Bitcoiners who like to take their self custody seriously often use tools like fire resistant metal plates to write their recovery seed words through a center punch tool. Products like the coinkite seed plates backup exist but it is also possible to roll your own using washers and bolts. For BIP39 only the first 4 letters of each word are necessary. You can also setup multisig or seed x0r to make sure a thief doesn’t breach into your seeds with just one plate, often stored on multiple geographic locations.
I wonder if some similar strategy exists for normal master passwords. Could be a nice idea for a low-tech-product-for-high-tech-solutions product. Perhaps a metal card where the user can manually punch a QR code.
I don't have two keys. I do keep a fallback method like restore keys written on a safe place.
I did find out however that my old Ledger X can do U2F and GPG so I'm trying to learn how to use it. This Ledger was my first first hardware wallet but I got a coldcard which in my opinion is a better bitcoin wallet. I had no idea what to do with the ledger - second hand market for these things are a big nope. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out there are apps that allow the Ledger to perform some of the Yubikey functions.
While in Brazil a person very close to me suffered a very destructive paranoid psychotic crisis. We've tried help from the public healthcare but their earliest waiting time was 1 month. I've slept for days at the door because she was convinced there were Russian cameras and radioactive emitters planted at our house and wanted to run away. That person stopped to eat and bath and wasn't thinking rationally. We couldn't wait a month.
It was the worst time of my life. I had to pay a private psychiatrist to treat her. A very good one - we plotted together a plan to partake on her fantasy and administer a risperidone injection which was super effective. She is fine now and visits said doctor once in a year only.
Sure you can go to a general clinic but the doctor will forward you to the proper specialist queue which might take months or even years.
In the Netherlands I once sought an eye treatment for my wife. The local hospital only had a waiting time of 2 months. So I called my insurance company who then found another clinic ~45 minutes away by public transport in some small village, which had a waiting time of 2 days. Everything (besides the bus ride) was still covered by the public insurance system.
The "legacy banking system" you are referring to is probably something similar to the ECB or the FED. Only 13% of the world population live under a stable financial system or democracy. So please check your financial privilege.
I mean am I wrong? I'm assuming you are from the US, Canada or Europe when you say central banks have a net positive impact on society so I can presume you are clearly speaking form a point of privilege. You've never suffered through strict capital controls and hyperinflation. You can participate in any investment scheme without the need to supply spurious amounts of impossible documentation. You are not sanctioned. You may even have born in the right place. Am I wrong? Doesn't that sound like privilege to you?
It's one thing to say "the x you're talking about only applies to some small percentage of the overall global market".
But if you're worried about people's privilege you're missing the point and thats what makes you wrong, because nobody with any intelligence responds to 'check your privilege' with anything but derision. focus on the argument with your own logical persuasive argument instead of accusing your opponent of some sort of original sin.
shouting "check your privilege" at the end of a crypto argument isn't checkmate, rather it reduces your argument to one of nonsense. Discuss ideas.
Tether truthing the eminent doom of tether is all well and good but why aren't we talking more about YCombinator promoting startups that burned their customer's money by sending it to anchor protocol UST ponzinomics while lying that those investments were held in USDC and USD?
Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. You need to make bets everywhere and hopefully some stick. The other side of that is some don’t stick, and some go proper pear shaped. Make enough bets, it has to happen.
I’ve got no idea what their original pitch is, I certainly wouldn’t back a crypto startup that ostensibly aims to do something like what it looks like they tried to do, but if I was making 300 bets a couple times a year I’d be silly not to do something in the space.
Whether a ycombinator seal of approval lead to investment which lead to consumers getting fleeced and culpability in that situation, I don’t know. It’s crypto. If you’re silly enough to think it’s a safe investment, you’re blind. A company can also say a lot of things differently from first pitch to accepting millions from consumers. As an investor with 10%ish equity, you’ve got some sway, but you don’t have much sway. And who is to say their bet isn’t the right one.
A stain, but I don’t know about righteous indignation, I don’t know how much culpability transfers back to yc… but I don’t feel it’s a whole lot
> not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. You need to make bets everywhere and hopefully some stick.
Thats not how it works; VC's are allowed to pass on anything they want, and it turns out they dont cut a fat cheque to every idiot who knocks on the door.
And how many Porn companies has YC funded? Zero as far as I know, is that because porn related companies have zero chance of being profitable? Or is it that they take a moral stance against that industry?
Nor as far as I know are they in the asphalt industry, likely because they are focused on tech. I am sure some people out there find asphalt a moral issue (I personally dont) but I suspect they are not spraying some funding around in that industry because it isnt really of interest to them or their investors.
Lots of asphalt tech opportunity, just not so much electronic tech. And timelines are long.
I’m disappointed that we still do cold patches instead of heating the surrounding asphalt when filling potholes. That’s where I’d transfer soldering technology into asphalt.
The problem here is not a bet on crypto but a company that basically went "oh hey sorry too bad the USD displayed on your account is actually UST. K thx bye".
I think I cover that. Company does not equal backer. Bad behaviour by company is not the responsibility of investors, it’s the responsibility of the board, the exec, and ultimately the courts. Investors can shape and influence, investors hopefully provide a filter and feedback, but everyone can get swept up in a good story. Company should be caned. Yc? I’ve already said what I feel.
It's not the legal responsibility of the investors, because society has given them limited liability. It may or may not be their moral responsibility, depending on what they knew, encouraged, or whatever. And the usual payoff for morally-shady but legally-blameless behaviour is reputational damage.
Y-Combinator exists to make Paul Graham and it's investors money. Morality is not money. Y-Combinator doesn't exist to make morality for its investors.
Maybe it'd be better if our society reprioritized so "these organizations are all amoral actors who exist for no other purpose except to fatten the wallets of their owners" isn't the assumed norm.
Perhaps the sarcasm here was not understood? Corporations should exist to serve people, broadly. Not the other way around. People over profit. We should all strive to be kinder as well where possible.
Clearly I shouldn't be the arbiter of world priorities, but I think there is something horribly fatalistic about people defending corporations as amoral entities as some sort of immutable property of the universe.
This is not a good argument. Of course companies can optimize for multiple objectives and to pretend that any company doesn’t is willfully blinding oneself to reality.
> Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator.
That's why we have the concept of "due diligence". YC is absolutely allowed to make bets in the crypto world; but they have a brand name and a reputation of serious investors. I know that when I see the YC logo on a new product I discover, it serves as a signal. And having a fraud company being allowed to use the YC brand on their website, because YC wanted to work with them and gave them money to allow them to grow (meaning: "cheat on more people") is definitely a stain on their track record
If you’re financially backing and providing direct hands on strategic guidance to an active and blatant scheme to commit securities fraud then you are doing something you should not be doing.
The previous sentence isn’t and shouldn’t be particularly controversial.
> If you’re financially backing and providing direct hands on strategic guidance to an active and blatant scheme to commit securities fraud then you are doing something you should not be doing.
As you wrote it as a generic hypothetical, no, it’s not really controversial to me. If however you are meaning to say it as a passive aggressive way to accuse YC, yeah, it very much is controversial.
To not be controversial (for me anyway), you’d need to meet some burden of proof with evidence. How much would be enough to meet that burden? I’m not sure at this moment, but as you’ve presented zero that I’ve seen, I think “more than zero” is a fair starting point.
By definition, a “YC Company” is given hundreds of thousands of dollars and direct hands on strategic advice on how to run the company. That’s the meaning of the concept.
The company in question has blatant securities fraud as their core business model.
QED
Here’s a logical construct in return. When people you like do unethical things they are still unethical.
I feel like there’s a lot of leaps in your “logical construct” there.
First and foremost, did YC approve of this “core business model”? Sure, the founders got into YC, but did they pivot during the program (frequently happens)? And while YC may be on the board, they don’t have controlling interest either.
So yeah, there’s a lot of scenarios where people “you know” and/or “partner with” do unethical things, but that fact alone doesn’t mean you are unethical. You very well could be, but guilt by association isn’t enough proof here imho.
It isn't particularly controversial, but who is to say that the founders in question took the advice being given, or even showed up for the feedback sessions? Has anyone ever been kicked out of YC?
Given the number of companies that have gone through the program, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least one that completely ignored everything the founders didn't want to hear or do.
Hmm. Both those cases seem to be more along the lines of "said/posted things that made YC look bad" rather than "kicked out for ghosting their mentor" or "kicked out for scamming their users"
Scamming their users mostly makes the Founders look bad.
NOT kicking them out is what would make YC look bad. I wouldn't expect it to happen immediately, though, if YC does an internal investigation to see whether any principals, mentors, or advisors are implicated in the unethical behavior as well, whether by commission (giving unethical advice) or omissions (such as failing to raise red flags).
YCs public track record in terms of self-reflection on possible errors in judgement isn't particularly encouraging though. From the outside the org seems to focus on evolutionary changes though certainly at a fairly rapid clip (which means that cultural norms are hard to establish and maintain, giving the "carriers" of non-normative behavior opportunities to wriggle around avoiding scrutiny. For new extensions of the program YC favors rapid experimentation and iteration, which may fail to establish compatible norms depending on who is leading the effort.
It is worth contrasting one of the more stable outposts for YC culture, this very Hacker News site. YC has a very strong policy regarding not just avoiding a conflict of interest when it comes to moderation of posts critical of YC, but moderators have been instructed to moderate those posts and discussions considerably less than would otherwise be indicated, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. That's a pretty strong commitment, and one that can be difficult to live up to (avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest is a standard that judges are supposed to be held to, but not lawyers, for example). YC may or may not have always lived up to the spirit of that commitment (only insiders can know for sure), but it is reasonably plain that an ongoing effort is being made to live up to the letter of that commitment. Kudos to pg for establishing it early, and to dang for keeping it going.
The point I'm arriving at is that establishing and maintaining a cultural reference point like that is very difficult in an organization that is growing, changing, and sending out strange offshoots without a lot of explicit (even occasionally public) communication about similar bright lines and thou-shalt-nots, and outside of the HN context, we really haven't seen evidence for that.
> Or is it bad to talk about such things around here?
Don't think if there is good reasoning and no name calling etc.
I would love to hear the explanation how these companies even got into YC from the people who picked them. Is this some type of divide between purely making money at YC (which can be dirty, immoral, bordering on criminal etc) and the tech community of HN who are generally against that sort of thing?
I mean it's not only crypto; it's dark patterns, privacy invasion etc; HN is generally against that, but probably many YC companies would be dead without them.
It's obvious YC would make some crypto bets. The same way Ark invest is doing on the public markets, YC will do at the seed stage to ensure they have exposure to a market segment that might turn into a big thing (I'm skeptical, but it's not impossible and I don't have a crystal ball.)
What I'm curious about is the initial pitch. Did YC have a way to know that company was a terrible (potentially fraudulent) idea, or did the founders mask it sufficiently that it would have been difficult to tell?
Either they are incompetent to realize that crypto is 99% a scam and should be avoided or they knew it was a scam but still thought they could make some money before it all fell apart (Coinbase investors)
Look, I tend to agree with you. Crypto has not found it's use case, it has a lot of scams, a lot of environmental issues, and other problems. It's been many years, it's fair to think if it hasn't found that killer application yet, that maybe it never will.
But it's also still possible that it will. If you make a living by making long bets, then it's completely reasonable to want exposure to crypto.
If you are in the business of promoting your brand to young entrepreneurs, so that they include you in funding rounds, then yes, it makes sense to have exposure to anything that young entrepreneurs are working on.
If you are in the business of owning a piece of any company that may go public via IPO or SPAC one day, then yes, might as well give money to anyone who seems like they may be able to get to that finish line.
If on the other hand you are in the business of predicting the future of technology, it doesn't make sense to have exposure to technologies that are 99% scams on the off chance that someone accidently makes something useful in an effort to get rich. There is a lot of real innovation happening in the world that deserve that funding.
That 99% number you're quoting is made up. It's a value call. I think it's a reasonable position to give crypto a small chance of becoming something really big. If you're in the business of making long bets on the future, you want a piece of everything that fits that description. Including crypto. You don't know which bets will pay off, and it's nearly impossible to make an educated guess. It's simpler to just invest in everything that has that potential.
If a group of people created a perpetual motion machine community, would they deserver some funding? How can you prove that they are not going to discover new physics that allow energy generation from nothing?
Obviously not. But are you implying that crypto has as much chance of turning into something as finding a way to violate the law of conservation of energy? That's ridiculous.
Are you aware of the search feature? Or are you wondering why people aren't talking about something tangential in this thread specifically?
People talk about YC companies all the time. There is no weighting, no one flagging posts about YC companies. Most people here aren't part of YC, we have no reason to give them any more leeway than anyone else. The main reason no one in a random cryptocurrency thread is talking about one random cryptocurrency company is because that company is not a significant part of the industry, and no one except the people getting Goxxed even know it exists.
Didn’t we have a absolutely massive thread about this just earlier this week? How much more can we talk about it? Is it the only thing we should be talking about?
I’ve tried using á RockPro64 with FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT and although it runs just fine without hacks I’ve noticed the performance is not that good. FreeBSD is not big.little aware so it doesn’t distinct between the A53 and A72 cores. Cryptographic hardware acceleration is not very good. On the other hand most Linux distros work quite well.
Then there is the piece of flaming crap that is the ASMedia PCI-E SATA card that they sell along with the board on their store. That thing cannot handle 2 SSDs and its not a problem with power delivery. Replacing it with some marvel based cards.
> Inflation encourages spending
> Incentive to spend.
So less crap being produced and bought in a whim and more decision making process on purchasing long lasting quality products (like it used to be). Less cheap plastic trinkets, less planed obsolescence.
Please sign me up for that wonderful deflationary world!
> So less crap being produced and bought in a whim and more decision making process on purchasing long lasting quality products (like it used to be). Less cheap plastic trinkets, less planed obsolescence.
Not really. Just more cash held instead of productive assets. The only thing a deflationary currency chang's about an economy is giving everyone a default investment strategy that wastes output.
> Remember, with a stablecoin, there is no upside to holding.
As always people around here tend to see the world from their point of privilege. If you are in Turkey, Sudan or Venezuela right now there is a huge upside in holding a stable coin pegged to the dollar. Only 13% of the world population is lucky enough to live on a stable democracy with a stable economic system.
If you live in a country with an unstable currency but without strong capital controls, the upside can be had by holding dollars. And that comes without the risk that your known-to-be-a-bit-dodgy nearly-dollar collapses.
That's a rare situation. The first thing a government does when their economy starts to colapse is to force the population to use and save in their dying currency while restricting access to foreign currency to prevent capital flight. Just look at Russia and Argentina.
Can you? I've got to imagine that transacting in a runaway inflationary currency is going to get you bad rates no matter what.
If you want to buy crypto using rubles, Lebanese pounds, Venezuelan bolivars or anything else, you need a counterparty who will accept that currency as payment. And if your currency is losing a lot of its value every day, with no end in sight, your counterparty will not give you anything approximating the official exchange rate, even on an open market, because accepting payment in that currency immediately exposes them to that currency's inflation.
That doesn't make sense. The black market (being illegal) would have significantly higher risks and transaction costs, so even with arbitrage the prices could still be significantly different.
Oh that's a different question IMO. Crypto is making it easier to bring dollars from abroad so I get it does lower the black market cash dollar's prices in that sense. Big international crypto exchanges like binance aren't yet regulated here so technically the crypto world IS part of the black market anyway
Unless your bank kicks you out by some reason (incompetent compliance).
Unless foreign bank refuses your transaction because the bank doesn’t like the color of your passport.
Unless somehow banking system wants to cut extra from your transaction (2.5-4% for transaction) because of double currency conversion you didn’t ask for, because you didn’t specify correct correspondent bank and your bank didn’t tell you about that.
> Unless your bank kicks you out by some reason (incompetent compliance). Unless foreign bank refuses your transaction because the bank doesn’t like the color of your passport. Unless somehow banking system wants to cut extra from your transaction (2.5-4% for transaction) because of double currency conversion you didn’t ask for, because you didn’t specify correct correspondent bank and your bank didn’t tell you about that.
These are all problems invented by Crypto bulls to build a narrative for why Crypto is widely useful.
There are a handful of small, very poor countries where Crypto might have been better than holding local currency. But you also had to be poor in those poor countries for it to make sense for you to buy Crypto instead of hard assets like land or housing - if you were merely interested in bypassing monetary devaluation - and not interested in EXTEMELY risky speculation to get absurd returns.
The total money for people this might even have made a little bit of sense for is maybe $1Bn. Considering Crypto had close to a $3T market cap at some point - this is not a talking point. It's noise.
The real story - and the only story - is that Crypto is and always has been speculation.
I disagree. As someone from Argentina which has a high percentage of crypto owners I can say poor people in poor countries aren't literate enough or don't have the resources (ie: liquidity, bank account) to get cryptos. It's more of a middle class thing here. Real estate isn't cheap in the big cities if you take into consideration the average salary and barely any financial aid to buy property. Besides, being a landlord isn't profitable enough given the initial investment because rental prices are heavily regulated. Also not good for reselling because price have been going down in the last years and it looks like it will keep going like that. Stocks options are heavily limited and also (obviously) regulated. A lot of people here are afraid to invest in stocks here anyway. with an estimated inflation rate of 60% people save money by buying dollar cash, crypto and classic bank instruments (fund investments and fixed term investments)
IIUC, it's quite easy in Argentina to convert pesos to dollars and store them in an Argentine bank with a US correspondent bank - ditto for Euros and Yen.
There are many downsides to Tether. Why is it worth the risk in comparison?
Additionally, there's simply not enough money in Tether compared to the $80B to talk about. It's a distraction.
Again, it's a matter of resources. Not everyone can travel to US and have the money to open a bank account there. Anyway to "easily" convert from pesos to US dollars (which you have to use some financial instruments which aren't trivial for the average citizen) you need to justify all your earnings which not everyone can do because people try to avoid taxes as much as possible.
For instance, most devs I know that work remote jobs for companies abroad, they ask for them to pay in crypto because if you try to get paid in the legal way you get 50% less off the bat in the forceful conversion from usd to pesos and then you get an additional 20-30% less due to taxes
It sounds like it would be worth it to get a US bank account and be paid in USD at that point - assuming developers are making $50k+ USD per year. Virtually all non-small employers would prefer that as well.
> These are all problems invented by Crypto bulls to build a narrative for why Crypto is widely useful.
These problems happened to me and still happening.
Swift transactions in USD from US to UAE are getting double converted (at cost of 2.5-4% of the total amount) and it’s very difficult to get meaningful answer from the bank support about what’s happening
Nothing you wrote makes any sense. We are talking about stable coins. Where does speculations fits here? Also could you make an argument without making accusations?
1. Stable coins make no sense for anyone outside of a handful of small, poor countries.
2. Stable coins make no sense for anyone who has meaningful wealth even in those countries because they have other, better options available.
3. The amount of money in Stable coins is >$100Bn - this is far more than what would go in to resolve any of these problems. Mentioning these problems is noise / a distraction.
4. The primary purpose of stable coins is for people to get in and out of / time trades in cryptocurrency (speculation).
Do you honestly believe people collectively parked >$80Bn in a shady company using it purely as a bank account - because that was really their best option? If not - then these talking points aren't really worth talking about. My whole point.
The "stable" part of the -coin is all marketing. It's true while enough people believe it's true... and if at any point enough people disbelieve it, it'll be everything but.
Yes, BUSD & USDC have regular attestations that their holding of USD in bank accounts backed by the US government & US treasuries are real.
Tether on the other hand has invested mostly in commercial credit, who’s counterparty they decline to identify. Given that they constitute something like the 5th largest commercial credit fund in the world on that basis & the other funds deny seeing them in their markets, it seems that they’re lending to ... lets say unorthodox counter parties.
Some have suggested that they’ve been lending to Chinese builders, but it seems more likely to me that they’ve been lending Tether to cryptocurrency trading houses and marking it up on their books. This would create a self-feeding circular dynamic at one or two removes; if so the whole thing could unwind quite spectacularly.
It seems to me that some gold coins would work even better in this situation (for longer term savings, not something you move in and out every month). Did you consider this? An honest question.
You can buy small quantities of coins off dealers for a very modest spread plus the cost of insured postage. I have a few sovereigns at the back of a drawer from the 2008 crisis which have basically held their value. There's no magic to it, it's just a nice shiny object.
Converting back to cash at a reasonable rate is probably a lot harder.
You compare the convenience of a download against having an asset with a few millenia of history in your physical possession (which is not without its own risks) and pick your poison.
Gold is one of the easiest things to smuggle: it is compact and can be easily melted, painted over, made to look like a cheap tourist souvenir, mixed with other components, etc. and then recovered at the destination.
That does not mean that it is trivial to smuggle gold out, but if you need to do so, the chance of success is pretty high. Much higher than smuggling out fiat money held in a government-regulated account during capital controls. My 2c.
In principle, there's no reason someone like Revolut can't just offer virtual (but backed by segregated client assets) accounts with "real" USD to people living in those countries.
It may be a compliance issue, of course. If you want to stay on the good side of the US Treasury, compliance could be expensive, especially in certain countries.
But the basic premise here is that USDT's risk premium is worth it as the cost of avoiding compliance, which, sure, I guess.
I wonder if some similar strategy exists for normal master passwords. Could be a nice idea for a low-tech-product-for-high-tech-solutions product. Perhaps a metal card where the user can manually punch a QR code.