HN user

jsutton

284 karma

Engineer and founder. Applying blockchain technology to improve inefficiencies one of the largest and oldest industries in the world.

Posts1
Comments192
View on HN

They aren't auditing anything. Programmers/engineers don't audit budget and spending. If they were doing an audit, they would have accountants on their team, which they don't. If you bring coders/engineers into a system, it's for accessing/manipulating data/code/infrastructure. This is an enormous and unprecedented overreach.

No one takes .so seriously even after notion.so. Hell, I'm sure countless people still try .com before giving up and Googling "notion" (or maybe that's just me, but I doubt it).

We get it, you don't like crypto. You would be better off leaving the snark and sarcasm at home if you want to get your points across without sounding bitter. Your last line completely contradicts the previous point you were trying to make-- it's clear to anyone that's paying attention that crypto economy has objectively grown beyond speculative trading and scams.

A normal database isn't able to be easily disseminated by the people who need access to this data, which is enormous. Then who gets to host it? Real Estate associations are too many, too fragmented, too entrenched to agree on one or even a handful of companies with the privilege to host this information.

A blockchain (assuming you can get buy-in/critical mass from the agencies) has the ability to align some financial incentives of all interested parties to open up access to real estate listings while still holding ownership and profiting from that access.

Instead of real estate companies protecting their listing data, they could offer access to their listing data in exchange for a fee or revenue share. Instead of out-of-date listings parading as up-to-date, there's a public temporal record of updates. Instead of buyers getting restricted or partial information, they can obtain access to the listing data via alternate sources.

Agreed, this is the kind of use case blockchain excels at. I worked on a project that attempted to do something like a distributed MLS, and we had major industry leaders on board indicating a large degree of belief that blockchain could revolutionize the industry. MLS is, after all, just a legacy federated system running on inertia.

Unfortunately, it's so difficult to get a critical mass of inventory to succeed; it requires either a massive upfront investment, or partnering with RE developers from the beginning.

it merely aims to be a new mechanism by which value is transferred, which by most objective measures it's very bad at doing.

What objective measures are you using? Over $3 Billion in value is transferred over the Bitcoin network every day. There has never been any downtime, nor has it ever been hacked, and fees are flat and transparent (just a few bucks to transfer unlimited value across the world).

There's been a few examples of use cases said by others in this thread, and your financial settlement use case is a great one. Any time you need to move money around multiple parties based on a clear set of rules or criteria, blockchain could be useful. Insurance claims, international remittances, lending, to name a few. Anywhere a valuable process is still dominated by paper (and there are surprisingly many).

Generally, being able to program the management of money (i.e. if personA meets a certain criteria, send $X to personA) in a transparent system can be incredibly powerful.

There's nothing absurd about a company seeking to legitimize a component of their business.

The crypto industry is not built around avoiding government rules, that's a myth propagated by its many detractors. It was born to address a failure of the banking system that hurt regular people the most.

Cirtrix hasn't ever been the parent company to LastPass. LogMeIn bought Citrix's GoTo product division, and also bought LastPass, so that's the extent of their relationship.

LogMeIn and subsequently LastPass is has been owned by the private equity firm Francisco Partners since 2020. Ire can be focused on Francisco Partners as they completely gutted LastPass and other LogMeIn products shortly after acquisition.

Be honest with yourself, do you really believe every single crypto company acts without integrity and ethics? If so, it's clear you haven't familiarized yourself with the whole industry. Plenty of crypto companies have strong controls around security, consumer protection, compliance, etc.

The problem is that anything which is declassified for the US public is also declassified for the world. There are plenty of things we wouldn't want our adversaries knowing.

This is why most democracies are Representative instead of Direct -- it's impossible to give everyone all the information they need to make informed decisions while keeping sensitive information secure.

So, elect people of good character and competency to the offices that are privy to this kind of information. Educate the public on why this is important.

While connecting with 1 good founder for advice can be as beneficial without the time commitment, good accelerators not only provide the education on fundraising but also the network and infrastructure to actually fundraise. Accelerators often have groups of VCs and angels that will both participate in mentorship and allocate funds to invest in each cohort.