120 sats \ 6 replies \ @notgeld 25 Jun 2022 \ on: OpenBazaar Co-Founder Explains Why Bitcoin’s Answer to eBay Folded Its Tents bitcoin
Simple Auctions and plebeian.market exist although aren't funded by vc's.
May be VC money is the actual rats poison?
Top-down financing is antithetical to organic growth, which is the essence of life. Nobody got rich winning the lottery.
Money is certainly not a bad thing, but you have to also earn your place in the world before you ask for more.
Plebeian Market is much simpler in what it does compared to OpenBazaar, but we think that in the long run it'll get much further, exactly because we are hungry and foolish.
The fact that Brian Hoffman, after failing that, went on to build auctions on centralized blockchains is quite telling: he understands "decentralization" without understanding Decentralization. Decentralization starts with the plebs, from the roots.
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I prefer to think of it as fuel for a fire. If you have an un-contained fire and add a bunch of fuel, you are fucked.
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VC money for a nonprofit open-source commerce-facilitation project makes no sense to me. Where there is no revenue model, and all the organization's infrastructure can simply be forked and federated, a business formed to serve an ideology will not benefit from the positive feedback of market incentives. At least SN follows the Craigslist/television/newspaper/twitter/fb model of success, give-away the network-effect component, and sell marketing to companies wanting to piggyback on the service (jobs/ads).
In this case the VC only prolongs the pain for the "guy with an idea" and misallocates social and human capital to people with technical know-how but no understanding of the other business activities required to bring a product to market. OB1 may have had a relatively successful technical development effort, but the necessary activities for precursors to product development and supporting activities of market research, market feedback, market realignment appear to have been short-circuited by angel-money and groupthink.
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I see an abundance of VC money as direct result of credit expansion. So the result is quite similar.
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VC funds are definitely Cantillon beneficiaries, but I don't think venture funding is necessarily bad.
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Yes, they are rat poison.
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