ghall

I'm glad to know I'm not alone in being shocked by Flightcar's service. I've also had a recent horrible experience with Flightcar, and unfortunately must also recommend users steer clear.

I've only seen this level of tone-deafness from startups that are about to die or startups that are about to raise big. Given they are still expanding aggressively into new cities I'd assume it's the latter and they're pushing a lemon onto VCs.

Thanks for posting @warrenmar

We'd like to host another debate, if any HN-ers would like to build a bot to compete in the debate please let me know, should be great fun! :)

Great article.

Given this spam attack, do you think it's a realistic goal for BTC to displace traditional payment networks. Visa routinely handles 2000 TPS. At this volume, wouldn't miner fees =~ cc fees?

My friend, I unfortunately cannot comment publicly outside our video due to legal sensitivities.

Of course, I always have an open door policy, provided any discussion is private and off the record.

Here's our video response to the allegations. Many thanks to all of our users for your continued support and trust!

http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/121768113883/sand-hill-ex...

So cool, thanks for sharing!

Most of our users at the time we got investigated were physically located in the same office space as us. We gave them a printout with the league rules and fielded questions in person. Based on their feedback and questions, we were updating our FAQs and peripheral pages.

The archive.org will show most of our content pages were in a permanent state of flux -- the only constant page was our terms of service, which quite clearly called us a "fantasy contest"

Have you ever tried fundraising with four Silicon Valley VCs subpoenaed in an SEC case against you?

It's a bit like advertising you have an STD on your Tinder profile.

SHX founding team member here. It's been great to read everybody's comments. I'm not going waste my time weighing in on whether we were clever hackers or bozos -- the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

I did want to share some additional facts, which will come to light when the statement of facts gets published.

  (1) We had exactly 55 paying users, who had deposited $1550 and 15.6 BTC.

  (2) All but 5 of these users were friends, family, or members of our accelerator.

  (3) Our private beta test had been in operation for 7 weeks.

Gabriel,

With a few months of back data at Sand Hill Exchange, we've found our results often shockingly accurate.

For example, even before we experimented with a profit incentive, our users forecast big increases in valuations on Slack (http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/101804376238/sand-hill-ex... ), Beepi, Mattermark, and Reddit, all of which proved true.

Our community also outperformed journalists: http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/101679447223/parsing-the-...

I won't tell you what the smart money has been betting on in the past few months, but it will be great to see how this pans out. Here's the January predictions of relevance: http://blog.sandhill.exchange/post/109527449373/january-2015...

We provide shorting at http://sandhill.exchange/, but it turns out most people are fundamentally optimistic about startups :)

Thanks for the mention!

As mentioned below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272670 ), we're excited to see many more players expanding the fantasy VC space -- startups are awesome and we need more utilities like this!

-- Gerrit Hall Co-Founder, Sand Hill Exchange gerrit AT sandhill DOT exchange

As a co-founder of Sand Hill Exchange (http://sandhill.exchange/), we're excited to see many people growing the burgeoning Fantasy VC ecosystem. I like Exchangel's focus on seed stage startups, as I feel this is where the most interesting entrepreneurial energy resides.

Obviously, there are many key differences -- Sand Hill Exchange in particular offers the ability short sell, profit, etc. We'll be spinning up a hacker news league on http://sandhill.exchange/ soon so you can all skip our waitlist!

-- Gerrit Hall Co-Founder, Sand Hill Exchange gerrit AT sandhill DOT exchange

Very true. We're finishing up a redesign that will hopefully make things clearer.

Hear hear, Buster is awesome!

Also wanted to point to a similar project we're building called Sand Hill Exchange (http://sandhill.exchange/ ). By offering a fluid marketplace with real-time changes in price, we provide the daily feedback startup junkies crave.

Great, I need to move some drugs