joefigura

That guidance is about ICOs that are investment contracts. Lots of tokens appear to meet the definition of an investment contract, but not everything called an ICO is an investment contract. The whole point of that guidance is to help people issuing an ICO to determine what's an investment contract.

But Coinbase doesn't host any ICOs, and they reject ICO tokens that look like securities! Here is Coinbase's guidance to its users on that point:

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto...

They say as much in their press release, if anyone would read it:

"Coinbase has a rigorous process to analyze and review each digital asset before making it available on our exchange... This process includes an analysis of whether the asset could be considered to be a security, and also considers regulatory compliance and information security aspects of the asset. 90%+ of assets that we review are not ultimately listed on Coinbase because they do not meet these standards."

Coinbase says they don't list digital assets that could be considered securities! Everyone's hand-waving that Coinbase has obviously done something wrong, but no-one can point out specifically what. There's a disagreement on fact here - either the SEC tells Coinbase what it's doing wrong, and they can comply, or they don't and it gets settled by a court.

Edit: Updated the comment since articbull rightly pointed out that Coinbase does list some tokens that were originally issued in ICOs.

Coinbase claims that none of the crypto assets it lists meet that test. For the coins Coinbase lists:

  - Criteria #2 is debatable
  - They don't meet criteria #3
  - Or they don't meet criteria #4

Lots of coins look like commodities. They represent a digital asset, not ownership in a common enterprise or a loan. CFTC officials have said as much, as Coinbase quoted: "the SEC has no authority over pure commodities or their trading venues, whether those commodities are wheat, gold, oil…or crypto assets." - Then-CFTC Commissioner Quintenz

Coinbase believes that all of the tokens they list are securities. The SEC needs to tell Coinbase specifically what it believes they are doing wrong - it will have to eventually, if it files suit.

It feels like a lot of people have knee-jerk crypto=bad reactions. But read their press release - it really sounds like Coinbase is trying their best to comply with U.S. regulation, and the regulators aren't doing their jobs.

And last - For digital assets that do look like securities, the SEC provides no way to register them, and thus vaguely implies that Americans can't own digital securities. That's not their decision to make - they either have to do their job and regulate crypto securities, or get congress to ban them.

Edit: arcticbull pointed out that many digital assets do seem like securities (ICOs). Updated this comment with Coinbase's claim that they don't list any tokens that resemble securities

Yeah, it's like a stampede in a crowded theater - once the panic sets in everyone's fleeing for the exit and telling everyone else to go too. You could call that coordination, but it's more like once the panic starts it will carry itself out.

Brex could offer loans up to 25% of the borrower's funds stuck in SVB. As long as depositors receive at least 25 cents on the dollar, the loans would be paid back in full, and the borrower would have gotten significant working capital in the interim.

SVB's carcass still has significant assets, so Brex can set that % number based on what they know about SVB's state, to make the loans almost risk-free.

I'm not a banker and have no idea if this is actually what Brex is offering. That public page doesn't discuss terms at all, which makes sense given the chaos. But there's certainly ways to structure these loans without much risk.

reddit.com/r/askengineers tends to be heavier in conventional engineering / industrials. IDK if they allow recruiting posts.

But I think CS people tend to be much more online, since they build the internet and all.

YC has funded multiple companies drone delivery companies - Volansi, Pyka, Flirtey, etc., and they've also funded a jetpack company (Jetpack Aviation). Being too ambitious or too difficult is not an issue, and if you want to apply to YC you should

Cool stuff! A low-noise low spam alternative to Google is desperately needed. Excited to see where the product goes!

How do you plan to make money?

Found a bug on one search result - searching "chicken salad recipes" produces a solid blue screen.

Awesome to see your progress! Good luck deploying more solar!

This doesn't remove CO2 from the ocean, right? It instead mixes the ocean better to increase the total CO2 absorbed in the ocean, reducing atmospheric CO2?

It sounds like a cool idea but is not really related to what AirMyne is trying to do! Lots of ideas are promising and people need to be working on all of them

Very interesting work and it's cool to see glimpses of the future in biotechnology. How would this technology get to gigaton-scale carbon removal?

It seems that the options to use the trees to sequester carbon are to #1 leave them as live forest, #2 cut them down and use them for wood, or #3 convert the biomass to biochar or bio-oil and sequester it, before regrowing new trees. (slightly different schema than ZYinMD's comment)

#1 would require covering large land areas with your trees. Do you know how much land? It seems that could displace natural forests. Reforestation projects with native trees offer the possibility of restoring native ecosystems eventually. These trees would store more carbon per acre, but at the cost of permanently displacing native trees from that land. You mention reforesting mine land and other degraded land, which seems like a great idea - how much CO2 can you sequester with that sort of land alone?

For #2, unless you can increase total world wood production it seems like there wouldn't be a climate impact, because all wood produced today is already sequestering carbon.

#3 might work but you don't mention it. Biochar and bio-oil don't necessarily require poplars. The figure of merit for plants grown for biomass would be $/kg of biomass, or kg/acre. Based some of the discussion it sounds like empress trees or other even faster growing plants could produce more biomass, and for this application might be better suited.

Sorry about being late to the party!

Agree, the societal benefits of 5G are far higher than the cost of retrofitting aircraft with radar altimeters that are compatible with 5G.

I've been using Shortwave in Alpha for about five months and I think you're reacting far too strongly to one line in the blog post. The product does a bunch of things that encourage an Inbox-zero workflow. Emails are organized as a to-do list, and the archive feature is way more prominent than in Gmail, so the most natural workflow is to go down your inbox and check things off. Most of the organization described happens automatically. And the organization helps getting to zero - all of the confluence notifications I get, for instance, are grouped in a single thread and I can scan and archive them quickly.

I get to inbox zero 2-3 times a week, and that wasn't happening before when I was using the Gmail client.

> I need systems that make it easy to extract the relevant informations from them, and put the result in one central organized place for action, and another one for archive. A system that filters noise, and get me in control. That's it.

Yes! In my experience Shortwave is better at this than the client I was using previously. I think it actually addresses some of your issues with email.

Very exciting product, congratulations on the launch!

Buoyant Aero | Mechanical, Controls, and Aerodynamics Engineers | SF Bay Area | Full-time | https://www.buoyant.aero

Buoyant Aero builds small, unmanned airships for cargo delivery. We'll use our airships to deliver goods flexibly and cheaply in rural areas.

We offer the opportunity to design and fly a new type of aircraft, joining the project at its earliest stages. We've raised our seed round and are looking for engineers who care about hardware and who want to make it easier to move goods in underserved areas.

For more information, check out this article: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/27/yc-grad-buoyant-wants-to-s...

If interested, email me directly at joe@buoyant.aero. Thanks!

The development you're describing is the whole goal of upzoning, and the intended effect. Where you once had a single family home, you now have multiple units.

The brand-new townhouses sell for many millions because they're brand new. But adding new units relieves price pressure on the rest of the market - every person that moves into a brand new townhouse is therefore not moving in to older houses in other neighborhoods.

You're making out like a bandit because you're creating new wealth. Where there was only one housing unit, there are now many. This is a win for everyone involved, it's net positive.

> Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve

People say this, but it's not true. The U.S, particularly in growing areas, has not built enough homes per capita since the real estate bubble, and so prices go up[1]. It's as simple as that.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-underbuilding-housing-ove...

Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it.

The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!

Thanks for linking! Cool to see this on HN again

The full company name is "Buoyant Aero" for that reason! We often shorten it to Buoyant, but may use the full name more if it's a recurring point of confusion.

Yup, this is basically it. It's impossible to compete with a truck that's fully loaded, but there are tons of short middle mile trips where trucks aren't fully loaded (LTL or less-than-truckload freight). This type of freight is surprisingly inefficient, particularly in low density areas.

One clarification, the full-scale version's max speed is ~75 mph, and typical cruise speeds will be 50-60 mph. The 35 mph number in the article is our subscale prototype. We loose range in a headwind, but on most days the aircraft has more than enough range to complete our target missions. And on the days the weather's too bad to fly, many other small aircraft are grounded too. - Joe from Buoyant

That's not the case. The energy per mile depends only on the L/D ratio and the mass of the aircraft.

L/D is a ratio of forces, and work = force times distance. Going faster at the same L/D decreases the travel time but increases the power used, for the same energy usage. Generally L/D depends on speed, but you can get an apples-to-apples comparison of the energy usage of two different aircraft by comparing only L/D.

I think we might be discussing two different figures of merit. The efficiency that I care about is "energy per lb of payload per mile." You haven't defined what you mean by "efficiency per mile," but from the reference to von Karman efficiency, I think you have a figure-of-merit in mind that includes speed - specific resistance or productivity or something like that.

But the economics of our vehicle and use case don't really change with speed. The middle mile legs that we're flying are not fully-utilized - the most important thing is to get the cost per flight down, so that we can dispatch the aircraft whenever there's a delivery ready.

Very cool! I struggled with this exact problem at a previous role to generate reports from the results of a simulation codebase. Ended up learning and using Django, which always felt overpowered for a simple static report. Excited to see how the product develops!

We're planning to do this! Ben is a big fan of flight simulators and we'll build a model once things calm down a bit post YC

We built the current prototype on the YC investment. Before that, I self funded. The current prototype's 20 ft and cheaper than you might expect.

We've found YC enormously helpful and worth the dilution, providing structure, advice, and also momentum. We've gotten a ton done this summer!

Definitely. This is a longer term market and hard to quantify so we talk less about it, but we think that vertical takeoff aircraft that don't use the road or rail system will enable tons of new routes.

On 1, It was surprisingly easy to get started. We fly under Part 107, which basically says as long as you're flying low, in line of sight, and not over people you're unrestricted. And we found a local municipal airport that has a drone test range, and they've been enormously helpful.

On 2, we're big fans of vertical integration and will definitely manufacture the envelopes in house. Goal is to build the envelope/structure, and buy the propulsion/avionics off the shelf.

Our primary value proposition is cost, but we're also faster on most routes because we fly point-to-point. To start off with, we're selling to customers who already fly cargo aircraft in areas where roads aren't an option. Our airship is much cheaper than the planes they currently use. Longer term, we think we're competitive with trucks for less-than-truckload cargo and in low population density areas.

The two most important efficiency metrics are Lift to drag ratio (L/D) and energy per payload mass per distance.

Lift to drag ratio describes the aerodynamic efficiency of the vehicle. Typical values, depending on flight conditions, are 4-5 for a helicopter, 8-13 for small planes, and 12-16 for our airships. (Large planes can get as high as 17, but a larger airship would be also be even more efficient). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift-to-drag_ratio#Examples_of...

From the L/D ratio and the propulsion system efficiency you can calculate the total energy used, and divide that by the payload mass to get energy/kg/km.

Standard drone regulations in the U.S. allow mostly unrestricted flight up to 400 feet. We think that's about the right altitude to stay below general aviation - no obvious advantages to flying higher - but TBD depending on how regulations evolve

We think we're starting at about the right time to skip straight to aviation hydrogen. Several companies are working on fuel cells and infrastructure specifically for aviation. We're starting with the battery version, and by the time we deploy the hydrogen version in the middle of the decade we expect the cost to have come down a lot.

If we're successful, these airships will be flying for decades to come. The extreme weather this summer and the recent IPCC report has driven home how important it is for new forms of transportation to be zero emission from the beginning.