zaguios

The offer was for $3 billion. They are worth $24 billion today…

In absolutely no world would have taking that offer been the right decision.

Uh, are we living in the same world? Javascript completely and fully dominates the web, he couldn't have been more wrong about how the future would turn out.

That's exactly my point, this makes the dark pattern calling the action "cancel" instead of disabling auto-renew? In general when I see the word cancel on the web it typically gets rid of something instantly.

I disagree about the point regarding "turn off auto-renew". This actually makes way more sense to me than "cancel". When I read "cancel" I am always worried that I may lose my current access that I paid for. When I know I am simply disabling auto renew I know that I will still have the remaining access that I paid for.

These companies do a lot of dark patterns, but you stressing things such as this and others really discredits your otherwise valid argument.

Devise does integrate with SSO, but you still have to set everything up yourself for all the main providers which takes a good bit of time with a lot of custom frontend work needed and a bit of extra backend as well. It would be nice to have SSO out of the box without the need for a bunch of manual setup which was kind of the promise of this bullet train thing.

This doesn't really have the types of features I would personally want as someone who has done a lot of rails development in the past.

The types of things I tend to need to set up in any modern app is SSO integration, React integrated on the frontend, etc... These are annoying things I have to integrate every time I build something and are more or less industry standard at this point.

I’ve personally had nothing but terrible experiences with Western Union. In contrast, sending money with crypto (not Coinbase which is a nightmare centralized layer which defeats the purpose of crypto) has had 0 issues for me.

RebellionBase | Sr. Software Engineer | Rails, React, Node, Solidity | REMOTE | Full-time | https://rebellionbase.com/

Rebellion DAO is a passive income distributing DAO that utilizes DeFi, identity, and democracy to create a new monetary ecosystem. The DAO itself exclusively invests & funds companies which use the DAOs native currency, REB, with the objective to create both DeFi and real world uses for the token. The protocol just launched, but in the past month the DAO has increased its assets from $30k to over $300k via organic growth and is accelerating rapidly.

What to expect:

- Build & develop user facing features for the RebellionBase website which acts as a portal into the DAOs smart contracts

- Be the first engineer on the team other than myself & help shape the foundations of RebellionBase

- Design & architect scalable solutions for a rapidly growing userbase with a strong emphasis on security

- Write and deploy smart contracts in solidity to handle additional feature requirements connected with the DAO

If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out. Prior crypto experience is not required, but a strong engineering background is necessary. Reach out to rebel@rebellionbase.com if you would like to apply.

The author is confused. The point isn't to have every little thing decentralized (though there are plenty of tools in the space to do this if you desire). The point is so that different centralized entities can build on top on the decentralized data in a way that can be trusted.

If I want to build my own decentralized exchange allowing people to trade their tokens I can without the permission of anyone. If I want to create my own NFT marketplace to compete with Opensea I can without the permission of anyone.

Yes, it costs money to do things on chain. That's the part you sacrifice, the benefit you receive is the fact there is no single point of failure. If a crypto exchange goes down it doesn't make the price of cryptos go to 0. Even if they were all taken down simultaneously you could easily spin one back up pretty quickly. Web3 is simply a tradeoff of cost vs openness & robustness. Most things have no need for Web3, but it certainly has it's place for certain types of projects.

Not OP, but I've visited several cities in China including Changsha and it's definitely one of my top 3 cities. The food and club scene there stood out to me in particular.

Employees are able to override the pin entering requirement. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this from happening if you happen to get targeted. (Speaking from experience)

SwiftDemand is a digital basic income where people can sign up, claim their daily stipend, and user their new currency to transact with one another. We earn a small cut of what each user receives as well as from transactions made through the platform.

A little more info on the revenue model:

There are 2 main streams of revenue, the first comes from transactions on the platform in which SwiftDemand receives a fee similar similar to that of Amazon. The second is that SwiftDemand receives Swifts for each identity that it manages (payed by the protocol itself). If we continue our growth we think it's more than possible to get 100 million users on the platform receiving $1-$10 per day generating around $0.10 to $1 a day in revenue per user that would put yearly revenue in the 10's of billions.

More details and justifications:

The first thing that needs to be understood is that there are essentially two separate pieces. There is the underlying Swift Protocol and then SwiftDemand itself. The Protocol is essentially a decentralized government with 3 components, Swift Citizens (regular people), Delegated Nodes (elected officials that have voting power and can forge new blocks), and Identity Providers (companies that can approve Swift Citizens and are responsible for preventing people from creating fake accounts). SwiftDemand is an Identity Provider that sits on top of the Swift Protocol.

SwiftDemand is incentivized to bring more people onto the platform since Identity Providers receive Swifts for each Swift Citizen that they actively manage. Identity Providers are also kept in check by the Delegated Nodes as they have the ability to remove Identity Providers that act poorly. If an Identity Provider did not have the motivation of profit, people would be less likely to create competing providers fostering less competition which would lead to a weaker ecosystem. We believe having a capitalistic system that is kept in check by the decentralized government is the optimal strategy to make the Swift Protocol successful.

To the numbers. We already have nearly 500,000 registered users with Swifts currently being value at somewhere around $0.001 to $0.005 based on transactions in the marketplace. User growth should remain relatively easy as our pitch to consumers is simply "sign up and receive free money" and we have achieved our entire userbase without any paid marketing. The trickier part is growing the economy part to the point where the value of Swifts can increase to $0.01 to $0.1 per Swift. We already have over 5,000 submitted products on the marketplace (mostly people that believe in SwiftDemand selling personal services), however our intention is to partner with bigger companies that can utilize our userbase essentially to give out promotional offers and consequently transition that into a larger economy over time. Based on our early adoption these numbers aren't unreasonable and should be more than achievable making SwiftDemand a strong investment opportunity.

To answer your other question:

- Why would people pay non-Swifts to buy Swifts?

Unlike most other currencies we're not really focused on getting people to trade between Swifts and non-Swifts. Our goal is to create a new currency with a fair distribution model. Our vision is to have people collect their Swifts, use their Swifts to buy goods and services that interest them, allow people to sell goods and services to receive more Swifts, and essentially create an entire economy without any need to convert their Swifts to non-Swifts or vice versa.

Other:

I'm curious if you have any suggestions on a better way to pitch the business opportunity to investors (YC and other). The consumer pitch is relatively straightforward as the value proposition is clear, but I do think I struggle on the investor side.

Here is the rejection email:

"Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund SwiftDemand. We were really impressed with the number of participants you have on the platform and the fact that people are doing transactions. However we struggled to convince ourselves that there was an underlying big business here. If this is going to be something that is economically meaningful to people to allow them to live on it, then it would be hard to for this to also be a billion dollar company and would probably be better suited to a non-profit."

The email shows two big misunderstandings in how SwiftDemand works. It's on me for not temporarily taking control of the interview once I realized the lens they were viewing SwiftDemand through.

This is meant as more of a disclaimer than a selling point. A small portion of users sign up, collect their Swifts and are then confused why they can't directly withdraw them in USD. We can probably change the language to be more positive while still conveying that point though.

Thanks for the feedback!

SwiftDemand is a fairly radical concept so initially I was worried that making claims too bold could come off as arrogant, but since we have now gained a lot more traction we should definitely revisit the copy on the landing page.

I like the conciseness of the 1 liner you proposed, the three sentence explainer is great as well, but we aren't necessarily looking to disintermediate the banking system, but rather to become a global currency that focuses on social economic good in the form of UBI.

A huge portion of our users are really focused on the crypto aspect of what we're doing. As we continue to gain a broader appeal we will likely de-emphasize the crypto part.

The struggle to communicate it was a problem with how YC perceives UBI due to their involvement in UBI research. They grasped the concept quickly, but the questions they asked were targeted primarily at whether or not it would be enough to actually support people, as well as my thoughts on current UBI initiatives rather than the market opportunity and underlying business. In short, they saw it as a charity and didn't dig deeper into the revenue model or vision.

Thanks again for your comments.

I applied for the last YC batch and got rejected. The interview was itself was completely outside of all the expectations that I had. I had done a bunch of preparation work doing practice interviews with YC alums as well as friends. Some of them asked the standard YC interview questions while others went off on tangents, but I felt I had really strong and clear answers to most of the questions they were likely to ask.

Unfortunately when I got into the interview, by the time they had asked the third question it was clear they had completely misinterpreted what I was doing. I knew in less than a minute into the interview that there was no chance I would be accepted. What I should have done was try to stop the interview and completely reframe what I was doing in a different context so they could more clearly understand. However, the 10 minutes goes by so quickly. The interview started and ended before I came to that realization (I did however try to interject at the last 30 seconds with some key points, but by that point it was too little too late).

I believe my situation was an exception to what normally happens given the nature of my company, but it was really disappointing to feel like I never got the chance to explain the unique insights I had into the space, how the company was managing such insane growth, and the vision for the future.

SwiftDemand | Blockchain Developer | San Francisco, CA| | ONSITE | https://www.swiftdemand.com/

SwiftDemand combines the concept of Universal Basic Income with the blockchain. It's SwiftDemand's mission to both create a platform where everyone in the world receives a small amount of income on a daily basis and build a currency that is used for day to day transactions in the same way you would interact with Amazon or Apple Pay.

In the month of January we have continued to grow very quickly from less than 30,000 users to over 85,000. So far we have distributed 165 million Swifts and we have a marketplace with over 600 submitted products. At this time SwiftDemand is not funded, however we are looking to raise money in a presale and already have committed interest from over 900 people. The presale process likely to be completed within the next 2 months.

There are two potential options: 1. We can begin talking now, and once SwiftDemand has concrete funding bring you on immediately following that. 2. Start before the presale has completed and be given a larger stake in both the currency and the company.

Whitepaper: https://github.com/swiftdemand/swiftprotocol

Other roles SwiftDemand will be hiring: Full Stack Engineer, Customer Support

If you are interested please email chris@swiftdemand.com

Yea, you are correct in stating that Bitcoin is much more similar to gold than it is an actual currency. That's one thing that I'm attempting to solve with Swift Demand, since coins are constantly being added to the economy you can't really use them as a long term investment and hope the price will increase. This will ideally lead to the currency having a stable value. As for making the currency move at a high velocity this is definitely one of my primary goals for making Swift Demand successful. My current plan is to implement an easy to use API and then get some online services on board to start accepting the currency to get the economy moving at a healthy speed.

An API is on my todo list. There are three main things I am looking to add in the near future:

An exchange to allow people to trade their coins for normal currency An API to allow businesses to easily hook Swift Demand into their platform Added verification requirements (This one depends on the rate of growth)

Yea, the extra account issue is something that I have thought a lot about. My initial plan is to slowly increase the requirements for information. In the very near future I will be making email verification a requirement. After that I will be adding required phone verification as an extra step. Eventually once the service grows large enough I will be forced to start requiring private information to ensure that people are unable to game the system by creating multiple accounts.

Inflation will be handled in by simply increasing the amount of coins given to users. For example if there is a target of 3% inflation YoY then then amount of coins given will be based on that target inflation level. Figuring out the exact numbers will be decided in the future once the service has gained mainstream adoption.

Hopefully the same way that Bitcoin established value. Speculation that the coins will be more valuable in the future. Obviously since the coins are constantly being generated you are never going to have the coins reach values of $1000 each, but it is possible if people suspect eventually they will be worth $0.10 a piece they might try to invest now by buying them at $0.01 a piece. Hopefully after this happens and the currency starts becoming more established it will be able to maintain that value.

You can check out some information on the stats page: https://www.swiftdemand.com/stats

I actually only released the website less than a week ago so it's still incredibly new, but people have already done some cool stuff with it. This guy set up a website to write haikus in exchange for coins http://swiftpoetry.club/

I'm planning on setting up a service to allow people to more easily exchange coins into their local countries currency and develop an API so websites can more easily accept Swift Demand as a payment option, but these things are still in the pipeline.

For anyone who is interested, I actually recently started a basic income experiment of my own. You can check it out here: https://www.swiftdemand.com/

Essentially the way that it works is that anyone who signs up will receive 100 coins each day and they may be freely traded among users. Ideally over time people will start assigning real world value to the coins and then the daily income you receive from Swift Demand will function exactly how Basic Income is supposed to work. If anyone has any questions or suggestions relating to the service I would love to discuss them.

I would love to discuss your disagreements, I've thought a great deal about my implementation, but there may very well be several ways I could improve my approach. Feel free to shoot me an email at zaguios@gmail.com if you would like to talk more.

I don't have anything set up yet to update people on new developments, but it is something that I'm looking at implementing soon as I continue development. I'll let you know once I set something up.

The 3% is there due to the fact that Swift Demand is trying to be more than just another currency. It's also supposed to be able to act as a way to perform normal day to day commerce. This 3% fee is needed to provide buyer and seller protections as well as support the development of new features for Swift Demand. I'm assuming you are asking why you want to use this over Paypal from a vendors point of view and there are several reasons.

The first one being that Paypal isn't known to very trustable and often freezes funds. The second is that I intend to eventually make a very developer friendly API that lets vendors add Swift Demand to their websites very easily. Early merchant adopters will also have the potential to set it up by allowing people to essentially sign up for their service for free by letting people set up a Swift Demand account and automatically transferring Swift Coins to the vendor for a subscription based service (This means merchants can sell their products without ever requiring a user to break out a credit card which could be a potential large source of extra revenue).

This is complete nonsense. There are no blog posts about SwiftDemand nor is there any place where you have to enter in sensitive data. If you want to make claims like this please cite sources instead of being an "online detective".

Edit: I just did some digging myself, it appears that there is another currency called Swiftcoin out there that is based on the blockchain that I was not aware of. Please be aware that this Swiftcoin is in no way related to Swift Demand. I may need to change the name of Swift Demand's currency to avoid people accidentally assuming these are related.

Second Edit: I have updated the website and removed all references to the term Swiftcoin. The website will continue to be SwiftDemand, but the currency will simply be called coins.

This is awesome, I'll take you up on that offer. Can you write a poem/haiku about Swift Demand itself? Coins have been sent.

For Swift Demand to work your account will need to be completely tied to your true identity. Initially the methods of verification aren't very strong to prevent any unneeded friction for early adopters of the service. Once Swift Coins start having real value I will be placing much stricter rules and requirements for identity verification. Starting with extremely strict regulations is both hard to enforce at the start and will harm the ability for Swift Demand to succeed.

Adding more money into the economy will constantly devalue it, you are correct. As I mentioned in another comment in order for this to work there needs to be speculation that the currency eventually will become more valuable and people start to buy it as a form in investment in a similar style to how bitcoin started. Once value has been established and new coins are created at a constant pace the hope is that it will be usable in the same fashion as any other form of currency.

Government due indeed print new cash, it is what causes the constant inflation that is present for all major currencies. All of your arguments appear like they would be the same for other real world currencies that do indeed function normally. There's a decent chance that it will fail, but I believe it's worth it to try.

Yea, it will be very difficult at the beginning to convince people to actually accept Swiftcoin for services. In order for this to occur there will need to be speculation that coins will be worth a certain amount in the future.

I.E. if a person is willing to make the bet that Swift Coins will become valuable in the future they might try to buy a large amount now for a discounted price so in the future they can turn a profit. Once this begins to occur it will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy since more users will want to sign up since the coins will have value due to people buying them as an investment. Once the price stabilizes at a reasonable number it can then proceed to be used as a normal currency.