Ah thanks for the downvote, you're very neutral and would make a great Wikipedia contributor. /s
How are the two sites not remotely in the same market? They are literally knowledge bases. Albeit, Golden is focusing more on structured data similar to Wikidata.org and Everipedia.org is focusing more on blockchain related content first with the backend using smart contracts/token incentivization.
I ran that hackathon. Can confirm it happened in 2015. LA Hacks at UCLA, Evan was the keynote speaker and stayed around to talk to hackers and builders after his speech. Snapchat, as a company, was at its hottest peak in 2015. Very cool event.
Hi Taylor, this is one of the cooler (probably coolest) consumer products to come out of facebook in a while. I was following it closely since the announcement a few months back.
My question is: I am sure you guys are familiar with crypto-based prediction markets like augur.net and prediqt.everipedia.org that use smart contracts and real money for predictions. Given that facebook is also building Libra and getting into blockchain, do you guys see that down the line Forecast could be something that moves to facebook's blockchain and/or you guys collaborate with crypto-based products like the above mentioned? That would be truly exciting since it would bring pure market dynamics to the predictions. I'm aware of the regulatory hurdles there, but thought I'd ask anyway. Great job! This is so fun to use.
Thanks! Right now we're focused more on building the community and usability of the product, so the market implementation itself is fairly simple. But we're following the various crypto implementations closely...
Community is always the most important aspect, agreed! Great to hear you guys are watching the crypto prediction markets closely, they are coming up with some novel features. I'm sure they'd all be interested in working with you guys at Facebook too given the users they could get through a partnership. Good luck!
A blockchain-hosted fork of Wikipedia named Everipedia.org has most of these features already built coincidentally. While I prefer Wikipedia over them, I have been noticing myself use other skins/newer look wikis instead of the dated Wiki UI. Although, the load speed of Wikipedia.org is difficult to beat.
Do you think that GPS coordinates will be exposable with the API so that there can be public tracing maps online? Obviously a big privacy issue where the actual bluetooth ID and the person's identity have to be fully anonymized but if GPS coordinates of contact points can be exposed publicly, there can be good public tracing maps that can show where contact events are happening and in what numbers so that people can avoid certain areas (and on the other end where other areas are safe where there's no contact). This can publicly also be used to display R0 counts in different zip codes and geographic areas.
I dont see any mention of it in the current context of bluetooth device proximity tracing. It is possible, however, that apps that will build up on this API will also fetch location history separately from already established mechanisms on each OS.
As a matter of fact I see this as a very likely scenario as this is precisely what South Korea has already done.[1]
I think the real interesting private sector utility will come from implementations of the contact-tracing map instead of just the bluetooth app (which there will likely be "official" ones or ones being worked on directly by Google/Apple themselves).
Just to clarify, the Apple/Google proposal discussed here does not require geo location (and I’d assume that you don’t have to give it access to location data).
This is a fantastic project and great idea! One thing, I believe there are 2 hurdles to adoption: Kong - the unit of account/currency and Kong - the paper money. Don't you think you're trying to do 2 things at once? Why not try this unique technology with Dai or Tether which has a lot of traction? In fact, I would LOVE to have Dai bills.
I agree as well. I find the idea of a crypto-backed paper note to be very intriguing and very useful as well.
I think most others here are simply jumping too far ahead of what is being done here. This is a proof of concept type project. It can certainly be improved going forward, I'm sure.
We've discussed this. It was a bit lower risk to validate the hardware works with a new token than the additional complexity of Dai. A lot of other challenges there too but we're a small team.
Sounds fair. I really like the technology though and think you guys have the most unique take on paper crypto so if the actual token itself becomes a barrier to adoption due to volatility/stability (which is a leading reason why stablecoins are all the rage right now - as I'm sure you guys are aware), you guys can license out the tech or produce bills for Tether, Dai, USDC, and other high traction stablecoins. Our small stablecoin team (releasing product Q1) would be interested ourselves if we were to ever get into the 9 figure market cap range.
You're not completely off base, in fact, you are 100% on the money (no pun intended). This was such an obvious situation to everyone even remotely paying attention that you'd have to be living under a rock to not see what was actually going on.
I love Balaji and honestly, he is very eloquent and charismatic, but being honest here...I still think that Coinbase buying earn.com was a pretty clear and obvious bail out by his SV friends in high places (A16Z etc). That company was going nowhere after raising $120m 4 years ago and the best they came out with was email spamming crypto payments that coincidentally got bought for $100m by his other friends' company that was doing well. I mean let's call a spade a spade. With that said though, he is right on a decent amount of his blockchain ideas and predictions (just not predictions when they involve his own company apparently).
They are kinda spammy looking, but then again that's a lot of paid emails, and you are getting paid to read that spam. You can count $15.50 in that screenshot alone. Multiplied across a userbase somewhere between 100k-1M (based on the quoted numbers of "hundreds of thousands of users") and assuming that most of those emails came within 1-2 months time, that's $90-180 per user x 100k-1M users. On the low end that is $9 million per year in total paid email volume. On the high end it is in the tens of millions per year.
There aren't too many public numbers beyond "hundreds of thousands of users" and "millions in revenue". We have to see what Coinbase does with the Earn.com product and where it is in a year before judging this acquisition.
Unfortunately I have to (mostly) agree with you. It feels exactly that way.
The "email spamming crypto" part you were referring to has never worked in a good way (in fact you call it spam for a reason). For several months I observed Earn.com and guessed that it was not going to end well.
Very interesting idea. Have you heard about Basecoin and Seigniorage shares? They are trying to do exactly that: http://www.getbasecoin.com/ Are these coins securities in your opinion?
Why bother using a convoluted blockchain stablecoin rube goldberg machine where you need to jump though several hoops just to use it, when you could use a service like venmo, square, stripe, etc? What use case would justify the need for a stable coin if not for evading the law?
Simple, just look at ETH. ETH is fully programmable currency. It can be locked away in a smart contract and programmed to disburse based on various conditions. A stable ERC20 token would have all the benefits of ETH coupled with the stability of the dollar. That's an incredibly powerful concept, much, much more powerful than a simple payments API with 2-3% fees BTW.
