A16Z 2025 Big Ideas for Crypto | Hacker News Reader

A16Z 2025 Big Ideas for Crypto

a16zcrypto.com

12 pointswslh12 comments

The liquid democracy thing I find interesting. I guess I don’t trust that anyone with any semblance of power actually wants something that looks like direct democracy, so I’m suss that it would ever be implemented in a fair way, and I’m curious how something would be implemented by a group of people who are probably biased to believe the historical warnings against direct democracy.

I think the issues to evolve our democracies are not directly connected with technologies (e.g. crypto). Indeed as an incumbent I see that crypto "wants to" reinvent democracy and at the end they only find that they are just reinventing the wheel, or resulting in a square wheel. Democracy seems more linked to institutions and great organizations with strong fundamentals and good vision.

Regarding liquid democracy specifically I think it inherit the problems of issue oriented politics: "don’t miss the forest for the trees", democracies are looking for short term clientelistic policies because the short term pays better to politicians.

> Democracy seems more linked to institutions and great organizations with strong fundamentals and good vision.

Right. No part of me believes we'd have this functional a society today if the founders of America had resembled the values, motivations, and access to technology of the crypto/tech community.

I'm building a liquid democracy. The cool thing is that we won't bother applying it to "democracy" first — the killer app will actually be to computer your news feed, in a way that you control through your social network, rather than an AI.

Here's a prototype of it: https://peeryview.org. Check out the /about page. It's like Reddit or HN, but instead if having a single "moderator" with monopoly power over a set of "voters" with one vote each; you weight everyone's vote for your unique feed. And they weight a second layer of people's votes, etc.

We call this network a Web-of-Opinions, or a WoO. The Woo is subjective. It's soft. It's social. It determines your attention (in the news feed).

As it grows, it creates a new game-resistant reputation system, aka a "Liquid Democracy", that can be used for many things: like a Proof of Personhood, or an actual Democracy.

We just announced a protocol draft last week at https://braid.org/meeting-99. If you're interested, please give feedback here, in the braid group, or write me directly at toomim@gmail. This is the time!

Maybe a dumb question, but are stablecoins actually the cheapest way to send USD? This is a real problem for me: I have a house in Costa Rica, which I need to pay for with US assets. So I have to make regular transfers from US accounts to Costa Rican accounts. Is there a way to do, say, $5,000 USD in US account -> stablecoin -> USD in Costa Rica account for less than $50, including all exchange and transaction fees?

It really depends if you can find a (cryptocurrency) exchange that lets you withdraw to a bank account in Costa Rica. If you can find one, you don't even need stablecoins. The way it will work is

US Bank -> Deposit USD to US cryptocurrency exchange -> Trade USD for Bitcoin (or some other crypto that has cheap transfers, it doesn't really matter) -> Send Bitcoin from US cryptocurrency exchange to Costa Rica cryptocurrency exchange -> Trade Bitcoin for USD (or local currency) on Costa Rica cryptocurrency exchange -> Withdraw to Costa Rica local bank

Theoretically, all of these steps can be done with less than ~$1 in fees. My banks and exchanges let me deposit for free and withdraw any arbitrary amount for 50 cents. Sending any arbitrary amount of cryptocurrency should be cheaper than that. The big question is if an exchange exists that lets you withdraw to Costa Rica banks, and what they charge for that.

It all reduces to liquidity in both ends, no matter if they are stable coins (crypto), a foreign currency (fiat) or gold (real-asset). In Costa Rica (or elsewhere!) you will surely also have issues/high-fees with foreign currencies that are not in the top. If the liquidity problem is bot solved then find another way.

I'm guessing not, since you need to exchange it in both countries. As I understand it the article is comparing "sending USD directly to another countries bank account" to "sending stablecoin to another wallet", so it completely skips any inconvenience and fees associated with getting USD in and out of the stablecoin.

It really depends on how expensive/easy it is to off board in your Costa Rican account. But the fees for getting it there should be minimal, if not a bit convoluted. Ultimately, the cheapest way is to buy an ETH L2 or Solana stable coin. I think you can exchange USD<>USDC on coinbase. Then you can transfer it wherever for a couple cents.

I don't think you need stablecoins to do this, you just need a crypto exchange that supports withdrawing to your Costa Rican bank account

Yes, we can help you do this with ShieldPay.

We've helped onramp a seven-figure USD to stablecoin and then offramp directly into their bank at that fee.

We're licensed, backed by a16z CSS, Kraken, YC founders. Feel free to email me at isaiah@getshield.xyz.

I can't wait until AI plateaus and stops scaling horizontally across GPUs. Then the idea of agents will finally go away. AI cannot reason and to think otherwise is asinine.

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