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There were a few cryptos that tried the exact same thing before Maker. Notably NuBits and BitShares, both of who had dollar equivalents with what was at the time more collateral in their native crypto than the dollar peg. In all instances at some point the collateral value collapsed and the whole thing went kaput (more or less at once).

That said I have high respect for the Maker team and the overall idea. They are some of the best people working in crypto right now.

I've heard this from people other than yourself but are there any write ups or documentation of the "early days" of MMA/UFC?

If someone would compile it this is the sort of report I would read (and pay for) gladly (i.e. what martial arts are used in military / police academies and the rationale).

All the more reason to support a social media platform that creates extreme groupthink?

I know that dog created the universe with a pair of parentheses and after that it was pretty much backwards and uphill.

ok maybe not: https://xkcd.com/224/

TLDR: Two zero days. Complex social engineering including spoofed university emails and identities. Not a lot of detail.

Grade inflation is a relic of the Vietnam war era where grades were systematically inflated to keep people from the draft. Also happened uniformly across top tier schools and its hard to do a rollback (especially at one institution only).

There are many nomic games which involve a starting rule set and a subset of the rules that are mutable. Those are the most playable ones in my estimation.

I tried leaving a negative review once. It was a disaster. I stopped using Airbnb. I started using HotelTonight. Soon it looks like I might have to consider something else.

Point of symphony was the privacy focus. If you are a bank you could imagine the issue with have all your data in Slack or a Bloomberg chat DB.

How did you get rid of the wall? From my experience with FB apps and desktop experience they always feed you back into the wall. I haven't found an effective way of blocking it yet. FWIW on the phone I uninstalled the FB app ages ago and only use the Messenger app.

To me this illustrates a huge opportunity: big tech can't effectively engage with public good projects (e.g. typical government territory). What's needed is a tech gov superlayer that provides an umbrella for these services and can also guarantee their internal integrity. The lack of guarantee over this last point is one major problem here.

Among other things it's virtually a HN rule at this point that the top voted post is critical. A purely positive post is a clear red flag and indicates sarcasm or some other snark.

I work on and advise several projects involving protection and cyber-security, specifically within the blockchain space.

I'm hiring ;)

Here's the earliest legal work on this stuff which will probably interest you:

https://coincenter.org/entry/reporting-back-from-the-blockch...

The textbook definition of a security is expecting to profit based on the efforts of a third party.

For Goliaths the optimal strategy I found was to tail them and wait until they ran into some trouble on the front end. Its easier to make it a pack kill. Wait for a moment of weakness and then finish it off.

In general the optimal strategy seems to be sniping. Stay on the edges of the map (N. Europe, mid Africa) and then sweep in to more highly trafficked areas and pump in missiles. If you are ever hit retreat immediately until you recover your health. That's a pretty low risk way to stay at the top of the leaderboard.

The pricing is very unclear from even three clicks in from that link, only that it is some sort of add on service.

Thanks for understanding me. Unfortunately my original comment seems to have been massively downvoted by uninformed HN readers.

There was also no evidence you could do sub one minute blocks for Proof-of-Work. Then Vitalik read the ghost paper and figured it out. Put enough very smart people working on hard problems and eventually they will figure some of them out.

For 100+ person events? What coffee shops have 100+ person spaces? I have the same problem described and space is always an issue. I live in Silicon Valley and i can't think of a single bar that has a space of that size or that would let you use it or that noise pollution wouldn't be an issue.

Founder of the first ICO platform here (April '14, SWARM) and early contributor to the Ethereum project.

I half-left the industry for a few reasons:

(1) Current crypto-markets highly favor "smoke and mirror" hype-driven approach to product as opposed to a user and product centric approach.

(2) Most "businesses" in the space are basically about skimming money off the top of a frothy market and effectively encouraging the scammy parts of the system. I suppose I could be making a lot of money this way right now but would highly violate my personal ethics to do so.

(3) It is exceedingly difficult to tie any sort of standard value to a blockchain-issued token, partially because of the complex regulatory framework around such offerings

(4) The libertarian bias of the industry effectively forces a massive head on collision between the incumbents (e.g. the SEC) and folks trying to circumvent their control, also effectively guaranteeing some version of "blood on the streets."

That said, as someone who founded the first platform dedicated to these topics I obviously think there are a lot of positive elements that are possible. Including:

(1) Streamlining and adding efficiency to capital markets by removing middlemen

(2) Funding novel highly sophisticated technological projects that would be difficult to get funding for in the VC world (Ethereum, DASH)

(3) Creating broader incentivization than exists in traditional funding models such that users of a product are directly incentivized by its success

(4) Allowing for novel forms of governance and organizations that are not bound by the legal system of any specific legal jurisdiction (e.g. DAOs)

All of these ultimately have high value. However, I think what we are likely to see is a major phase of consolidation after the current hype cycle wears off (much as what happened with "the DAO").

The reality is that ICOs are mostly scammy and useless projects at the moment with a few shining examples.

DISCLOSURE: I don't mean to critique any particular political philosophy in this post. If I have criticism it is more directed to tactics and strategy.

Here's some more context:

Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off.

Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x.

No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed) points out every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public amounts.

I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your access to it, and both of these are rather questionable.

Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that inspires the most confidence.

I've had several personal interactions with Prof. Puett. He's sort of like a new American Emerson, spartan in lifestyle, and incredibly inspiring both in his intellectual rigor and dedication to principles. I highly suspect he his having an extremely outsized impact at Harvard.

Is that equally true of the incubator side and Research?

Does YC have any evolving thesis as it comes to particular technologies, such as Blockchain or Quantum technologies? For example, are there attempts to achieve internal consensus on the use of Ethereum?

(Full disclosure: I applied with an Ethereum wallet one year ago and got an interview but was told that the path to market wasn't clear enough. The project was ultimately absorbed into a different incubator. )

My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667), in which many commentators noted that many high value applications were probably illegal.

As enthusiastic as I remain about the overall premise of equity replacements issued on cryptographically secure ledgers (including Etheruem, which I started with by running the educational channel Ethercasts), I don't see anything in this presentation that indicates that the massive challenges regarding nation-state regulation have been solved.

Even were one to go on the premise that one can effectively run this in a sandbox away from standard nation-state regulation, one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?

This and related effects caused ~2 years of delays in my own implementation.

I'll note I remain optimistic and positive about all related efforts in this field.

Same boat here. I co-founded a few Ethereum related meetups, including the Silicon Valley one. I think one of the big problems here is that a lot of the "business thinking" type folks are pushed to the side, as well as some brilliant but non-standard tech minds.

I notice that a few times when various people (including myself) raised critical feedback we were marginalized. I know a few brilliant people who were kicked out of various Ethereum related stack channels for non-conformity, for example.

Next up, Rilke week? ;)