geoffwoo

Soylent's an inspiration but I think it's overly harsh to say we're just copping their style. The design patterns were using are pretty common!

We did pretty extensive academic review on the ingredients and consulted folks at Stanford. We wouldn't want to ingest stuff that would mess ourselves up!

Thanks for checking us out!

Well, the idea was sort of those typical 'startup idea' tropes where it was a pain in the ass to make capsules... so why not abstract that away as a service!

Yeah, we wanted to minimize the caffeine dose because we don't want to mess with people's caffeine tolerance. Big coffee drinkers (3+ cups a day) who've helped us 'beta test' this were pleasantly surprised by how much alertness they derived from our product.

Unfortunately not ;)

Yup! Soylent's definitely an inspiration around innovation around nutrition!

Exciting opportunities in financial tech. Banks and their products have barely evolved, and new players with Silicon Valley aesthetics and execution are coming in and eating their lunch.

Addendum (4/26/2014): My focus is from a Computer Systems and Engineering perspective on the blockchain as a distributed database with trustless write access and it’s potential as a major component for new applications. Bitcoin, the application it was designed for, isn’t the focus here.

From a technical standpoint, the blockchain doesn’t open up any new ‘technical’ attributes. The blockchain does not enable any new sensors, nor does it enable an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth, storage, affordability, that doesn’t also apply to any other types of distributed stores of data. In fact, performance will be most probably be worse and at best will not be any better than existing trustful distributed datastores. In other words, any system built on a blockchain can be built on any other distributed datastore.

It does open up new ‘social’ attributes where trust is distributed away from existing central authorities, and there’s a line of argument that existing central authorities slow down innovation in regulated areas. We already see activity around finance and a new form of DNS. My point here is that trust is not magically removed from the story. Trust (in an economic sense) is simply transferred from an existing central authority to a new oligarchy of coredevs and early adopters.

Authority is a different sense, and in the cleanest arguments for blockchain’s potential, authority is transferred from humans to mathematics (any blockchain-based system transferring power to another set of humans is just not that interesting). My line here is that more important transactions tend to be ones that are disputed and thus regulated. Enforcing these decisions (especially in cases of real property and physical assets) therefore tend to be a function of the government. In one scenario if we follow this line to completion, I imagine a computer authority with drones and robots enforcing all contracts. This is perhaps a more trusted government because the blockchain-based datastores will be ground truth and there will be no need for human intervention. I don’t have any qualms against such a future. In this case, authority and trust is transferred from existing governments to properly carry out the will of the people (which a lot of people at any given time don’t think is happening), to authority and trust that every component of this humanless contract enforcement apparatus being properly implemented. But in the immediate and foreseeable timeframe, it’s unclear how this new authority will play with existing authority, and that’s really out of scope for this particular commentary.

Thanks for the responses and discussion!

I'm not trying to argue that decentralization is bad (Napster vs. BitTorrent is a great example). And there's a lot of cool technologies around decentralized / anonymized networking. My central point is that a trustless, distributed database i.e. the blockchain doesn't really offer practical advantages / new applications over what can be done today w/o such a database.

Charging back is protection for either one of the two transacting parties to protect themselves from misrepresentation from each other. The fact that it's one of the most popular features of a credit card would imply placing the naiveness on you. Laws/regulation exist because people are imperfect!

No, I think there's clear objective attributes that are different. Email vs. phone: async vs. sync, recorded vs. unrecorded, etc. The only real difference between blockchain vs. standard db is anyone can write who has 'x-coin' vs. trusted authority can write, and I argue that the difference really isn't that important.

For escrow, are we then not transferring trust from just one arbitrator to another now? Why re-invent the existing escrow system :)

1. Usually it takes a 10x improvement to make a switch from status quo to something new. To see a switch when the performance is much worse forces the benefits of blockchain to be extraordinarily compelling. And some of the benefits are not as rosy as initially conceived.

2. Agreed. This is status quo. I see a lot of arguments where folks claim that the blockchain creates a more egalitarian system. I wanted to explain why this wasn't necessarily the case here.

3. Agreed. However, the most important transactions are the ones most prone to arbitration, and arbitration requires authorities. Outside of valuable transactions is there really a need for such a complex database?

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Yeah, I make the distinction that while the distribution of power is relatively fair (determined strictly by processing power), the distribution of wealth (in the form of x-coins) is heavily skewed.

I don't have a problem with early adopters getting their just fruits, but to claim that it's more egalitarian than what exists today is misleading. The same argument can be claimed that Godaddy and other early DNS registrars are getting their just fruits by being early adopters of the current domain name registering system.

You're making strawman arguments e.g. a blockchain and a centralized database is much more similar than email and phone.

I wanted to note how it's used in practice.

I agree. These brands are story, but still have a basis on some superior quality with the end product. When the craftsmanship and material differences go to zero, it'll be interesting to see what that story will be.

We used Clerky for our notes when it was still in beta. Super simple, super easy. Great service.

We're looking forward to it!

ridejoy is pretty cool. try it out!