To chime in with the choir, you do get it. You bring up OpenSea and I can give you an example of the defeat-of-decentralization that you mention. One of the things that commonly appeals to people about the idea of NFTs is that smart contracts allow for things like a resale fee (points) to go back to the original owner automatically for all future resale transactions. But you actually can't automatically receive the resale stipulation if the resale of the NFT takes place off of the OpenSea platform due to its design, which is basically an intermediary smart contract that has the functionality that allows for the points to be assigned.
I'm not a decentralization purist so I can't say that "Web 3.0" centralization bothers me in and of itself. I do think it dulls a lot of arguments of there being great innovation in this specific area, especially when your non-fungible token consists of a URL string. Real-world, existing laws and regulation apply to this new stuff already, as you indicate.
If you're in the HN knee-jerk native digital assets hate camp, this is how you attempt to refute bitcoin. As someone who has stood up to FUD about bitcoin on this forum, this paper provides the ammunition that's actually needed and is relevant to discussion on this forum.
> Going through monetary history, we show how a true numeraire must be one of minimum variance with respect to an arbitrary basket of goods and services
The issue with this paper that I can see is it that it's a purely economic analysis that makes no mention of the inherent value of the technological underpinnings. In other words, it abandons some practical business valuations to the exclusivity of economic/financial ones. I don't think it's reasonable to say that the technological solution to game theoretic challenges like double spending on public digital networks indicates a final value of 0 as he does. I have no idea how to value this properly but have seen proofs by geniuses that are in complete contradiction to each other on the matter.
Refuting crypto is an exercise in futility, because there are only two types of people in that space: True believers who act like literal cultists and who are beyond the reach of rational arguments and hustlers who understand that it is nonsense, but will never admit that, because they are just there to make money from the first group.
I guess I'm not really "in that space" even though I work with various companies who call their projects "cryptocurrencies", as I'm neither of those two groups.
Maybe there is a third group: Believes that are some uses with cryptocurrencies, but most of the space is over-hyped, but that doesn't mean everything is vaporware, and someone who doesn't care about the money earned by working in it but rather that it replaces money as we know it today.
It's being downvoted because these kinds of black and white arguments which just call people names don't actually add anything to understanding. There are plenty of people other than died-in-the-wool haters or blind enthusiasts/hucksters. I personally fall between those two camps as do several others in these threads.
I'm not entirely sure either (and I didn't, for the record) but I could imagine why people would. Grouping a huge industry into just two groups generally is seen as over-simplification, and I would agree with that. There are clearly people working in the space that don't fit in in either groups.
Smearing an entire group of people by claiming they’re exclusively “literal cultists” or scammers and providing no additional argument for such a strong claim is the definition of a low-quality comment.
If your only goal is to persuade people who have no interest in utilizing reason, or to dazzle people who already agree with you with your rhetorical skills, then sure, there’s not much point. But if you actually want to utilize reason yourself and construct or refine a rational argument, that’s certainly not futile.
I wonder if you have thought about why you only see the subject in black and white? Is this something you do for other subjects as well? If so, getting to the bottom of what leads to this thought pattern would be very valuable to you I think. Then you could come up with strategies to avoid this.
To be fair to Mr. Taleb, he does mention the technology argument at the very end of his paper in the conclusion - although his counterargument is very much a handwave.
"The customary standard argument is that "bitcoin has its flaws but we are getting a great technology; we will do wonders with the blockchain". No, there is no evidence that we are getting a great technology — unless "great technology" doesn’t mean "useful". And at the time of writing —in spite of all the fanfare — we have done still close to nothing with the blockchain.
So we close with a Damascus joke. One vendor was selling the exact same variety of cucumbers at two different prices. "Why is this one twice the price?", the merchant was asked. "They came on higher quality mules" was the answer.
We only judge a technology by how it solves problems, not by what technological attributes it has."
Obviously you’re not under a moral obligation to make an argument, but what I think the OP means is if you want to actually convince people, and thus actually reduce the usage of cryptocurrency, then this is how you would do it.
The fact that I think that all cryptocurrencies are worthless in their current form does not mean that I need to convince people at large of this. (I may want to convince my friends, but my friends are generally already convinced.)
The religious argument (I must convert everyone!) resonates most strongly with current true believers. It is the same projection that many Prosperity Gospel Christians feel about atheists wanting to convert them.
I've asked a lot of people what cryptocurrencies are good for, and read many articles on what people think cryptocurrencies are good for, and they never give a satisfactory answer. So: either I haven't asked the right people, or nobody has a good answer. My current prior is about 90% that a good use for cryptocurrency in their current form has yet to be invented, and may never be.
Answers I've seen:
- you can do various crimes.
- you can gamble in many ways.
- you can send cryptocurrency to people in places which have reliable electrical, computing and networking environments but no Western Union or equivalent, and they can use that in place of the local currency with other people who are similarly inclined. (Why you would want to do this is rarely specified.)
- you can have fun being part of competing/cooperating cults.
Regarding your third point, the argument I've heard for it that I sort of understand is if you're living under a crazy dictator (or other less than stable government) who has ruined the local currency and you have no other way to store or transfer your hard earned money. So you resort to crypto.
Is there a name for the phenomenon that just happened here? The GP was speaking from an principled/idealist perspective and you replied with a realpolitik perspective.
I see this a lot in discussions and parties mostly end up talking past each other.
> I don’t need to refute cryptocurrency for the same reason the onus isn’t on me to disprove the existence of god.
If you believe Bitcoin is a terrible idea and/or will eventually be you obviously can abstain from it.
But if you feel significant portions of society are becoming trapped in it, and will reach an unfortunate end result, that is relevant to you. If you live in that shared society the failure of that idea will impact you. If you are concerned about the future impact on you, you have a reason to be concerned about refuting it.
If a bunch of people join a cult, I don't care. If a bunch of people join a cult, and believe that judgement day is at the end of 2022, that they will set fire to all the buildings and people in around them as a test, and their god/leader will protect the true believers leaving them unharmed, I do care. A lot.
So the question isn't do you have an obligation to correct everyone who is wrong. The question is, what are the consequences of the belief continuing to spread, and does it negatively/harmfuly impact society and me as a member.
> Going through monetary history, we show how a true numeraire must be one of minimum variance with respect to an arbitrary basket of goods and services
This isn't true. In the 14th century, for example, someone would find a silver mine, get the blessing of the king and start making money. Money wasn't connected in any way to "an arbitrary basket of goods and services." If Taleb rejects silver coins as a 'true' numeraire then he's just arguing a definition.
There are many crypto-enthusiasts for whom no level of rigor will ever satisfy them despite being obsessed with various "whitepapers" which are mostly marketing fluff. They endlessly defer to various whataboutism's until you find out they are taking an inherently political position (usually some sort of neo-libertarian) and hence the "merits" of the proposed currency _really_ only apply to people who are disenfranchised by existing economic systems. Usually, little is said of how to improve existing systems as that challenges the notion that the status quo is so flawed that it needs to be replaced wholesale.
Why do you have to refute cryptocurrencies to anyone? Make up your own mind and leave it at that. I'm atheist, but I'm not gonna go around and try to refute religion just because I don't believe in it, although I do think it does more harm than good.
People will believe in what they want to believe in, and there is little you can do to change their mind if it's already made up.
I was doing just this until they came up with that silly "web 3.0" moniker which is trying to attract developers for smart contracts. As a developer, I have zero desire to code for any of that stuff as it sounds like a security nightmare. Hopefully other developers here reach similar conclusions in light of good discussion on HN; but that could be naive as you suggest.
But then you've haven't been doing that at all? "web3" has been around as a concept since before Ethereum was even launched, plenty of people in the space have been talking about it for ages (internet time), and it is nothing new. What is new is the internet outrage against it, but easy to avoid that outrage too.
If you have zero desire for something, just stay away? I don't want to write Java code, so I don't.
Hopefully other developers will do whatever the fuck they want to do. Wanna work on cryptocurrencies? Go for it. Wanna write Java code? Sure, why not! Why care about what others are doing?
The best part is, in the pure Web 3.0 vision, http:// would be deprecated. It's somewhat absurd. The description of a proposed post-WWW Internet as "the Web" is incoherent. That being said, I think there are some critically important ideas involved. I came up with the term Internet 4 as a substitute but that's also not exactly accurate.
What is this "pure Web 3.0 vision" you talk about? As originally meant by Gavin Wood, Web3 is an idea or concept, not a particular technology. If it's using http (the protocol) or not has nothing to do with that particular meaning of Web3, so maybe you're referring to something else, as I have not yet heard about this "pure Web 3.0 vision" you talk about.
You're correct, it's not an actual thing. I'm using it as a device to summarize the kinds of protocols and networks that are part of common visions for what Web 3.0 constitutes. There is no canonical "pure Web 3.0" vision I can point to. But http:// doesn't play strongly in most advanced visions, especially if you subscribe to the hypothesis that wallets will move on from the web browser for average users for security reasons. Speculatively, wallets could possibly become a kind of browser themselves, with http://'s utility becoming more marginalized eventually.
I'm not referring to Gavin Wood's specific conception or the associated Polkadot and its foundation's specific usage of the term. FWIW, I'm really trying to dissect the name and not the vision and perhaps not doing it that well. As far as I'm concerned, the usage of the term predates even bitcoin and originally meant Semantic Web. Content-addressable networks like IPFS or Arweave could be seen as related to that conception, but it's a bit of a stretch.
Apologies, but not really. I became "involved" with bitcoin in 2013 somewhat accidentally through a job in behavioral finance. I was at the first bitcoin conference and was one of the few willing to talk to the "suits" who were there. Some of the neo-libertarian stuff used to frustrate me and I would refute certain points, only to uselessly draw ire from groups.
What I've found is like most people's relationship with money in general, a person's beliefs on the subject are usually rooted in their emotions. The area has always been technologically interesting to me so I tend to ignore everything but identifiable FUD, because that's part of what I do generally.
> As someone who has stood up to FUD about bitcoin on this forum
One of the problems with cryptocurrency communities is that they often immediately label any criticism they don't like as "FUD". It's a thought stopping cliche.
May 2020- $1M Pre-Seed
Sept 2020- $3.7M Seed
April 2021- $20.7M Series A
Dec 2021- $68M Series B
How can so many rounds be condensed so quickly for a business like this? Is the number of Homebrew downloads (37k as advertised on the home page) a metric that can lead to an 18 month ramp to Series B now?
I think there's a trend at play here I'd love to hear more about.
TBH not really. I've talked to the founder a few times. He doesn't want to put his name on things, as he's kind of a private person and really wants to direct the spotlight at his employees. But he's just an engineer who has spent a lot of time working with Protobufs, not a sales person at all.
(Disclosure: I was the maintainer of Protobuf who put together the first open source release at Google, and I made a small investment in buf early on.)
I think the negativity here is just because fundraising announcements (especially massive ones) tend to attract that kind of response. Admittedly fundraising announcements are not very interesting to an audience wanting to know what the product actually does. But I think what buf is building is not very controversial, it's just developer tooling that obviously should exist and doesn't for some reason, maybe because Google owns Protobuf but Google doesn't really have a strong incentive to make sure external developers have everything they need here.
Happy to answer emails but can't guarantee I have anything interesting to say.
The exuberant behavior of the VCs is really what's being noted. The core business could very well be sound. One just has to hope the very technical founder is being well advised.
Barring value judgements about the subject, there are some large chronology and fact checking problems with this post. The federal scrutiny of Bitcoin happened a long time ago now.
The China crackdown was this year. The US agencies mentioned all started examining bitcoin in 2012 at the very latest, and had a decent grip by the next year. Left off the list is the agency with the most impactful jurisdiction- the DHS- who essentially "signed off" on the "legality" of Bitcoin in 2013, specifically citing the ease of tracing bitcoin transactions. The IRS gave its guidance on bitcoin (and classed it as property for taxation purposes) in 2014. FinCen was not particularly concerned at this time, according to someone at FinCen at the time.
Cooperation between compliance specialists (like Promontory) and major investors and the federal government (for KYC and AML) hit full steam by end 2013, by necessity. The FBI seizes assets suspected of being used in the commission of federal crimes, and bitcoin is simply another asset for them to seize, which the Justice Department has done successfully for a decade now.
One could argue that bitcoin was able to go to the moon because of these decisions, actions, and verdicts.
Sources: people who worked in these agencies or organizations at the time and the publicly available information at the time that it was disseminated.
2018 was the year the US SEC really cracked down on ICOs. First a few of the totally fraudulent ones.[1] Then, anything that looked like a security offering.[2]
The IRS has been gradually upping the pressure. Form 1040 for 2020 included, for the first time on the main form, the question "At any time during 2020, did you sell, receive, send, exchange or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency?" The IRS has access to Know Your Customer data from many crypto exchanges, so, anyone who checks "No" and has a crypto exchange account will get attention.
Here's a history of the IRS slowly tightening its grip on cryptocurrencies.[3]
Right, I understand that can appear to be tightening, but the IRS guidance is exactly the same since 2014, as are the penalties. They're now more actively alerting US taxpayers they need to pay taxes on their "virtual currencies." But the US taxpayer has always had that obligation, and the IRS is now starting to more visibly enforce it. They've been doing so less visibly as well. With so much more digital asset economic activity, there's that much more taxation, and that much more enforcement. The code is the same.
American crypto exchanges were actually reporting predating that announcement; they had to in order to not get shut down. Thoughtful people knew that certain regulation would have to be met from the beginning, but that memo wasn't universal and there's no one who goes door to door with the facts for hungry home speculators. There's likely to be a continual wave of retroactive enforcement for some time. That's why most sincere people in the space have been paying any required taxes generated by their activity starting for the year 2015 at the latest.
Incidentally, bitcoin hasn't been considered a security by the IRS yet, but the infrastructure bill that just passed has a whole sea change of new regulation for the space. I don't feel I've been informed well enough yet to comment much regarding macro implications. But there is something in there that could effect the latest buzzwords to go media viral: NFTs. Securities-related Know Your Counterparty and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that will be in effect starting in 2023 may apply to NFT sales, for any seller. That could have a real impact. You would need the EIN or social security number of your buyer.
We could call this tightening or a crackdown, but I think it also might be fair to call it reigning things in to prevailing standards. I don't really know. All this revolves around interesting questions about how the standards continue to be established for what constitutes a digital security vs digital property/currency.
As to the ICOs crackdown, it was nice to see regulators actually take real action on straightforward and often inept securities fraud. They were enabled by capability advances that weren't as feasible with bitcoin alone. They were old grifts cycled around again for a round of digital "innovation," so they were nipped in the bud pretty quickly. These kinds of fraud will probably spring up at every stage of the digital asset technology development cycle. The noise can be a bit maddening, and I can understand your general sentiment.
Yes. It's pretty clear that forward looking NFTs are securities under US law, per the Howey test. The NFT community is in total denial about this.
The SEC is basically reactive. They wait until people complain about losing money in a scam. Then they bring the hammer down. This avoids complaints about over-regulation.
(A "forward looking NFT" is something like land in a virtual world that doesn't exist yet.
You're funding an enterprise run by others to build the thing. That's an investment contract, which the SEC regulates.
An NFT that represents "art" that exists at the moment of sale is probably just a collectable.)
By the way, none of this is new. See "Swampland in Florida" on Wikipedia for the 1950s version of the same concept.
That's true, except they have been enforcing and building the capabilities to enforce at a larger scale. They can enforce going back decades, are called in constantly to help other investigations and prosecutions, and are in no rush.
It's just like everything else, literally, and tax evasions only get media coverage under pretty limited circumstances.
Taxation in the space has always had a foregone conclusion that some have chosen to handwave or rationalize away. Not a bright strategy IMO.
Regardless of Bitcoin itself, it seems the US has started looking at Federal regulation of stablecoins only this year. The way it looks to me, the existence of wildcat stablecoins are an important pillar keeping the crypto economy afloat. Just this week Tether was seen printing billions again, just as Bitcoin started going south.
Tether has a lot of people worried. It's a big enough issue to have reached Cabinet level. Tether now has US$76 billion outstanding. This can't end well.
A critical relevant fact is missing to help explain this. It screws up currency analogies, and that may be why people have asked for clarification.
Bitcoin (BTC) is classed by the US Federal Gov't (IRS) as property, not currency.
That wasn't some kind of mistake or tax technicality on the IRS' part - a lot of analysis went into this in 2013, along with DHS and FinCEN. This is the definition for BTC in the US.
That means what happened today could be described as:
The first and oldest decentralized, distributed, cryptographically-secured record of digital property ownership (Bitcoin as a network) is producing cryptographic keys (the property, BTC) at half the rate it was yesterday. There is now less of the digital property (BTC) being created by the network daily, and this is due to an artificial scarcity strategy built into the Bitcoin source.
Another way to analogize: imagine the westward expansion of the USA also being subject to "halvenings" like this. In years 0-9, settlers were encouraged/allowed to settle on 1000 miles worth of land (counting linearly westward), then years 10-19 only 500 miles further, than yes 20-29 only 250 miles further, etc.
Early settlers are incentivized to grab large swathes of land quickly and cheaply, to get the system bootstrapped. Later settlers have to fight over smaller tracts of land, because after all the land is finite (you eventually reach the ocean). However, the land is also nicely divisible into smaller and smaller sub-plots, so units can be adjusted as needed.
The rules by which this "westward expansion" are governed are written into the Bitcoin protocol. But unlike land and the ocean which are natural facts for the most part that we take for granted a priori, with Bitcoin the "border"/limit here is also defined as a theoretical construct (and hence, could theoretically be changed, but this would be a hard fork and people would have to reevaluate the value of a new network with a new set of boundaries/rules).
Well, no one else has said it, so I guess I drew the short straw.
Teenagers are most likely wired for later nights because they have reached initial fertility. They will sneak off in the night to fool around, especially if they haven't had a child yet. At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is how babies are made. Adolescence is the age when women would first become pregnant, and the ancient's concept of marriage was probably not the same as ours. (There is evidence of monogamistic tendencies in humans for a long time but that isn't synonymous with marriage.)
Teenagers are biologically wired to want lots of sex and they tend to do it at night. I would put a lot of money on the fact that that hasn't changed in millennia.
Obviously, this is a critical aspect of the process that allows for the continuation of the human race. Humans didn't have the consistent ability to wait to reproduce until 30 as is common now. And probably not the desire too; I can't see career-building interfering.
The initial party must have ended pretty quickly. Poor ancient teeenagers.
(Edit: considering this speculative is reasonable and factually correct. But speculating there's been behavior change is currently more speculative. What reason do we have to think teens had daytime sex in ancient times and our behavior has changed? What about for mature adults? Never heard of an existing tribal culture that mostly has sex during the day, and that's how we get much of our anthropological evidence.
Humans tend to have sex at night, and the most fertile, desirious and energetic would be wired to spend more time at the time people have sex doing it: that would be selected for because of our primary biological directive. Is there a more logical evolutionary reason?)
Aren't you simply making a baseless guess with nothing to back it up? Why would there be biological pressure to mate at night? I don't understand how you're so self assured (unless you read something on this which I haven't, in which case please share :)) If you don't, then I don't understand the purpose of phrases such as
>The article misses the point almost to the point of absurdity.
Oh, I don't know about that. In Ekrich's ' At Day's Close: Night in Times Past' [1] seems in pre-industrial age society the norm was 'bi-modal sleep'.
First or "deep" or "dead" sleep, as it was sometimes called, often seems to have taken place shortly after sunset, or at least before 10 in the evening. After two to four hours of the night's deepest rest, people would wake up for an hour or two, then resume sleep for another stretch before rising with the light.
During this waking period, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or have sex.
Many might find the later a good description of teenage behavior. Couple that with the physiological fact that
For men, levels of testosterone are highest during sleep and require at least three hours sleep to reach this peak. [2]
It'll likely be the nth time Matthew Walker is cited here, but in his interview with Joe Rogan, he mentions this is likely a societal trend rather than a biological need:
> Joe Rogan: Yeah, I've heard this recently, that people - that you should have two sleeps. The idea of two sleeps.
> Matthew Walker: Yeah, it's actually a little different than the idea of two sleeps. So there was a time in the sort of Dickensian era where people would sleep for the first half of the night, maybe sort of 4 hours or so. Then they would wake up, they would socialize, they would eat, they would make love, then they would go back and have a second sleep. If you look at natural biological rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly seems to be something that we did in society, but I think it's more of a societal trend than it was a biological edict. However, we do seem to have two sleep periods. Those tribes will often sleep about 6.5, 7 hours of sleep at night. And then especially in the summer they'll have that siesta like behavior in the afternoon. And all of us have that, sort of this - what's called the post-prandial dip in alertness, just means "after lunch" - and if I measure your brainwave activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in your physiological alertness somewhere between 2 to 4 pm in the afternoon [irrespective of diet].
I'm not sure this is true. Yes, adolescence is when childbearing ability and the associated hormonal incentives start, but where is this "sex must happen at night" component coming from? If anything, I would guess that's a modern phenomenon being retrofitted onto the past.
It’s pure conjecture until the commenter posts some sources. Now I feel patronizing pointing it out, but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex. I think this is modern cultural norms being propped with pseudo science.
That doesn't mean that having a 'late night' trait wasn't advantageous to mating. For example, when humans started pair bonding, infidelity may have been more common among those who could sneak out under the cover a darkness while their partner was asleep, spreading that trait further than those who remained monogamous. It is easy to think of many possible reasons why a late night trait could have been advantageous in spreading that trait further than those who naturally followed a more daytime rhythm during teenage years.
Or it could just be random chance. Either way, it's fun to discuss. We don't have to dismiss all fun discussion because it may be conjecture. It is only the comments section of HN, not a respected scientific publication. Time and place.
Also, when your jobs are a) finding berries and hunting mammoths and b) having sex, it is not implausible that doing a) during the day and b) during the night gives you more reproductive success than vice versa.
It is fun speculation, but still, OP's self-assured "this is so trivial" tone was not called for.
I mean, my impression from reading 19th century novels is that people used to just slip into a convenient glen or wooded area, it wasn't that hard before the industrial era.
I'd say visibility, permission avoidance, the excitement, and I'm sure there's more. Just like now, why would it have changed? For what specific reasons? Obviously spring and summer would be easier. I don't think that's retrofitting; I think we're continuing it still and the lack of recognition of that is confusing me.
I'm positive they figured out how to have sex in the day as well when possible. But nomadic daytime marching would reduce opportunity, and in a hunting culture it would be harder to separate a woman because of daily gender-disparate activities. In a predominantly gatherer culture, perhaps it was easier.
You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology. Sneaking around at night would be more likely to net you a tryst with a nearby tree branch or ditch than an exciting sexual encounter.
You’re really off about that. Our night vision is actually pretty good, especially if you’ve used it for every night of your life. Fire’s clearly been with us for long enough to be a factor, in addition.
I’m against the hypothesis though, if only for the fact that energy levels peak shortly after waking up - “why we sleep” discusses this a little.
That book also suggests the variety of sleep patterns exists for evolutionary reasons. Ie we are social creatures. Having a multitude of waking/restful cycles in a group kept our ancestors protected with a nearly round the clock group of protectors - who evers sleep cycle woke them up when ever.
It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
> Fire
Lighting a fire at night in the place where you're having sex seems like a pretty good way to get discovered.
> Having a multitude of waking/restful cycles in a group kept our ancestors protected with a nearly round the clock group of protectors - who evers sleep cycle woke them up when ever.
This is a just so story. If we all had the same sleep patterns, you could just as well point out that there would also be advantages to that arrangement.
> It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
You mean in a thunderstorm, maybe? Or a fog bank?
On a clear night, even with no moon, humans can see quite well. Since rod vision is used, it is difficult to do fine work (reading, sewing, soldering, ....), but just walking around outside is no problem.
If you want to see the night for yourself, try spending a few nights camping out somewhere away from artificial lighting. Don’t bring along any of those terrible “white” LED flashlights – they completely clobber night vision. It takes about a half hour for eyes to fully adapt to the dark.
> It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
It's pitch-black for city dwellers with eyes unadapted to darkness. Weather allowing, for most of the time you have moonlight providing good enough illumination to (carefully) navigate the outside.
Matthew Walker, PhD in his book "Why We Sleep" discussed sleep cycles and their variances from one person to the next. Specifically, during his discussion of circadian rhythm in chapter 2. From page 22: "As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we'll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten. [...] Consequently the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable."
He discussed varying sleep cycles across individuals. Specifically, he suggested society needs to be more inclusive of different sleep patterns and needs. Instead, society rewards people who naturally wake early in the morning at the cost of "night owls". All in the same area of the book.
You're welcome to research and earn your own PhD in neurology and author your own book on sleep patterns, but I'll stick with Dr Walker's work.
>You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology
I grew up in upstate New York and could actually run 5 miles around the nearby lake in the woods any night, even moonless ones. You can see the silhouette of the trees against the stars and it isn't even really needed once you memorize the trail anyway. And that was just for exercise. I imagine horny teenagers would be even more hard working.
I, and I assume most guys (and gals) in their puberty were horny most of the time, but my being a night owl I don't think factored into that at all. I studied much better at night, I was a lot more creative (music mostly) at night, and everything was more peaceful at night. I was horny too, I guess, but that was more of a 24/7 thing.
Same here. I don't think it's a stretch to say that increased teen sexual energy, inextricably bound to increased general energy, was a big part of that, whether sexually active or not. In fact sublimated sexual desire/energy can be extremely helpful in creative endeavors. It's the essence of creativity, the creation of a new human life is pretty hard to top power-wise.
> ...no competing theory that does have hard evidence has been proposed, so current behavior is actually the first rationalization.
I think it would be even more reasonable to investigate WHY this is being discovered now rather than a long time ago. What has changed in the lives of teens now compared to 3 or 4 decades ago?
I suspect one thing is a much higher percentage of "structured time". Teens today seem to have far more time obligations than my generation did. As a result, socializing and free-time ends up getting pushed to interstitial times, late at night _and_ online.
Young people need unstructured time for ad-hoc socializing and discovering who they are and there is less opportunity for that now so it happens later at night when their obligations have been met and the time is their own. That's a simpler explanation than primate sexual urges.
Very slight digression. I can't stop thinking that modern 'college' oriented societies forgot to take biology into account.
IMO teenage perception of the world, which triggers the frenzy need to act, create, be seen; this is how I interpret pseudonyms and graffiti for instance.
A century ago, the average independance was ~16, similarly some religion have rites of passage in mid teens to signal a change of status. I think they did notice there was a need for teens to change lifestyle.
Sam Altman had a great post recently about YC's indictment of timing pressure tactics on accelerator offers. We completely agree with that position and try very hard to not give that impression. Clearly sometimes that pressure is still felt even if it's not intended.
One issue that is relevant to us given our fixed class sizes is getting a definitive answer from an offer as quickly as we can so that we know if should move down the list and give an offer to the next team instead. Having 10 offers out and finding out that only 8 want to accept would mean we are giving out 2 offers potentially much later than the others.
Purely as a practical timing matter we hope to have a set of offers out around the same time and have everyone accept or dismiss them pretty quickly so we know who the class will be.
There was good discussion of this on a prior HN thread when @sama posted that blog piece. If I can dig it up I'll add it here.
There's a goalposts-moving thing happening here. The claim in the post isn't simply that there was a time-limited offer made. The claim was that a complicated legal document was presented just before a weekend, with a demand that it be accepted or rejected by the following Monday.
I have no idea if that actually happened or not, but this thread isn't really addressing the claim in the post.
Not evading here, just don't want to go into unnecessary detail, but here it is if you are interested -
Our LOI is not a complex document. It's one page long and covers 7 points.
1- agreeing to supply an official version of the cap table
2- representing that documents supplied to us are are accurate to the best of their knowledge
3- acknowledging that the team must relocate for the duration of the program
4- committing to fully participate in the program (show up and not have another job outside of their company)
5- agreeing to the dates of the program
6- agreeing to our equity exchange
7- confidentially clause regarding the offer
And a final clause states that while signing the LOI executes your agreement to our terms that "your acceptance of our offer
is subject to your review and satisfaction with the formal contract provided". In other words signing the document is merely signaling your intent to participate in the program, but you aren't held to any specific clauses by signing.
This is not a document that is meant to be negotiated, there are really no terms here that we'd debate on, it's more of an outline of the deal so that you get it all in one place and have it in writing up front.
Still, why Friday? Why not Monday? Why not a week time horizon? Yes it may be industry standard, but you aren't looking for industry standard people here. Why send such a thing to begin with? If it's not legally binding, negotiable, or really anything other than a 4th grade valentine's day card, why do it? Yes, again, the authors may have misread the boilerplate, but those are the people you are looking for, the ones that aren't 'normal.' If you want to do business with people, then do it. This isn't love notes in lockers stuff.
The following questions aren't meant to be antagonistic, but your PR has just taken a hit, and the specific claim made in this post about the LOI isn't a small one. Let's clear it up.
There was good discussion of this on a prior HN thread when @sama posted that blog piece. If I can dig it up I'll add it here.
Is Sam Altman involved with TechStars? If not, why is his name being evoked? It's great that you agree with him, but OP is saying that at least in his case, this point of view was not honored.
One issue that is relevant to us given our fixed class sizes is getting a definitive answer from a offer though as quickly as we can so that we know if should move down the list and give an offer to the next team instead. Having 10 offers out and finding out that only 8 want to accept would mean we have are giving out 2 offers potentially much later than the others. Purely as a practical timing matter we hope to give out a set of offers and have everyone accept or dismiss them pretty quickly so we know who the class will be.
I understand, but this is simply the universal rationale behind pressure tactics. Your desire for quick resolution is understandable, but the specific claim made in the post needs to be addressed.
No worries at all, I don't take it to be antagonistic in any way. I'm hoping to accurately represent how we operate and I'm inviting your questions, so ask away!
>> Is Sam Altman involved with TechStars? If not, why is his name being evoked? It's great that you agree with him, but OP is saying that at least in his case, this point of view was not honored.
Sam is the president of YC. I'm invoking his name because it was a great post on a common accelerator tactic that we do not employ. The comments in that thread are very relevant. I wasn't invoking Sam so much as I was pulling in the context of that prior discussion on HN.
>> I understand, but this is simply the universal rationale behind pressure tactics. Your desire for quick resolution is understandable, but the specific claim made in the post needs to be addressed.
Actually not the case. As covered in the thread I referenced the reason that this pressure tactic is typically employed is that an accelerator is trying to force a company to make a decision before the deadline of a program that they view as a competitor, in essence front-running the selection process of another organization.
The point I'm making is that while we don't want to use that tactic, we can't afford to give an open ended offer up until the first day of the program because we'd risk having an 8 company cohort. It's less of an issue for YC to take an additional (or lose an additional) half dozen companies between their selection process and day one of the program because a) they don't offer workspace to their companies and don't have to do with those logistics and b) the uncertainty of +/- a few companies doesn't matter as much in a 60+ company batch as it does in a 10-12 company batch.
In the meantime, Troy sent over a Letter of Intent and explained that it needed to be signed and returned by Monday. I was very frustrated by this. You don’t send a legal document to someone over the weekend when their is no time for a lawyer to review it and demand it back by that same Monday. Whether it was the intention or not, this was a high pressure sales technique and just one more red flag.
Which is well put- "whether it was the intention or not." So, why wasn't Talkroute simply rejected for taking too long? If Techstars was concerned about an undersized cohort, they could simply sign another startup with no ill will - Talkroute just missed the deadline. No harm no foul.
A Saturday -> Monday LOI signing isn't typically considered a reasonable expectation.
Right and I don't know the specifics of this situation so I really shouldn't conjecture.
Clearly the company didn't feel they had the option to take more time to decide. If that's the case that's on us and we can do better. I will absolutely assert though that if they needed the time they could have had it.
>Purely as a practical timing matter we hope to have a set of offers out around the same time and have everyone accept or dismiss them pretty quickly so we know who the class will be.
How can you say this in the same post you say this?
>Sam Altman had a great post recently about YC's indictment of timing pressure tactics on accelerator offers. We completely agree with that position and try very hard to not give that impression.
I'm not a decentralization purist so I can't say that "Web 3.0" centralization bothers me in and of itself. I do think it dulls a lot of arguments of there being great innovation in this specific area, especially when your non-fungible token consists of a URL string. Real-world, existing laws and regulation apply to this new stuff already, as you indicate.