gdberrio

"It did make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur."

As someone who relates to the post [i.e., been spinning my wheel's studying for a while], I totally understand the author.

I would say that what makes someone an entrepreneur is a diferent mind set: the people who want to, feel a need to do so. A need to, when you enter a cab and see something not right, start thinking "How would I solve this business issue?".

But, like everything in life, there's the funcional entrepreneur and the dysfuncional one [hope the Author doesn't take it as an insult]. Dysfuncional one's have a passion and a great want to be entrepreneurs, but have a nasty and unhealthy dose of "I want to get this absolutly perfect" syndrome. At the first try. So, we study. And research. And keep researching. And try to forsee every problem we could maybe/possibly encounter, and solve it, mentally. And, times goes by, and little is actually done (though we have a clear "vision" in our minds. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)

The post doesn't make me wonder if the author really wants to be an entrepreneur. If he didn't he wouldn't even have started. It makes me wonder how to get out of this dysfuncional "wheel-spinning" pattern of entrepreneurship.

Tks for all the feedback. This is an awsome list to get started.

On to reading & hacking away...

I don't think that answers my question on intermittence, persistence and syncronization.

I can have my date hosted, but if my friends don't (that's why they use your service, so not to have to do that, or else they remain with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. That's your USP), I can only access their data when my friends devices are online. Or, alternatively, you store my whole friends graph on my device, which presents scalability and performance issues. Or, 3rd route, you store my friends data on multiple devices on the network, doing "multiple seeds". Again, we're back to "opps my data is all over the place", when your Unique Selling Point was P2P = privacy, no need to centralize.

Even Skype Supernodes don't solve this issue. They solve some of the routing issue. Not the "address book/data issue". You don't seem to solve it either.

Pardon what may seem to be a silly question (amateur "would-be" engineer speaking), but I have a doubt, which is the following:

Data needs to be stored. You either store it locally, and as such it is only accessible when the device is on, or it's stored on a central repository or index, meaning it's always on even if one of the devices is off.

How do you tackle this? How do you make sure that user A tries to access news feed of user B, and fails to get it because user's B device is offline?

Maybe I'm being slow or noobish, but it seems to be the same problem one has with bitorrent: user A downloads from user B if user B is online. If data is common, I have multiple seeds, but social network implies that nobody has the same data. Unless you copy my graph to my friends "device" so one has multiple seeds, which could be quite unpractical on mobile devices if I have a lot of friends.

How do you solve this "intermittent issue" and the synchronization and persistence problems it generates? Without a central "clearing"/indexing server? Even Skype has "Super nodes" to handle this issues...

This aside from the fact that "IPV6 deployment" is not going to be a easy cake to bake, one has to fix the problems faced by GPG trust model to ensure that two parties can verify (with some degree of trust) that the other party with whom they're communicating is, indeed, the person they expect, dynamic IPs, and so on.

If you think HFT is quite hard and challenging, then Forex isn't any easier: you can still lose a ton of money over an unforseen event somewhere in the World.

More seriously, as someone who trades for a living, here's what I've learned (the hard way, i.e., losing my own money makes for expensive lessons):

Forex is one of the most volatile markets on this side of the "Milky Way". Only Commodities (Natural Gas for instance) beat it. The average range of noise (noise, random movement, not signal) is enough to loose huge amounts of money.

Forex brokers offer a stupid amount of leverage. 50x, 100x (and even 200x) leverage is not trading. It's gambling. Which means that if you want to stay in the game you need a lot of trading capital (want to make a million trading forex? Start with a billion).

Depends on your experience but, if you don't have a lot, start with stocks (CFDs, for instance) or indexes for deep markets.

If you still want to go the "Forex route", some reading material has to include: Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy. You don't need a PhD on it, but you do need to grasp the basics of interest rates, currency parities, inflation, growth, central banking, capital movements.

Statistics. Again, no need for a PhD, but the basics are useful/helpful.

Money Management. People want the "holly grail strategy indicator" that gets you 9 out of 10 profitable trades. That's a myth. The best traders in the industry usually lose 2 out of every 3 trades. The point here is: you make up what you lose with the winning trade. So the real point is not how to enter (though it's still important) but to know when to "exit" the trade.

Basic trading strategies. Some apply better to Forex, other to Stocks, but in general the same principles apply.

And do take care: the Forex market is full of "Win x times your inicial amount in n days with our y fullproof strategy/platform" scammy proposition.

The complexity of the platform is cumbersome.

In first place you need a special purpose terminal (the Keyboard essentially) because you need special functions, that are only found on that keyboard.

Second the usability of the thing. It's just appalling. To search a quote you need to know codes similar to the names of x86 CPU register (not jocking... you want to search by topic? TNI <Go key>. Want to view some equity analysis? Hit <Equity key> NN <Go key>). The interface is confusing, cluttered, horrible to navigate through, and concept of "back" is skittish at best.

For the privilege of a steep learning curve, horrible design, proprietary formats, little integration with outside tools (except for Excel) and a horrible looking keyboard, you pay 1500$ a month.

They are, however, the best source for Data in the market. Stocks, futures, fixed income, you name it, they have a price quote for it.

So yes, it's a good market for disruption. But (there is always a "but"): it's not a easy market to get in, and bloomberg as a very good choke on the Banks. The other competitor is Reuters. And IMO, it's easier to disrupt B2C companies. B2B reminds me of the "Nobody ever got fired for buying MS". Well, no trader desk director ever got fired for buying Bloomberg.

"So one way to disrupt banks would be to put these resources in the hands of an individual."

Well, not quite, IMO.

Because technically those resources are not the Banks own resources. They are the Deposits. That's why Banking is an inherently leveraged business (and unstable by definition). You take deposits to fund credit, making money circulate (and earning your fee's for the "job", aka, arbitrage).

And, by putting the resources the Bank has in the hands of an individual creates another bank, i.e., a single institution whose porpuse is to evaluate and arbitrage information assimetries and balance fund demand with fund supply.

"Social Networking might be a good research direction to solving the P2P information problem solving, by revealing our preferences."

Yes, it could, but it implies they go over the engineering culture they have. It's not an engineering problem, it's an economics one. It's like Google trying to solve a Customer Support problem. They're really not good at "human interaction" ;) Point is, you don't solve it with some hard coding. You solve it with proper incentives structures and market design.

As a trader, I totally agree!

Disrupting Wall St. implies not just making a "new" UI/UX/Interface for banking clients (like Mint or Square), it implies looking at changing the Banks inherent Business Model. Can Silicon Valley pull it off? Well, from a foreigners perspective (commenting from Lisbon, Portugal) Silicon Valley has a very engineer centric perspective on problem solving, and while engineering inputs may be useful, this is not an engineering problem, it's an economics problem.

Take P2P loans (Zoppa, Prosper, Lending Club) for instance. Why aren't they gaining traction? Because while they try to change the main Business Model for banks, they fail to solve the fundamental problem of Information Assimetry. That's the "reason d'etre" of the Banks. Banks business model is not just "skin you alive in loan fee's", they solve what we economists call "Adverse Selection" problem: how to sort good from bad credit. They are basically information arbitragers. They pool your credit info, compute a score, and sort loan suppliers with loan demand. The cost of doing so is expensive for an individual investor. And there is a problem of "preference revelation", or, in layman's terms, people lie and try to free ride.

That's why banks exist. Is the model ripe for disruption? Yes, it hasn't really changed fundamentally since the last 300 years since the "Venizian Banca" but for that one need to solve the affordable decentralised sorting between creditors and debtors accounting for fraud, incentives to lie and free ride and asymmetrical information.

IMO, Facebook brought a good innovation to the table. And no, I'm not talking about the "like button", social hype (attach social to something and somehow you have an Alchemical transformation of iron to gold): Applied Network Theory.

Social Networking might be a good research direction to solving the P2P information problem solving, by revealing our preferences.

Payment methods have a different problem to it: fraud. You can, and usually do, bleed money on it. Paypal did, and still does. To counter it, you make it more painful to do transactions (that's why Paypal is, sometimes, bloody annoying). Pain acts as a filter to fraud. That's why Banking is so cumbersome. Again, pain as a filter for fraud. Think of it like this: Google could reduce spam by making it painful to search and index (reductio ad absurdum oversimplification). It's a simple "no innovation" solution.

There is a lot of innovation to be made. But it's a bit more complicated. It's not just "make a new cute web 2.0 interface to sort your personal finances" like Mint.

Just my 2 cents.

(PS: pardon the occasional english typing error. Not a native speaker)