Where's the Infrastructure Fund? The Education Fund? I thought a16z was all about "It's Time to Build" now.
<a href="https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/" rel="nofollow">https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/</a><p>I guess even they couldn't convince themselves to <i>want</i> to build things. I suppose that hollow rhetoric was for everyone else and not them?
do we know anything about the performance of Crypto Fund I so far? i'm really curious what kind of GP throws good money after bad on out-of-favor stuff like this. not that it can't work, its just unusual.<p>one whole thesis here is "Modern Store of Value". is Crypto Fund II just gonna put 25% in bitcoin?<p>"New Ways for Creators to Monetize". i feel this is the weakest thesis of the lot. i dont see how decentralization helps here.<p>alright im done being crabby hn commenter. good luck to cdixon and katie haun, and the people actually trying to invent the future.
Can we drop the whole "blockchain" shtick and just start calling this space "crypto"? Bitcoin combined a cryptographic protocol with an incentive structure to produce something incredible: digital cash that can be held and transacted without a central authority. The innovation was in the combination of protocol components, not the data structure that resulted ("the blockchain").<p>The problem that we're actually trying to solve with all of this is how to provide a root of trust. Blockchains are a way to do that, but I've yet to see a compelling use case beyond digital cash. Attempts to implement any transaction more complicated than cash settlement on a blockchain will inevitably run into the fundamental problem: transactions are contracts, and contracts will always require a legal framework and judicial system to mediate. You simply can't remove that requirement and all of the "inefficiency" that comes along with it.
Online payment fees come from fraud, chargebacks, and credit card points/benefits.<p>I don’t see how crypto solves the fraud problem. Sure there will be lower fees, but higher risk of fraud.
>Transferring actual value quickly and cheaply without a third party, in much the same way we currently transfer data like emails or photos,<p>Do we actually do this that often, though? Email and photo sharing are generally dependent upon third parties, and generally extremely centralized and powerful ones, such as Google or Facebook or Twitter. Very little Internet communication goes directly from one person to another.
It seems to me like 99% of the aims in this document could be achieved by a competent and efficient non-profit bank that offers a good API. Let's Encrypt is a similar example of how a cheap and effective competitor can really improve things in a space fraught with inefficiency.<p>Why don't we create a Let's Encrypt for banking rather than fiddle around with frankly unnecessary technology?
You have to appreciate the audacity of some of the portfolio companies in Fund I for getting away hilariously bad business models. They literally fleeced Chris Dixon into funding Pied Piper (dfinity.org) and crypto kittens and he actually bought it. There's definitely some massive sunk cost effect going on with this new fund on a scale we haven't seen before. Anderssen used to be the smart money in VC and now they're doing this fund.
I wonder why the fund is themed after a technical solution, and not industry or anything else. It's not like you see container funds or functional programming funds.
Cryptocurrency was invented to remove middlemen. Everyday I hear about another company trying to hold your keys for you. Exchanges are the new banks. DeFi helps get rid of them. Now if only you could buy crypto from your neighbor, we truly could get the efficiencies of fast and nearly free, instant payment. Exchanges benefit from the accidental regulatory capture of security theater making it so you can't sell crypto to others out of fear. Perhaps I'm biased as a cryptocurrency founder.
If only there was a way to directly pitch A16z without the connections.<p>Some of us crazy people are consumed by Web3 ideas so much that we spend years thinking about it full-time aren't necessarily the most social or well-connected people.<p>Creating an MVP for a vertically-integrated company that's carefully designed to rip the guts out of the entire existing tech monopoly is extremely difficult at best. Applying with large-scale ideas like this to YC as a solo founder without an overachieving background offers an almost infinitesimal probability of success.<p>Likewise, it'd be cool to see pre-seed funding from these types of initiatives. I'd love to spend another year or two just refining the notes generated by tens of thousands of hours of thought into a cohesive design document. It's so much content I'm having to create a custom spatial interface to map and organize it all into a kind of living design doc.<p>I suppose the point is that the deep thought required to envision things like this is at odds with creating a personal brand or playing the traditional traction-based startup game. Some of us are just out there in left field, alone. We want to bring incredible amounts of value to the table, but it's very difficult to do so.
I've been a crypto bear/skeptic for a long time, but given how much cash the Fed has pumped into the market and their general reluctance to take cash out of the market, we could be set up for some pretty intense inflation if/when there is a U shaped recovery. As such, I'd be looking to buy inflation protection where you can these days: gold, BTC, TIPS, etc.
<a href="https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggles-to-earn-passing-grade-in-crypto-fund-ii-learn-by-doing-classroom-project/" rel="nofollow">https://standardcrypto.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/a16z-struggl...</a><p>( A16Z struggles to earn passing grade in crypto fund II “learn by doing” project )
Sounds like a 2010 view of crypto when it was all new and exciting!<p>In reality there are a lot of practical problems that I don't think have been solved because they are baked in.<p>I feel they have been mentioned a thousand times on HN.<p>Just to pick on one, using cash which has a volatile value is not practical for the "unbanked". Whereas "IOU" cash based on $US is. Obviously $US is volatile too but a lot less than Bitcoin etc.<p>Stablecoins might solve this, but they are IOUs. And if they are not IOUs then they are untrustable not to crash to zero worth.<p>Crypto makes sense as a speculation, and also as an alternative to cash where you want to avoid government and private interference in transactions (but don't mind potentially losing privacy as all transactions are public).<p>For example Paypal can freeze your account or the Government can freeze your bank account, but "One does not simply confiscate bitcoin".
> Unlike existing systems where the sender and receiver must have fee-extracting bank infrastructure in place, payment blockchains require no bank account, thereby opening up financial services to the two billion-plus unbanked worldwide.<p>Unlike existing systems where you have recourse to recover your payments if anything goes wrong, blockchains leave you hanging and at risk of fraud and even simple coding mistakes, thereby opening up financial services to the modern-day robber barons of the world -- and less efficiently than ever.<p>Thus solving payments, once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.<p>Less tongue in cheek, here I was naively hoping we'd gotten over all this. Twelve years of attempts to advance this technology with absolutely no break-out successes, but hundreds of high-profile seemingly obvious failures.<p>Alas, sounds like we're winding up for round 2.
Off topic, but I really, really wish we could stop overloading the word "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrencies when it already is an abbreviation for cryptography. It's worse when we start saying things like "crypto networks", which is likely frequently misinterpreted/conflated with any kind of secure or encrypted network.<p>We owe it to ourselves to keep clear language available to talk about the concept of secure, private information storage and transmission. Blockchain is cool, but it's a very distinct concept from crypto.
I didn't realize until reading the comments in this thread that some people hawking crypto are now using the term 'Web 3.0'? That's utterly repugnant.
So is this why there was an article yesterday from A16z pushing a really neutral and balanced guide to crypto explaining how it's going to solve every problem under the sun and is a great tool to decentralize control away from big corporations. Because as you know, venture capitalists are all about creating tiny corporations and giving control back to the customers.
The advances happening in Decentralized Finance right now are very important and will power the financial infrastructure of the 21st century. This space is rapidly evolving and is undergoing a Cambrian explosion right now, which is super fascinating to watch. Having been there for the dot com era and the mobile era, this feels the same. If you're in technology, it's worth educating yourself on this space. Two of the best resources I've found are:<p>Bankless Newsletter & Podcast: <a href="https://bankless.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bankless.substack.com/</a>
The Defiant Newsletter: <a href="https://thedefiant.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thedefiant.substack.com/</a>
This is so incredibly ironic after the call to build stuff in the real world.<p>As I posted at the time (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913860" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22913860</a>) - talk is cheap, let's see where they put their money before we compliment them. I guess we've seen it now.
If anyone is interested in the intersection of Web 3.0 and Creator Monetization, you might like LBRY.<p>The core idea of LBRY is to make YouTube-like experiences possible without Google (alternatively, to fix the discovery, incentive, and legitimacy problems of BitTorrent).<p><a href="https://lbry.com" rel="nofollow">https://lbry.com</a> (consumer portal)<p><a href="https://lbry.tech" rel="nofollow">https://lbry.tech</a> (tech portal)<p><a href="https://lbry.tv" rel="nofollow">https://lbry.tv</a> (web app)<p>We were also just mentioned on HN in Andy Baio's article on Deep Fakes: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011445" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011445</a>
I'm disappointed to see that none of the Crypto Fund II is slated for Cryptography, but instead only to Cryptocurrency.<p>Obligatory: <a href="http://www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cryptoisnotcryptocurrency.com</a><p>There's a lot of important problems in (and around) cryptography that need solving.<p>To be charitable: Maybe some of them can be solved by cryptocurrency projects? There is some precedent here. (Zcash advanced the state of the art for non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and pairing-based cryptography, Monero demonstrated real-world ring signatures, etc.)<p>But more importantly: There are a lot of possible solutions that need an incentive to be developed, and could potentially become profitable start-ups.<p>But it's sad to see that cryptography (a.k.a. the real "crypto") isn't even a seat at the table calling itself "Crypto".