slice_of_life

I love cryptocurrency Goolybib Founder Voice

But could you expound on this part here

Participating in modern e-commerce for the unbanked/underbanked

From my experience, the unbanked hardly have a chance to own cryptocurrency because they don't even have internet. In my country, MPesa is pretty much ubiquitous and that is because it doesn't need the internet to work.

Are there any ideas on how to overly SMS functionality over cryptocurrency in order to truly bank the unbanked? One idea that is bouncing in my head is a sort of agency model where agents can actually have the internet set up in physical premises and they can be the ones to set up crypto-wallets and withdraw/deposit fiat. The unbanked users can simply continue to use SMS based systems to operate their crypto-wallets.

Only problem is that they wouldn't necessarily truly own their coins - most users on HN may care about that but these folks wouldn't. If it works, it works and that's all they'd care about.

I just thought about the idea now when I read your comment so it isn't necessarily refined.

come up with a solution which is easy to implement

This might be better phrased as, "a solution that's easy to scale". I don't think the implementation part of most valuable things is remotely easy; at least from my experience.

1 in 3 adults—with criminal records

I must admit I haven't ever thought about these numbers but it strikes me as insanely high. How can this be explained? Is it a feature of just America or is it reproducible in other countries as well?

Don't get why the downvotes. Still gonna kick ass.

Feels like a question I should have asked as well. $150 p/m per site seems exorbitant.

My reference is to majority of the time and in a sustainable way. If doing good will last, there must also be a way to sustainably compensate the actors; they also need to have their needs taken care of.

SLA for fixes

Very curious how you price this...per fix or standard monthly fee? If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?

I had been doing the hosting with 3rd party providers but I realised that I could actually do it better myself if I built a multi tenant platform. For the support, I was doing a lot of the support anyway so I realised I might as well do it in my own platform.

For these reasons, I've deployed my app on a Vultr server, have a couple of clients on it for my beta and so far so good.

I'm still working on the billing system for my clients so that when they renew their hosting the next time round it will be on my platform.

A couple of things I didn't want to touch include domain selling and email hosting. My platform has turn key ecommerce tools that are good enough for customers to want to pay for. Domains are still done by a 3rd party (but they're mostly cheap) and as for email, I would rather provide integration with Zoho or google apps. I don't like the headache of email deliverability; it's not worth the effort at this stage in my startup - heck, even Shopify don't touch it.

Once I'm done with billing, my next big problem to solve is logistics. I need to find a way to help my merchants ship to their customers easily as it is still a very big problem for them. It will mean partnering with a myriad of logistics providers and creating an ecosystem for just this.

We are weak creatures.

Ha ha. You're hilarious.

On a serious note though, I don't disagree that indeed your statement above is true but because we are weak creatures, we must rely on systems. Making the world a better place is many a time correlated with some sort of validation by consumers in a market based system. I.e. solve problems/make life better or easier for someone, get rewarded by more and more patronage.

Granted, this is not always the case but majority of the time, this has been in my experience the most unbiased and reliable way to do good in the world. Simply by solving other people's problems for your and others' sustenance, you somehow also end up making the world a better place. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

This is the most unbiased view of Amazon I've seen.

I hadn't seen it that way but like @dna_polymerase pointed out above, it may very well be. I still maintain it's myopic and undeserving of a company I'd like to think of as the next facebook/amazon/google/microsoft

These are outfits that have provided tremendous value to the entire planet. My view was that Uber could have followed the same trajectory. Now, not so much anymore.

I would rather have Uber crash and burn under the stewardship of Kalanick (unlikely scenario) than have the same happen under a clueless board and a replacement CEO (likely scenario).

I said it before and you can mark my word. This decision to hire Immelt as Travis' replacement only goes further to solidify my claim. Bad decision. Very bad decision.

Mistakes are made all the time. I swear to you, there's an exaggerated amount of hate towards Travis. You'd think he's the devil. What has he done that's so bad? He simply founded a company that was super successful within a short time, with an idea that seems so easy that everyone thinks they could've done it and along the way some missteps were made.

Are you sure you would've done better? Would you like it if the plurality of stakeholders in your ecosystem vilified you in a similar way? I'm sure you wouldn't. Cut Travis some slack!

What are these folks thinking? Bring Travis back.

It's too early to have 1) a non-technical CEO 2) a CEO without domain experience & passion

There's nothing to demonstrate this guy even cares about what Uber is doing in logistics and technology.

Overthinking factors of success can also be stifling as it may lead to analysis paralysis. Just do it is a better way to do it, so to speak.

I agree 100%. It seems absolutely bonkers to me that one would leave their money on coinbase if this is the case. How is this even a debate? They will not hesitate to keep the BCC value themselves and even if they somehow magically find it in their hearts not to assume the value of BCC, why let their customers' assets go to waste?

IMO, they're neither good nor credible custodians of their customers' assets.

whereby a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people control a massive proportion of wealth while those in poverty lack access to food security, healthcare, childcare, the basic necessities of life

May be a more important question is why those people lack those things you mentioned. If for instance Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos never existed, would it make those poor people richer? You are not addressing the problem when you simply vilify the rich as the cause of the poor's woes. Your argument is intellectually dishonest and I think it stems from unnecessary envy.

Like Marc Andreessen said, Venezuela's great this time of year.

I agree. Don't forget Amazon still has so much it's doing with its current projects. Bezos has been really impressive. If you haven't read The Everything Store, you should get it - great book.

Ambiguous. Please let me know what's not clear and I'll respond.

Yes. Succinct answer that brings cryptocurrency's problems to the surface. Only when this is solved will it be practical to largely abandon fiat and I simply cannot wait.

The American right and the French revolution right are competly different things

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26029/what-is-th...

I'd point you to that and say I'd only support your statement in so far as saying part of the American right is not as pro-liberty as it ought to be - this is in reference to neoconservatism and similar ideologies.

They've lost meaning, and serve only to avoid talking details

They're shorthand and I think they're useful when you're genuine about discussion but want a quick way to understand where an argument is coming from. If you're disingenuous about conversation, it doesn't matter whether labels are used or not, you simply cannot self-regulate your bias to give room for discourse is all I'm saying.

Like a coin, every story has 3 sides

I like that.

Make a list.

What are the things you want out of life?

List them in order of priority.

Go after each item on the list.

Realize that you may or may not get each item you want but that the thrill is as much in the chase as it is in the outcome.

Realize there's nothing wrong with material success. I've seen both riches and extreme poverty. Riches are better.

My list is literally the first thing I see when I wake up; it's on the wall I face when I wake up.

It's the pendulum I spoke of earlier at play.

Love your HN bio BTW. Too funny.

Disclosure: haven't done this but I have a girlfriend of many years and a startup so here's my 2 cents.

Both these things are hard and as such both will have a hard time succeeding but they're both worth the trouble so I say go for it with these considerations:

You need to have an agreement that you will be professionals first while at work and that at work, work comes first. Your company is very important to you and emotions(good and bad) will tend to take precedence but you have to be cognizant of your emotions and try to separate them. You have to.

For this reason, have an agreement of sorts, a kin to a prenuptial agreement. Answer questions like if things go wrong and you can't work together anymore, what happens then? There's a reason companies have strict policy for workplace relationships and how they ought to be handled.

That whole categorization is a joke

It's a very serious distinction. One which wars have been fought over many times over (from the french revolution to the cold war). To trivialize it is more than naive.

Tell me what you want, why you want it and how you believe will work best to get it

There are many things I personally want but underlying it all is the idea of non-egalitarianism. I want structure in any society where merit and hard-work are given the utmost priority. Why do I want it? Because it is the most natural and most proven way to create proper incentive structures for the best outcome for other humans and myself.

How will I get it? First of all, remove most, if not all, government involvement in citizens' affairs. Allow for free markets to prevail and for the best ideas and the best people to rise to the top. I will take aristocracy over democracy any day. Democracy has become a tool that's been used to take away the liberties of individuals in the guise of freedom and equality.

it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed

But it does. That's exactly the point. It's a pendulum of sorts. A symbiosis where one cannot exist without the other in equal proportion. For any 'reasonable' discourse to happen there must be the acknowledgement of this fact; right or left, you come to the table biased. The one-sided blame game won't work because all it does is exacerbate the situation.

very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

Here's a fallacy that was debunked in the election. If the very rich are 1%-ers then how is it that so many sound-minded individuals chose Trump? The math doesn't support your statement.

I stopped watching CNN as well because the bias was all too blatant and here I was all these years thinking that it was unbiased or at least tried to be balanced.

Marc Andreessen (whom I consider one of the smartest people I like to learn from) touches on this media issue here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0

Even Marc is deeply conflicted when it comes to this particular issue. I think Marc is a partially closeted rightist and it's understandable because he works in California which is largely leftist. If you've followed Marc on Twitter(when he used to post) and on is interviews, you'll notice he'll be deeply inclined towards rightist views (he'll mention Venezuela as a cautionary tale) but not even he had the courage to support the republican party during the last election. The only person I know who had the chutzpah to come out, so to speak, was Peter Thiel and I respect him deeply for this.

That said, even Thiel is human after all; he was supposed to attend the PFS(a conference led by one of the best right leaning economists of our times - Hans-Hermann Hoppe) last year but cancelled as it had begun to draw unwanted attention.

but please do not come away with the impression that all right-leaning people are unreasonable

Nor that even MOST right leaning people are unreasonable. It's all a matter of vantage point.

Edit: grammar