What is the purpose of venture capital?
Making money is not easy. Making a lot of money is even harder. For the most part, in order to make a lot of money, products/services in high demand must be met with corresponding supply. The process is not cheap.
To fund the extreme overhead costs of new "ventures"...
Businesses cost a LOT of money, and profit margins are usually extremely thin. If we were to pump a million dollars into such a venture and we earned back $1.1M in the first year, that would be an almost unheard of return. It could take five years for someone to make back all the money they spent in the beginning before they started turning a profit.
Let's have a look at Trezor.
They make hardware wallets. I own one. You can pick one of these things up in your hand and realize: wow, what a piece of shit. Seriously it probably costs less than $1 to make a Trezor if they were being built at scale.
The problem is Trezors aren't being built at scale. They are a small company providing an extremely niche service to people like us who are balls deep in the crypto arena.
- There was an overhead cost to build the software.
- They have employees to pay.
- They have to build the device themselves or outsource it.
- They have to ship their product all over the world.
- They are located in the Czech Republic.
- When you buy one from California the return address is an empty field.
- 6010 N. Cajon boulevard, San Bernadino, CA
So even though this one ounce 20-year old tech piece of plastic costs like nothing to make, they still charge quite a bit of money to anyone who wants to buy one. It's a supply and demand issue. There are very few hardware wallets and there are very few people who actually want to buy one so far. Combine that with the sheer amount of money that's being secured by this thing and the fact it's a struggling small business with little competition and we see how the markup could be so high.
Mainstream adoption
When crypto goes mainstream hardware wallets will be dirt cheap. More demand and more competition to meet said demand will push prices way down. In addition, all the software is open source so new companies that join the fray won't even have to write their own code.
I'm 99.9% sure that once we hit mainstream adoption all hardware-wallets will be air-gapped using QR codes and cameras as a bridge. It's all but guaranteed that governments will start secretly injecting backdoors into these things (if they haven't already), and an airgap is the only way to actually stop data from leaking from the device.
So why is Venture Capitalism doomed?
Because these magical open-source networks are their own central banks. Why the hell would we need startup capital? We ARE the startup capital. It all comes down to the fact that the Dot Com bubble is nothing like a crypto bubble.
Again, companies have employees that need to be paid. The more employees you get and the higher you scale up the more support employees you need to take care of the other employees. For example, every big business needs to hire a Human Resources department. Their entire job is the manage disputes, train new employees, and handle payroll and overturn.
Every big business needs accountants and possibly even a marketing team and salesmen. They need to maintain their branding and make connections with other businesses and middle-men. There's a lot of friction and waste that comes with scaling up.
Crypto has none of that.
There are diehard users on these emerging networks that don't do it for the "steady paycheck". They do it because they love it and they want to see it succeed. They do it because the old system is completely broken beyond repair. These networks are alive and they have souls. Corporations are soulless time-sucking vampires. There is no question as to which path has more potential. There's a reason we were forced to start over from square 1.
So so early.
We are so early in the game that every single crypto development team in the world is a centralized shithole. There's no such thing as decentralized development (YET!). These systems are complex and we are laying the groundwork for an entirely new economy that nobody understands. In fact this new economy runs completely contrary to everything we know about capitalism, so the people with the most money and the most experience with capitalism are transposing their completely incorrect skills into the cryptosphere.
Once we have decentralized development in play, venture capitalism becomes nothing but worthless toxic imperialist money that no one is going to touch with a ten-foot poll. Developers will work for the currency they are building. Proof-of-brain has a long way to go, that's for damn sure. Good thing Hive is on the front lines, even if the current implementation is an ugly one, it's better than the zero progress of other networks.
Conclusion
Venture capital exists to scale up an operation to meet demand and provide the huge overhead costs required to do so. Theoretically, digital economies have virtually zero overhead costs in comparison. There's no reason to allow these vultures to swoop in and own the things we're building because we don't need their money.
This new digital landscape is covered in gemstones but we don't yet have the templates required to mine the value. Our entire mindsets need to change. We need to start thinking about cooperation over competition; Synergy over zero-sum game theory. It's a lot harder than it sounds, because we have been brainwashed in the opposite direction for our entire lives. We need to unlearn what we have learned and help others do the same.
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Venture capital has been a bubble for years now all it was is passing hot potatos around! Having worked in it and dealt with these MBA assholes they really believe the shit that comes out of their mouth
I liken it to the NFT market it’s got fuckall to do with the business it’s just how much I can sell it on for to the next fund and the story I can sell about it’s future profitably
I’ll be so happy to see the cut throat open source market take over and render many of these people as useless as they’ve always been
Interesting irony for the Trezor. The device potential secures a Bitcoin token or Ether token worth 50k and its 20 year old technology?
Amazing...
I am waiting for capitalism to make something better
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It is a total paradigm shift that everyone needs to have, grasp, comprehend and then habituate into their daily lives. Hive and its tribes are good training ground for this paradigm shift as we get to see first hand how where value comes from.
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Ana, 💭 here comes the promo affiliate link
This went into a different direction than I expected.
Love this! 😂
@chekohler could you please paraphrase for me?
MY HEAD JUST GOT BLOWN OUT after reading all that was written above, I think I need to stand from my chair and get a lot of water.
I seriously need to study more business and finance... and oh not spend too much time in the kitchen ha 😁
LOL why not turn your time in the kitchen into a business? Create meal plans, sell them as eBooks, do cooking courses and training and sell them online, there's so much you can do and all on your own time
Venture capital is just a fancy word for looking for early-stage businesses you can give money and when they get big you cash out, think of the first people who invested in Facebook, for example, they made a fat profit by selling their shares each time others wanted to get in.
But where do these guys get the money to invest in these companies? Through central bank printing so everytime a cool thing is created they already own a piece of that and control it, and its the same people recycling the money. But with a Bitcion standard and open source code anyone can use, you can't just buy up companies and sell them on later. You can't make a bad idea good with enough money the way they do now.
You actually have to make a business that has to be profitable or people will dump their tokens or pull out their Bitcoin and leave your business immediately.
I agree with you completely regarding decentralized development. I am attempting to make a tribe of my own right now and am finding that there are relatively few references to learn how to get things going. Being early is quite difficult as you have nothing to really model yourself after, but it is also so exciting to be able to lay that groundwork you mention in whatever way we see fit
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I would very much want things to be built at scale and reduce costs. I could buy a Trezor but honestly, I just leave it in a digital wallet just because its easier and I didn't think it was worth the cost. Maybe if I load more crypto and I really want to be secured in the future I would do it. But if it could be produced at mass levels and sold at cheap prices, I think people would ditch some of the digital wallets.
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You can get pretty good security by signing up with 3 exchanges and setting up a hot-wallet on your phone. You really don't need a hardware wallet until you've got over a certain level. Maybe $10k or $20k.
Ah that's good to know. I haven't invested as much into crypto but I do have some sitting around. Digital wallets and exchanges tend to be where mine are right now.
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Man you're just knocking it out of the park lately with the good posts. I have zero exposure yet to the DeFi stuff mostly because I don't have time, but this is going to be the future for funding everything. It's like crowdfunding on steroids with no gatekeepers. Centralized venture capital firms will likely begin to dissolve as DeFi scales and your average entrepreneur can easily access funding through it.
I disagree on multiple points. First of all, conventional companies are the most efficient organizational structure on earth — along with militaries. I don't know of any crypto ecosystem that can ship as fast as Facebook could when it had the same amount of users. Without delegating power to a leader, groups lack a coherent vision and will fail to get much done.
Right now most crypto products look like shit. Soon they wont. Once the bar raises, building a quality product for launch will require startup capital. This could look like a token pre-sale like we see a lot of, but what value do buyers bring other than money? Not much. Venture capital is smart money. They have experience operating a business and provide mentorship when your company is stuck. There will always be a market for smart money, and a lot of venture capitalists are great people that helped make the internet go from nothing to the behemoth it is today. And increasingly more of them seem interested in crypto.
Marc Andreessen made the first internet browser. Now he's a VC, and his firm announced is about to put $1 billion into crypto venture.
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Are you in Cali?
The delegation of power, you are talking about speed we don't need fast decision we need circleminded ones, conventional companies maybe be the most efficent thing we have now but let me ask...are you afraid of what lies beyond?
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I agree with you. In the end, its up to owner of the idea. Ideas may worked both ways. Stakes can be dealt to people or hold by the company. Blockchain can go both ways, shared ownership of people, which would be problematic for an organizations and controlled ownership of the major skates by a company which holds the idea of the application or ecosystem. I think second would be less interesting but more organized and faster evolving.
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