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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

This is probably a money laundry/tax evasion operation.

I don't believe these "big name Silicon Valley investors" just flush such amounts of money down a toilet without a hidden agenda.

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The big name valley investors got in at 50 cents per FIL in an advisor only pre-raise. The $180mm in the first hour is from your average Joe accredited investor who bought in at like $2.63 per FIL. The price is now $4.50+ for future investors. If there was a liquid resale market, the SV investors have nearly made 10x already. Of course, they cant resale for a while due to vesting and legal restrictions.

While crime is certainly a possibility, rich people just have so much money and they don't have that many options for where to put it. This is part of the reason why the housing crash happened; some new investment vehicle was created, and people with way too much money ate it up. And now with interest rates so low, the demand for high yield investments continues to grow.

After watching Ozark, I'm actually convinced that software is amazing for money laundering, it's stupid easy to generate huge amounts of fake data.

"Look, our food delivery app delivered 10,000,000 meals and everyone paid by cash!"

"Wow, we rented 10,000 homes through our short term rental app this month and everyone paid by cash!"

"Hey, we have an ATM that lets you convert money into NameCoin, sooo many people are using it, look at all this cash!"

From a bit of inside info from the aggregator side (think app - but let's keep it generic), there are some fraudulent activity in the 'seller' side and the aggregators pay a lot of attention to it.

"Uber for X" apps generally don't even accept cash; it's credit card or nothing. Building an app that accepts cash would be a red flag in itself.

Not in Germany (and I think also other european countries). People here love using cash, and so a lot of the startups go with it, or they would lose out on +50% of the market.

Why is that a red flag? Uber accepts cash. We are doing an Uber for X and accepting cash, cryptocoin, and limited credit cards (CC companies dislike adult services so it might involve too much cat-and-mouse to be worthwhile).

Not accepting cash seems like a the lack of features in an MVP. It's easier to handle CCs, but collecting cash in a sharing-economy situation is more work. It certainly isn't a good thing to not accept cash!

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