Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.
Naval Ravikant
The ledger, the distributed database - it's called a Blockchain - is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
While the traditional banks and credit card companies lock down access to their payments infrastructure to a handful of trusted parties, Bitcoin is open to all.
It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.
Cryptocurrency currencies take the concept of money, and they take it native into computers, where everything is settled with computers and doesn't require external institutions or trusted third parties to validate things.
Figure out what you're good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project.
Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.
People think about Bitcoin incorrectly. They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really, what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.
If you're investing in a company in the Bitcoin economy, you have to compare the valuation of the company to the valuation of the entire economy.
We can code wills, escrows, trusts, notaries, revokable charge backs, proof of contracts, intellectual property enforcement. What Wall Street does can be done in code by Bitcoin.
Entrepreneurship is really hard and painful - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for anyone who can't handle the extreme stress.
Having a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a fool.
A block chain is a series of blocks. Each block is a series of computations done by computers all over the world using serious cryptography in a way that's very hard to undo.
Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.
I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.
I don't think I'm any smarter than any of my developers.
The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.
For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!
I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don't use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.
In an ideal world, you raise a lot of money and then there is a downturn, before you start investing so you get better deals. But it doesn't always happen that way.
Any competent programmer has an API to cash, payments, escrow, wills, notaries, lotteries, dividends, micropayments, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and more.
All of the marketplaces like Prosper, LendingClub, etc., as they get larger, they flip from being retail capital to institutional capital.
Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.
Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.
I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.
Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships. Stay away from business networking events or friendships where there is always an underlying business angle.
I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.
Within my social circle, there is a large group of people who will take bitcoin as legal tender; like, you can go to them and settle debts in Bitcoin, and they will happily take it.
It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
We are seeing a lot of cases where the startups are writing the term sheet, dictating the terms, selling common stock instead of preferred stock, where they don't give the investor veto rights or board seat or privileges, and they are really asking the investor -- why should I take your money when there is other money available.
One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.
Our mission is to help founders and anyone or anything that helps founders helps us with our mission.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
People come in. They are too gung ho. They invest too much money in things they don't know. They lose it and then they clam up and stop investing. Then they miss the actual boom. That's the nature of the market.
Nation states that are used to imposing capital controls will face a quandary: ban cryptocurrencies and live in the technology dustbin; enable them, and this virus - this religion, this protocol - will enable the free flow of money and language, along with packets, around the globe.
ICOs are obviously a new and interesting form of funding for blockchain-based protocols, but it's not clear that all of them comply with U.S. securities laws or that all of them are companies that have good native use cases for new coins.
It's probably easier and cheaper to counterfeit hundred-dollar bills than it is to counterfeit Bitcoin.
VC firms that don't have a brand are going to struggle. Because there is a lot of money out there, you need to have a point of view, a brand, to really add value. You can't just talk about it, and say well, we are smart people.
We're going to try and prove to the market that you can do a legal coin offering. If the SEC doesn't crack down, this party will be amazing - the biggest party in town for a long time. If they do crack down, a lot of people are going to feel a lot of pain.
If you use a bad password, your Bitcoin will get stolen.
China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'
Humans don't 'need' math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks - the world seems fine.
Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet - almost a fifth protocol in the Internet suite. If Satoshi Nakomoto did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent them.
Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.
Take a very small amount of money, your throwaway money, treat it as if it's already gone, you've mentally set it on fire, and put it in some distribution of a few truly legit layer 1 blockchains.
If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.
At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.
Our model is very, very different to LinkedIn. We only deal with very small companies. We don't have any support for recruiters. In fact, recruiters are not supposed to be on AngelList Talent. It's a direct market where we connect CEOs and the founders and the head of products with their talent directly.
