WikipediasBad

Ah thanks for the downvote, you're very neutral and would make a great Wikipedia contributor. /s

How are the two sites not remotely in the same market? They are literally knowledge bases. Albeit, Golden is focusing more on structured data similar to Wikidata.org and Everipedia.org is focusing more on blockchain related content first with the backend using smart contracts/token incentivization.

The might be leaving to other newer alternatives like blockchain-based Everipedia.org or Golden.com (which recently raised from a16z).

I ran that hackathon. Can confirm it happened in 2015. LA Hacks at UCLA, Evan was the keynote speaker and stayed around to talk to hackers and builders after his speech. Snapchat, as a company, was at its hottest peak in 2015. Very cool event.

Community is always the most important aspect, agreed! Great to hear you guys are watching the crypto prediction markets closely, they are coming up with some novel features. I'm sure they'd all be interested in working with you guys at Facebook too given the users they could get through a partnership. Good luck!

Hi Taylor, this is one of the cooler (probably coolest) consumer products to come out of facebook in a while. I was following it closely since the announcement a few months back.

My question is: I am sure you guys are familiar with crypto-based prediction markets like augur.net and prediqt.everipedia.org that use smart contracts and real money for predictions. Given that facebook is also building Libra and getting into blockchain, do you guys see that down the line Forecast could be something that moves to facebook's blockchain and/or you guys collaborate with crypto-based products like the above mentioned? That would be truly exciting since it would bring pure market dynamics to the predictions. I'm aware of the regulatory hurdles there, but thought I'd ask anyway. Great job! This is so fun to use.

A blockchain-hosted fork of Wikipedia named Everipedia.org has most of these features already built coincidentally. While I prefer Wikipedia over them, I have been noticing myself use other skins/newer look wikis instead of the dated Wiki UI. Although, the load speed of Wikipedia.org is difficult to beat.

I think the real interesting private sector utility will come from implementations of the contact-tracing map instead of just the bluetooth app (which there will likely be "official" ones or ones being worked on directly by Google/Apple themselves).

Do you think that GPS coordinates will be exposable with the API so that there can be public tracing maps online? Obviously a big privacy issue where the actual bluetooth ID and the person's identity have to be fully anonymized but if GPS coordinates of contact points can be exposed publicly, there can be good public tracing maps that can show where contact events are happening and in what numbers so that people can avoid certain areas (and on the other end where other areas are safe where there's no contact). This can publicly also be used to display R0 counts in different zip codes and geographic areas.

Sounds fair. I really like the technology though and think you guys have the most unique take on paper crypto so if the actual token itself becomes a barrier to adoption due to volatility/stability (which is a leading reason why stablecoins are all the rage right now - as I'm sure you guys are aware), you guys can license out the tech or produce bills for Tether, Dai, USDC, and other high traction stablecoins. Our small stablecoin team (releasing product Q1) would be interested ourselves if we were to ever get into the 9 figure market cap range.

This is a fantastic project and great idea! One thing, I believe there are 2 hurdles to adoption: Kong - the unit of account/currency and Kong - the paper money. Don't you think you're trying to do 2 things at once? Why not try this unique technology with Dai or Tether which has a lot of traction? In fact, I would LOVE to have Dai bills.

You're not completely off base, in fact, you are 100% on the money (no pun intended). This was such an obvious situation to everyone even remotely paying attention that you'd have to be living under a rock to not see what was actually going on.

Any link to this type of vulnerability? Sounds like a juicy read.

I love Balaji and honestly, he is very eloquent and charismatic, but being honest here...I still think that Coinbase buying earn.com was a pretty clear and obvious bail out by his SV friends in high places (A16Z etc). That company was going nowhere after raising $120m 4 years ago and the best they came out with was email spamming crypto payments that coincidentally got bought for $100m by his other friends' company that was doing well. I mean let's call a spade a spade. With that said though, he is right on a decent amount of his blockchain ideas and predictions (just not predictions when they involve his own company apparently).

Very interesting idea. Have you heard about Basecoin and Seigniorage shares? They are trying to do exactly that: http://www.getbasecoin.com/ Are these coins securities in your opinion?

I'm particularly interested in #23 since it is clear that Wikipedia is even more dominant now than it was in 2008: More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.

I say this as someone whose recently been through YC. YC is getting phased out anyway. Crypto economics are doing what YC did to startup financing a decade ago. It's no longer any more valuable to even go through YC since it's so jam packed and over crowded. Maybe the network is slightly valuable, I concede, but my recommendation would be to not put yourself through the hassle and just create a normal business that doesn't need YC financing (or even VC financing for that matter).

The only other wiki project I know of that's the opposite of Wikipedia for <niche> is https://everipedia.org/ which tries to be a wiki for "everything" by not having Wikipedia's deletionist rules. It's an alright site but has nowhere near the traffic and name brand as Wikipedia, even though it has all the pages Wikipedia has.

You must be a joy at parties. Although your last sentence is profound and intuitive advice for startups as a general rule, you must be pretty insufferable in person.

Dang, it's people like you that are the reason we can't have nice things. I am pretty bearish on BAT's system myself, and I wouldn't use it personally, but it's your attitude toward this stuff that makes me not want to try to come up with ideas to help content creators or the "advertising problem" on the internet. Stuff like this is why advertising still exists and is unfortunately the superior choice still in monetization even though it is beyond shitty.

I used to mine hardcore back in the good ole days in 2013, first altcoin boom. What are you hobby miners mining these days? I know whattomine.com has charts, but what are some of the favorites these days for GPU and CPU coins that are actually profitable? Monero? Back in my day it was Dogecoin lol

What do you mean? I went to that thread and came out more confused than enlightened. And ya, I know they get stuff wrong from the news, I already said that in my original post, I wasn't trying to shill for them, I made that pretty clear.

There's a site that tries to do that exact thing called Everipedia, but they have been frequently lambasted in the press for being wrong in their articles. I assume you can't relax notability while at the same time selecting for accuracy. Still though, they are getting pretty decent traffic, and I like their site design. Valiant effort, not that great execution.

This is completely wrong on so many points, I truly doubt that you are even honest about talking to Mr. Villardo. He wouldn't be that stupid to even insinuate something along those lines. Magic the Gathering Trading Cards would be classified as securities by the card printing company with your silly interpretation. After all, they are transferable, the value of the rare cards go up the more popular the game/network becomes, you can't get your money back from the store or the company if you wanted to return your pack of cards, so it's a security? Please. I'd recommend editing your post so you don't come off as clearly clueless.

That would work except your friend would have to confirm you know only after finding Waldo himself and hashing it to compare the hash to your hash. The idea is that they don't have to know the secret, but you can demonstrate you know the secret.

Tell that to Snapchat...

These are "generalized careers" so they have to grasp at arbitrary cues that vouch for intelligence and competence. Careers that require specialized tasks don't look at generalized grade averages or test scores of non-relevant backgrounds like "French SAT" for a "hedge fund" job.

What real world value? What does that even mean to have "real value"? Selling advertising now has "real world value"? How? FB allowing people to bid on eyeballs of random people surfing their site has as much real world value as pieces of paper with dead presidents on them (or imaginary coins on a blockchain). The only reason it has value is because we agree it's valuable.

Fair example, but that's also not what I meant. The price of SNAP, FB, or GOOG stock isn't correlated with a potential buyback of only a small amount of shares back. That doesn't seem to be where the value is pegged. I don't think SNAP has done or is expected to do a single buyback in the foreseeable future. Hundreds of millions of dollars of SNAP volume is traded on exchanges per day. Where does that value seem to come from? My argument is that it comes from the same abstract consensus that makes tokens have the same behavior on exchanges, and literally just that. Nothing more. I know you won't agree, but I think you have an outdated view of what a stock really is. Newer stock offerings in tech like FB and more and more like SNAP are behaving like tokens rather than classical stocks. They show no properties of classical ownership aside from being registered with the SEC as a security.

After that you can immediately put money in your pocket by selling the appreciated shares you own.

Ya, you can sell them to someone else. The same way you can sell the token to another speculator. This statement of yours does not establish a substantiative difference between tokens and stock.

I'm not talking about dividends. I made that extremely clear. A lot of companies pay zero dividends and also make it clear they have absolutely no plans of paying future dividends either so there is no expected value of future profits that peg the stock price. There is no rights of voting or any kind of classical definition of "ownership" pegged to the stock. Look at SNAP, hundreds of millions of dollars of volume is traded per day of SNAP on exchanges. If I removed the ticker name from my post, would you think I was talking about a token or stock?

Owning a stock entitles you to a share of current/future assets/profits of the business.

Can you provide me with some concrete examples of famous, high profile tech stocks like facebook and snapchat giving a "share of their current/future assets/profits of the business" to stockholders? As far as I know, there is no promise of current or future assets that they will pay out or distribute to shareholders barring legal actions and demands of liquidation, forfeiture etc all of which are not part of the simple "stock owning experience" that can be used as a counter example here.

And no, you don't necessarily need dividends, cash on the balance sheet is very real and there's plenty of ways it can end up in your pockets other than dividends.

Please do tell me how cash on facebook's balance sheet can end up in my pocket if I own FB common stock? What are some concrete examples that could happen. Then, how about some concrete examples that have actually happened?