The simplest explanation is that this is a mostly symbolic move: They want to show that the stable coin and crypto companies they invest in are actually trusted by YC. It starts to look hypocritical if an investor is funding crypto companies and praising them as important breakthroughs, but not actually using them where it’s important.
Advising unproven risky businesses to depend on other unproven risky businesses? Doesn’t that just increase the likelihood that something goes wrong?
I'm convinced the point of YC must be something other than launching successful businesses
Why wouldn’t they?
I would consider that a risk decreaser, because the loop creates a stronger fit signal.
Even more powerful, since across a cohort the encouragement is N-way, or really N^2-way, it actually lowers risk on average the more startups act as each others’ early customers.
And co-adopters benefit from getting unusually responsive suppliers with a strong indirect stake in mutual success.
Encourage isnt a requirement. Adopt only if it makes sense.
Read carefully: They’re not actually advising that startups prefer it. They’re allowing it as an option.
It doesn’t mean that it will actually be used. They just don’t want to appear like they’re avoiding the companies they’re funding. It’s a bad look.
> YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged (…)
“Encouraging” means advising, advocating for, not “allowing as an option”. I don’t know if YC really does that, but that’s the conversation. It’s about the claim made in a comment, not the submission.
Yes, I understood that perfectly.
> I wasn't claiming they encouraged the use of stablecoins.
Neither have I claimed you did.
> I was adding historical context to the move.
Yes, I know. All my answers are congruent with that.
Are you saying founders don't mount an FTP account using curlftpfs and access it using SVN?
What a strange toss-up.
See for yourself the blacklist features
https://github.com/circlefin/stablecoin-evm/tree/master/scri...
No, it's not. It's not possible to come to the US soldiers with a bunch of US dollars and some demands and get what's demanded in return for the dollars.
Only trust of the other market participants backs the US dollar.
Break in, bash owner about with a wrench, get coins. <Insert xkcd>
There are ways to prevent this. Like using multi-sig with geographical separation (so you can't move funds alone) or setting up forced time-delays. Ultimately, being your own bank is a massive responsibility, and I think too many people take that reality too lightly.
Our knowledge is constantly expanding, allowing us to build things differently than we used to. Modern cryptography, which makes things like multi-sig possible, is only a few decades old; it didn't even exist when the current banking industry was being established.
The people that did exactly that never had to worry about (hyper)inflation...
Oh but hey, checkmate, burglar who is threatening to cut my daughter’s finger, my wallet is multisig !
It’s the same logic as iPhones bricking themselves after being stolen. Even if your specific phone isn't an iPhone, the fact that most phones are now useless to thieves discourages the crime across the board.
Gold is interesting because more of it was being mined and produced all the time. There wasn’t even a finite amount of gold.
Thinking that a gold standard means no inflation (or in practical terms, deflation as the population grows) is a modern fantasy.
It’s a sign of commitment to something they’ve invested in as OPs says.
For states:
They quietly inflate the money supply by forking fiat, achieving monetary base expansion without the political cost of explicit money creation
For issuers:
They convert user deposits into a private mint: risk-free interest on collateralized reserves, with none of the upside shared with holders
For users:
For everyone but the unbanked & criminals, stablecoins are strictly inferior money surrogate: no yield, no guarantees, and no recourse