Uh, are we living in the same world? Javascript completely and fully dominates the web, he couldn't have been more wrong about how the future would turn out.
To summarize the talk for those in a hurry: the presenter, pretending to be from the future, describes YavaScript as an archaic computer language that served as a bootstrap to WASM, which is now the default compilation target for nearly all languages.
WASM is an extremely useful compilation target because of its portability (specially for running on browsers), but it is far from being the "default compilation target" for almost any language. The promised near-native speed is not here (in general you get x2 or x3 slower code but it can be even worse), it is limited to 32-bits (MEMORY64 is on the way but there is not a clear roadmap of when this will be generally available in browsers), blocking IO is a pain, and its design seems to be constrained by the underlying JS JIT (it still looks like ASM.JS with a different syntax).
I still believe that it is a miracle that we have WASM as a standard, and that it runs smoothly across different browser vendors, but why nobody seems to be worried about lack of progress in performance?
LLVM IR would be a much better binary target. It was used in the abandoned PNaCL project. AFAIK Apple uses it (bitcode) to store apps that are later compiled for specific platforms. WASM looks like a toy compared with this technology.
I worked on PNaCl back in 2011. There was a growing understanding that choosing LLVM IR as the representation was a mistake. I even tried to come up with something better, but failed to do so. I was glad to see asm.js and then WebAssembly coming to the scene. In my opinion, WebAssembly is better than what PNaCl could have ever become.
The problem is that LLVM IR makes breaking changes fairly frequently -- for instance, LLVM 15 made all pointers untyped; where before you'd have a type like *i32, now you just have ptr.
If you're trying to run the same IR on 32-bit and 64-bit devices, I'd expect you'd need to freeze the word size anyway -- if a C or C++ program uses sizeof(), what value gets returned?
Blocking IO doesn't get solved by switching to LLVM either; you can't block in browser WASM because it'd block the JS thread; a WASM engine not attached to a browser has no such issues. (I wish at least one-shot continuations would get added so that this could become a bit easier in the browser, but I understand the hesitancy to do so...)
I guess just that asm.js nor WASM are the reason why Javascript still dominates. Most of the dominating technologies transpile to plain ol' javascript.
I disagree about the point regarding "turn off auto-renew". This actually makes way more sense to me than "cancel". When I read "cancel" I am always worried that I may lose my current access that I paid for. When I know I am simply disabling auto renew I know that I will still have the remaining access that I paid for.
These companies do a lot of dark patterns, but you stressing things such as this and others really discredits your otherwise valid argument.
> I am always worried that I may lose my current access that I paid for.
That would be illegal. They must either give you the service you paid for or refund your money on a prorated basis. I have seen free trials where cancelling early ends the trial but no money had changed hands so it's acceptable.
That's exactly my point, this makes the dark pattern calling the action "cancel" instead of disabling auto-renew? In general when I see the word cancel on the web it typically gets rid of something instantly.
This doesn't really have the types of features I would personally want as someone who has done a lot of rails development in the past.
The types of things I tend to need to set up in any modern app is SSO integration, React integrated on the frontend, etc... These are annoying things I have to integrate every time I build something and are more or less industry standard at this point.
Devise does integrate with SSO, but you still have to set everything up yourself for all the main providers which takes a good bit of time with a lot of custom frontend work needed and a bit of extra backend as well. It would be nice to have SSO out of the box without the need for a bunch of manual setup which was kind of the promise of this bullet train thing.
Devise does not impose anything on the number of tenants. I run a Rails app with multi-tenancy and SSO support with Devise. As someone has mentioned, although it does a lot of the work and it keeps well organized, you still need to do the UI for configuring and some backend logic.
Devise doesn't support SSO, but it supports omniauth, which supports SSO, right?
You certainly can write and maintain code to add multi-tenant sso, but since omniauth does not support any configuration storage, you have to add that yourself.
> This doesn't really have the types of features I would personally want as someone who has done a lot of rails development in the past.
This is relative.
> React integrated on the frontend
This is something that I don't want at all. Regarding the SSO, without reading the code, I'm sure you are able to accomplish it using devise (included in their framework)
I’ve personally had nothing but terrible experiences with Western Union. In contrast, sending money with crypto (not Coinbase which is a nightmare centralized layer which defeats the purpose of crypto) has had 0 issues for me.
Would love to hear your story of your simple easy decentralised cryptoasset money sending as most people I know who do this end up telling me a story that is not exactly a user experience delight but more like a nightmare of key management, shady random exchanges, incomprehensible jargon, bizarre gas fees and so on.
Rebellion DAO is a passive income distributing DAO that utilizes DeFi, identity, and democracy to create a new monetary ecosystem. The DAO itself exclusively invests & funds companies which use the DAOs native currency, REB, with the objective to create both DeFi and real world uses for the token. The protocol just launched, but in the past month the DAO has increased its assets from $30k to over $300k via organic growth and is accelerating rapidly.
What to expect:
- Build & develop user facing features for the RebellionBase website which acts as a portal into the DAOs smart contracts
- Be the first engineer on the team other than myself & help shape the foundations of RebellionBase
- Design & architect scalable solutions for a rapidly growing userbase with a strong emphasis on security
- Write and deploy smart contracts in solidity to handle additional feature requirements connected with the DAO
If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out. Prior crypto experience is not required, but a strong engineering background is necessary. Reach out to rebel@rebellionbase.com if you would like to apply.
The author is confused. The point isn't to have every little thing decentralized (though there are plenty of tools in the space to do this if you desire). The point is so that different centralized entities can build on top on the decentralized data in a way that can be trusted.
If I want to build my own decentralized exchange allowing people to trade their tokens I can without the permission of anyone. If I want to create my own NFT marketplace to compete with Opensea I can without the permission of anyone.
Yes, it costs money to do things on chain. That's the part you sacrifice, the benefit you receive is the fact there is no single point of failure. If a crypto exchange goes down it doesn't make the price of cryptos go to 0. Even if they were all taken down simultaneously you could easily spin one back up pretty quickly. Web3 is simply a tradeoff of cost vs openness & robustness. Most things have no need for Web3, but it certainly has it's place for certain types of projects.
Not OP, but I've visited several cities in China including Changsha and it's definitely one of my top 3 cities. The food and club scene there stood out to me in particular.
Employees are able to override the pin entering requirement. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this from happening if you happen to get targeted. (Speaking from experience)
I applied for the last YC batch and got rejected. The interview was itself was completely outside of all the expectations that I had. I had done a bunch of preparation work doing practice interviews with YC alums as well as friends. Some of them asked the standard YC interview questions while others went off on tangents, but I felt I had really strong and clear answers to most of the questions they were likely to ask.
Unfortunately when I got into the interview, by the time they had asked the third question it was clear they had completely misinterpreted what I was doing. I knew in less than a minute into the interview that there was no chance I would be accepted. What I should have done was try to stop the interview and completely reframe what I was doing in a different context so they could more clearly understand. However, the 10 minutes goes by so quickly. The interview started and ended before I came to that realization (I did however try to interject at the last 30 seconds with some key points, but by that point it was too little too late).
I believe my situation was an exception to what normally happens given the nature of my company, but it was really disappointing to feel like I never got the chance to explain the unique insights I had into the space, how the company was managing such insane growth, and the vision for the future.
Same with us at last year at missiveapp.com, the interview was relaxed, still could not articulate what we were doing based on the questions. They even talked about some of our metrics at the end, those were wrong, like from the previous time we applied.
We were rejected, the reason: No market.
To YC's defense... they interview so many incredible founders.
We grew between 10% and 30% every months since. So in the end all good.
Our team was also rejected in 2013 with conferencebadge.com... that time we bombed the interview and were really bad. The business has now grown to 7 figures a year.
Both businesses are still managed by our small team of 3 co-founders and one employee and are quite successful. We own 100%.
What if we would have made the cut... who knows...
Missive is a central hub for all your team communications, both internal (chat) and external (emails, Twitter, Fb, SMS). We offer an email client like interface (thread based).
The key difference is we offer internal chat (no tied to external conversations) and the UI is more akin to your email client. You consume everything from an Inbox.
Missive really feels like a snappy email client, a lot of our paying users even use it alone (not in a team context) just because they like the UI. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j95F4sr5Qdw)
> Swifts have no direct connection to any form of currency and are not backed by anything. Swifts are only worth what other people are willing to pay for them. There is no guarantee about the strength of Swifts in relation to any other currency.
This is the opposite of selling your product (I'm not sure if a word exists for that). Which is a shame because the idea sounds really cool.
This is meant as more of a disclaimer than a selling point. A small portion of users sign up, collect their Swifts and are then confused why they can't directly withdraw them in USD. We can probably change the language to be more positive while still conveying that point though.
Dude, kudos for the project. You need some helping hands to put across your ideas and message in a simple and clear English language. If you don't mind reach out to me on telegram at sammydeeknight i can help.
By the way if you don't mind changing the name of the product too... 'swift' could be easily confused with the Swift language...
It’s a mildly interesting idea but faces an obvious chicken and egg problem that you’ve just punted on so far. Without demonstrably solving or having a plan to solve it (eg. why anyone would trade usd or btc for swifts), it’s uninvestible. UBI hype is likely the only reason you got an interview.
"Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund SwiftDemand. We were really impressed with the number of participants you have on the platform and the fact that people are doing transactions. However we struggled to convince ourselves that there was an underlying big business here. If this is going to be something that is economically meaningful to people to allow them to live on it, then it would be hard to for this to also be a billion dollar company and would probably be better suited to a non-profit."
The email shows two big misunderstandings in how SwiftDemand works. It's on me for not temporarily taking control of the interview once I realized the lens they were viewing SwiftDemand through.
>The email shows two big misunderstandings in how SwiftDemand works.
Well, since an HN comment isn't under the pressure of a 10-minute speed date and you can take control of your own narrative right here in this forum... Can you gather your thoughts and explain in 1 or 2 concise sentences how SwiftDemand works?
Your concise sentences should basically answer:
+ What's the revenue model? Is it memberships/subscriptions or ad revenue? Why would the buyers (consumers or businesses) pay money into the SwiftDemand ecosystem?
+ how SwiftDemands YC's $150k seed investment at 7% equity turns into ~$50 million. (Those example numbers assume YC's 7% being diluted twice down to ~4% with subsequent investments, and a ~$1+ billion dollar exit valuation.)
Your webpage mentioning "everyone gets 100 Swifts a day" and "3% fee" doesn't really explain the commercial _value_ of the UBI blockchain. This would also explain the motivation of _why_ people would pay non-Swifts currency like $USD to convert it into Swifts UBI blockchain.
Your other comment summarizing it to "to become a global currency that focuses on social economic good in the form of UBI" doesn't really connect the dots of how YC gets a ~$50 million return on their investment.
SwiftDemand is a digital basic income where people can sign up, claim their daily stipend, and user their new currency to transact with one another. We earn a small cut of what each user receives as well as from transactions made through the platform.
A little more info on the revenue model:
There are 2 main streams of revenue, the first comes from transactions on the platform in which SwiftDemand receives a fee similar similar to that of Amazon. The second is that SwiftDemand receives Swifts for each identity that it manages (payed by the protocol itself). If we continue our growth we think it's more than possible to get 100 million users on the platform receiving $1-$10 per day generating around $0.10 to $1 a day in revenue per user that would put yearly revenue in the 10's of billions.
More details and justifications:
The first thing that needs to be understood is that there are essentially two separate pieces. There is the underlying Swift Protocol and then SwiftDemand itself. The Protocol is essentially a decentralized government with 3 components, Swift Citizens (regular people), Delegated Nodes (elected officials that have voting power and can forge new blocks), and Identity Providers (companies that can approve Swift Citizens and are responsible for preventing people from creating fake accounts). SwiftDemand is an Identity Provider that sits on top of the Swift Protocol.
SwiftDemand is incentivized to bring more people onto the platform since Identity Providers receive Swifts for each Swift Citizen that they actively manage. Identity Providers are also kept in check by the Delegated Nodes as they have the ability to remove Identity Providers that act poorly. If an Identity Provider did not have the motivation of profit, people would be less likely to create competing providers fostering less competition which would lead to a weaker ecosystem. We believe having a capitalistic system that is kept in check by the decentralized government is the optimal strategy to make the Swift Protocol successful.
To the numbers. We already have nearly 500,000 registered users with Swifts currently being value at somewhere around $0.001 to $0.005 based on transactions in the marketplace. User growth should remain relatively easy as our pitch to consumers is simply "sign up and receive free money" and we have achieved our entire userbase without any paid marketing. The trickier part is growing the economy part to the point where the value of Swifts can increase to $0.01 to $0.1 per Swift. We already have over 5,000 submitted products on the marketplace (mostly people that believe in SwiftDemand selling personal services), however our intention is to partner with bigger companies that can utilize our userbase essentially to give out promotional offers and consequently transition that into a larger economy over time. Based on our early adoption these numbers aren't unreasonable and should be more than achievable making SwiftDemand a strong investment opportunity.
To answer your other question:
- Why would people pay non-Swifts to buy Swifts?
Unlike most other currencies we're not really focused on getting people to trade between Swifts and non-Swifts. Our goal is to create a new currency with a fair distribution model. Our vision is to have people collect their Swifts, use their Swifts to buy goods and services that interest them, allow people to sell goods and services to receive more Swifts, and essentially create an entire economy without any need to convert their Swifts to non-Swifts or vice versa.
Other:
I'm curious if you have any suggestions on a better way to pitch the business opportunity to investors (YC and other). The consumer pitch is relatively straightforward as the value proposition is clear, but I do think I struggle on the investor side.
>, but I do think I struggle on the investor side.
To me, your text focuses too much on the Swift currency side instead of the $USD side. For investors, the $USD is more important since that's the currency they get their investment multiple from. Even if your end users are adding products&services[1] "in kind" (instead of paying $USD) to transact in Swifts, you still have to concisely explain how $USD gets into the business. You must have a clear explanation of non-Swift revenue.
Because you emphasized the Swifts instead of $USD, this leads to paragraphs that has a circular feel to it (we get paid in Swifts from Swift transactions) -- like this one:
>There are 2 main streams of revenue, the first comes from transactions on the platform in which SwiftDemand receives a fee similar similar to that of Amazon. The second is that SwiftDemand receives Swifts for each identity that it manages (payed by the protocol itself). If we continue our growth we think it's more than possible to get 100 million users on the platform receiving $1-$10 per day
That paragraph explains getting Swifts from other Swifts transactions (circular) -- and then suddenly it switches to them being worth $10. If a user is selling "20 HD wallpapers" for 500 Swifts, that doesn't explain how an investor gets a percentage of multiple transactions that are "worth $10" with a Swift-to-$USD exchange rate.
Let me give another example so you see the confusion in that type of writing:
You want YC investment of $150k $USD. Using your lower estimate exchange rate of of $0.001-to-Swift, you basically just need 150 million Swifts. Therefore, you could create a new identity account called "ycombinatorswiftinvestor" and give it 150,000,000 Swifts. It's your system and therefore, you just create 150 million Swifts out of thin air like a central bank. Your funding problem is now solved.
Obviously, that currency-swapping explanation would be unsatisfactory to you. You need the $150k of $USD more than 150 million Swifts! Likewise, your investors also need to understand the $USD cash flow more than the Swift transactions!
Further down in your comment is where I think you get closer to explaining the potential commercial value that attracts $USD:
>, however our intention is to partner with bigger companies that can utilize our userbase essentially to give out promotional offers
Is the idea to charge companies for "promotional offers"? (Like advertising?) Is that where the bulk of $USD revenue comes from? If so, you need to make it prominent and clear. (Instead of the revenue mechanism being buried way down in the comment after explaining technical things like SwiftDemand being the Identity-provider while Swift is the protocol, etc.)
Again, let's work backwards from a $1 billion exit valuation. Using a ~10x multiple of annual revenue as one possible valuation model, that's $100 million a year. If you're charging companies like Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, Toyota, etc to expose your users to their promotional offers, you have to present a convincing financial story that shows why those companies would pay that. You need to explain why they'd find your audience (userbase that want UBI) to be valuable to them.
Yes, I can see that you envision Swift to be its own large financial ecosystem without dependence on $USD.[1] (As a semi precedence, Bitcoin itself started out being worth $0 -- and then somebody seeded it with real economic value by trading 2 pizzas for it in 2010 -- which then lead to $19k-per-bitcoin in 2017.) Swift could theoretically experience a similar virtuous cycle of people adding more and more goods & services to Swift. But that growth is irrelevant unless one of the services _inside_ of Swift ecosystem is a bank that converts Swift-to-$USD. (Because YC and VCs take their returns in $USD.) Therefore, the $USD that comes from outside Swift via promo fees takes precedence and must be convincingly projected as $100+ million in revenue.
As a side note: your Swifts protocol+marketplace to provide UBI is well-meaning but it also has some economics flaws (e.g. disincentives for value creators). I don't see them being addressed in your FAQ[2]. My comment is long so I won't go into details but I suggest you discuss your UBI digital currency with people who like to study game theory of incentives and behaviors interacting with freemarket price levels (goods priced in Swifts) and an expanding money supply (everyone receives 100 new Swifts every day).
Your website is a little confusing, and it takes a little reading to characterize what exactly are doing. It's not bad though.
But your idea is bold and worth trying, definitely. Bravo on that. I find it odd that YC did not pick you up on that alone.
I can also see why you might struggle to communicate it.
I have some small points if you care to take them, they are just examples of some tweaking, for what it's worth:
Small thing for your '1 liner' statement instead of saying 'Swift is an attempt at' - drop the word 'attempt'. Also it could be more clear:
"Swift is a digital basic income for everyone"
... is a little more concise, it's very bold but doesn't sound arrogant either.
Three sentence explainer:
"Swift is a digital currency that we issue in the same quantity, to everyone who signs up, at the same rate, in perpetuity.
Swift is not backed by anything (so it's only worth what people attribute to it), but over time, as people find consequence, we hope that it will develop material value.
One day, with your help, we hope to disintermediate authoritarian central banking systems which favour one economic class over others, and to provide subsistence for everyone, by everyone."
Where you can replace the last sentence with something else, if you want, but it's nice to end with a hint of a bold vision. That I think explains it, and also has hints of boldness and universality, with a little 'populist antagonism' towards 'those evil bankers' without being crude, i.e. more aspirational, and it doesn't sound arrogant.
You can get into the 'digital now, crypto later' thing in the next para or whatever, that's obviously important (crypto crowds will be early buyers) but not essential.
Anyhow, just my two cents.
It's a great idea though. It's worth a try. Good luck with that.
SwiftDemand is a fairly radical concept so initially I was worried that making claims too bold could come off as arrogant, but since we have now gained a lot more traction we should definitely revisit the copy on the landing page.
I like the conciseness of the 1 liner you proposed, the three sentence explainer is great as well, but we aren't necessarily looking to disintermediate the banking system, but rather to become a global currency that focuses on social economic good in the form of UBI.
A huge portion of our users are really focused on the crypto aspect of what we're doing. As we continue to gain a broader appeal we will likely de-emphasize the crypto part.
The struggle to communicate it was a problem with how YC perceives UBI due to their involvement in UBI research. They grasped the concept quickly, but the questions they asked were targeted primarily at whether or not it would be enough to actually support people, as well as my thoughts on current UBI initiatives rather than the market opportunity and underlying business. In short, they saw it as a charity and didn't dig deeper into the revenue model or vision.
"we aren't necessarily looking to disintermediate the banking system?"
I gather that.
It's just an emotive idea that will likely resonate with boty a) those interested in UBI, who more often than not believe the current financial regime is repressive and supports banks and b) cryto currency types who loathe banks and classical currency controls more for anarcho-libertarian reasons.
It's marketing.
Because you are not a classical product, you gotta be a movement, you want to give some emotive impetus! Most people need a call to arms against some faceless regime, it's more powerful than a call to charity. You can drop it after a while.
These motivational inclinations are real with the early adopting crowd. Anyhow, just something to think about in general, really.
In absolutely no world would have taking that offer been the right decision.