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Comment by nakamoto_damacy | Hacker News Reader

How did his books PREDICT crypto when we had eCash way before any of his books? SMH.

Most of his books are also dystopias, not operating manuals.

Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".

a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!

a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:

- DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing customers to orchestrate social media activity across thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!

- Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place live in-game bets with just a swipe!

- Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in their app. No VPN required!

> Cheddr

> Coverd

Even worse, they're bringing Web 2.0 startup names back...

Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)

If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.

Yeah, which book are we talking about? Reamde features crypto heavily, but I remember having bitcoins at the time it came out.

I imagine this is intended (though if it's AI-generated "intended" doesn't really apply) as a reference 1999's Cryptonomicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon

From that Wikipedia summary:

> Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency

Ah, yeah, I missed that one.

Digital Cash was invented by David Chaum in 1982, and developed by his company DigiCash in 1990. I read about it years before Cryptonomicon.

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