So this takes 15% fee vs 30% for Coinhive. With almost non-existant barrier to entry, it seems like commission would be driven down to what traditional mining pool cuts (1% or less)

This doesn't have an API though so I don't really understand how you would use it for rewards. With Coinhive you can verify the number of solved hashes per user server-side.

Yeah, they don't have a private api, but you could use the client side API (miner) to get total hashes / listen for accepted hashes and save the data on your side and give rewards based on that.

"In the real world, “market cap” is based on a claim on a company’s assets and future cash flows."

Is that true? I thought even in the real world, market cap simply meant price_per_share * num_shares_in_circulation.

A few reasons I can think of:

Financially, having the option to do X has a certain value, even if on average X isn't valuable. (If X has volatility)

Startups has a certain risk characteristic that is different that what you can find on the public equity market. Theoretically, an efficient market should dish out higher reward to compensate for higher risk and poor liquidity of investing in startups. It may be beneficial to individuals to use startups to diversify their overall portfolio.

Startups in general might not be a great investment. The subset of all YC startups might be.

Researching and investing in startups is fun and educational.

Is the control on the yuan really that tight? How are Chinese citizens able to buy such a massive amount of premium Seattle/SF real estate with ease? Isn't ownership of foreign real estate a big leak?

Real estate purchases are one of the exceptions carved out where Chinese citizens are able to take more money out of the country. That's part of why it's so popular as an investment, because it's one of the few ways to move large amounts of money out of the country there's almost always another rich Chinese person or real estate speculator willing to pay the massively inflated prices which then gives the owner money outside of China.

I suspect (tinfoil hat on) that the whole spiel about "capital controls" and the bitcoin thing are a clever strategy to make people buy up lots of foreign real estate instead of virtual internet coins.

Is the data from coinmarketcap.com?

Just compared a few coins from coinbin to http://coincap.io/front/ and the prices seem to differ, so my initial instinct is to say no, but dev feedback would be great :)

EDIT: Just looked through the source of the project, and they source their info from https://coinmarketcap-nexuist.rhcloud.com/api/all, which is indeed built on top of the coinmarketcap API.

The data was stale, it turns out, for some coins — issue fixed now.

Yes.

The profit from the token sale goes into a foundation setup to oversee the project, not the founding team's pocket.

> The profit from the token sale goes into a foundation setup to oversee the project ... [truncated]

... that is controlled by the founders and could presumably be used for whatever they'd like. The usual approach is to create two companies. One a shell to own the ICO itself, and the second a tech services company that does development for the shell corp.

So it ends up something like:

"We definitely need the expertise of ICO founder Mr. X. Let's hire his consulting company to update the CSS on our web page at $1,000/hour..."

This is the main reason the traditional VC model works so well. You can't get rich unless the VC's make money.

You're kidding right? Founders/employees take "money off the table", even if the companies haven't generated a cent in profit.

Employees and founders typically can't sell shares (Except to the VCs, at a price the VCs set) until the company goes public, or is wildly successful.

They do get paid salaries, but undergo audits... To make sure that the 10 million dollar round didn't go straight to the CTO's Bahaman yaht fund. These audits are typically not done by the founders.

With an ICO, all bets are off. There's no reporting requirements, the founders hire their own bookkeepers, and the equity holders have no rights with respect to the governance of the firm.

You seem to be positing an absolute: that an ICO can't behave transparently by nature. Which isn't true. ICO and transparency aren't mutually exclusive.

No, but there's a huge difference in the amount of oversight token holders have on an ICO, and the amount of oversight that VCs have on a startup.

It's certainly possible to structure an ICO in such a way that token holders will get board seats, proper auditing, etc, but I've yet to see one that is.

The formula is more complicated than this. Services such as shapeshift.io guarantee the price for 10 minutes, as well as sending purchased tokens almost instantaneously. To accomplish this means keeping inventory and becoming vulnerable to volatility risk and liquidity risk.

Picking a reasonable bid-ask spread is hard, and probably involves more input factors than the 4 you listed above.

The cryptocurrency market is so volatile that probably 30% of the list(made in July) is no longer in the top 70.

What do you think about the steemit.com model, where instead of reader pays for the upvote, the whole community pays for it through dilution?

I think steemit is really interesting because posts are actually stored in the blockchain and all their payments are done using the Steem currency. I write about Ethereum but my backend is pretty standard: postgres with credit cards and bank accounts. I prefer direct payments because I think it's a stronger signal but I think they're cool and I wish them the best of luck. Maybe I'll buy some Steem.

Definitely. For an organization that spent a decade teaching startup the importance of building moats, it's no surprise that they've built their own.

If they hadn't built such a moat it would surely be irony but wouldn't have unusual to do what they preach