig to find
| anything that is not a scam or crap.
|
| For example here is the flagship of the NFT craze:
|
| https://opensea.io/rankings
|
| It speaks for itself.
| skywhopper wrote:
| "What makes [blockchains] unique, however, is that they allow
| developers to write code that makes strong commitments about how
| that code will behave in the future. It is that property that
| makes it possible for Bitcoin to guarantee that there will only
| ever be 21 million bitcoins."
|
| This is either a really bad misunderstanding of how Bitcoin works
| or it's just a blatant lie. The parameters of the Bitcoin mining
| algorithm can be adjusted if the mining community chooses to.
| There is nothing about the _technology_ that mandates "how that
| code will behave in the future".
| rudiger wrote:
| The mining community cannot change how Bitcoin works. Even if
| 100% of miners were to change their validation logic to accept
| more than 21 million bitcoins, none of the nodes running the
| Bitcoin software will accept the change. Bitcoin is governed by
| the nodes running the software, not by the source code.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You might say that the definition of and value of bitcoins
| are determined only by collective understanding, governed by
| the participants in the system, and that it is backed by
| faith in that collective governance, and will fall apart if
| that faith falters, or if the collective illusion underlying
| bitcoin collapses. Is that starting to sound like another
| currency you've heard about?
| boringg wrote:
| So is this a16z realizing that they made a huge bet on crypto and
| it isn't playing out like they wanted it to?
|
| Has anyone else noticed that Andreessen on twitter has really
| gone a different direction? I thought his commentary was normally
| pretty buttoned up and interesting but it seems almost strictly
| inflammatory these days. Maybe he was like this all along and I
| never noticed. Still like hearing him talk though - even if I
| don't agree with everything he says.
| sillyinseattle wrote:
| Outstanding researchers and educators! But a "founding research
| team"? Are they leaving their day jobs for this? Don't think so.
| clpm4j wrote:
| They're cashing in. I'm sure they're both well paid by Stanford
| and Columbia, but they have the opportunity to makes 10s or
| 100s of millions of dollars through a16z.
| datalopers wrote:
| Tim Roughgarden is an excellent choice. His materials and
| lectures focus on the actual math, science, and utility of
| cryptocurrencies with none of the bullshit hype.
| Liron wrote:
| IMO they authentically but wrongly think there's something of
| value to research, i.e. they drink their own kool-aid. Which
| means they'll fail to pull their money out at the peak of the
| bubble, undoing their impressive returns to date.
| rvz wrote:
| > Which means they'll fail to pull their money out at the peak
| of the bubble, undoing their impressive returns to date.
|
| Do you have any concrete evidence to support the claim, that
| they (a16z) have failed to pulled out and are in a significant
| loss on their crypto investments?
|
| Otherwise this is yet another baseless and unfounded assumption
| which can be simply dismissed entirely.
| Liron wrote:
| Huh? They've already pulled money out and banked a historic
| return for their fund. In fact one of their partners whose
| investment thesis is based on publicly-documented logically
| flimsy claims [0] was #1 on this year's Midas List because he
| made $3B for his LPs.
|
| My point is that since they're drinking their own kool-aid,
| they're not securing the bag / leaving the poker table right
| now, a time I believe is close to peak crypto bubble
| (although the bubble could also plausibly last another 5
| years and inflate another 5x). They're Leeroy Jenkinsing
| another $3.5B right now [1] which I think they're at high
| risk of losing and tanking the IRR of the combined funds.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664995
|
| [1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/20/andreessen-
| horo...
| boringg wrote:
| Interesting take. I agree I think they are authentic in their
| pursuit. Always make me ever so slightly second guess if there
| is value they see that the majority of us don't.
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