Thursday, March 10, 2022

Brian Armstrong Of Coinbase Looks Like Straight Out Of A Sci-Fi Movie

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Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Kathryn Haun: Maverick VC





Exclusive: Why star VC Katie Haun departed Andreessen Horowitz with an audacious plan to build a $1 billion crypto investing juggernaut The a16z vet made her name with big bets on Coinbase and OpenSea. Her new venture is on track to be the biggest Web3 fund raised by a solo female VC. .

Katie Haun Seeks $900M for Crypto Funds After A16z Departure: Report Haun is aiming for $300 million for an early investment fund targeting crypto startups and $600 million for a fund focused on larger companies and digital tokens.

Crypto’s Top V.C. Is Playing the Long Game Katie Haun, a co-chair of Andreessen Horowitz’s new $2.2 billion crypto fund, is betting that the blockchain will be as big as the internet. ....... A top crypto cop turned venture capitalist is now one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, with more than $2 billion at her fingertips. ....... Katie Haun, who created the first federal cryptocurrency task force as a prosecutor in the Justice Department, will co-chair a $2.2 billion crypto fund Andreessen Horowitz announced this week. She is a general partner at the venture capital fund and an independent director at the crypto exchange Coinbase. Chris Dixon, also a general partner at Andreessen, will be the fund’s other co-chair. ........ A Chinese regulatory crackdown on Bitcoin is battering prices and raising questions about the value and future regulatory landscape of crypto. .............. Xi Jinping and China have made no secret of the fact that they consider crypto and blockchain a top-five national priority for China in the next decade. They’ve publicly stated this, and they are developing their own version of cryptocurrency, a digital renminbi. We know that they plan to export this, to tie trade to it, to incentivize people around the world, not just in China, to use it. ............

the tremendous staying power of a decentralized, open system like Bitcoin.

......... There’s this myth that crypto founders want the Wild West. They’re really kind of desperate for regulators to say what the rules are. It takes so much time, money and resources — specialty resources — to figure out how to navigate the morass of agencies ranging from the C.F.T.C. to Treasury, let alone the regulators in 50 different states. .......... I’m full-time in the industry with experts all around, and I can’t keep up with the pace of this technology that’s changing so fast. ............ anyone today with an internet connection and a VPN can pretty easily go access products and services that are offered in other countries. It’s incredibly hard, if not almost impossible, for the U.S. to police what’s happening overseas on offshore platforms......... Criminals are early adopters and in some ways they make great beta testers for new technology. They’re always looking for a way around the system. Frankly, law enforcement officials actually really like when payment is made in Bitcoin as opposed to fiat. I think it’s funny because as a former prosecutor, I take this for granted. There’s a real false sense of security where wires are used or traditional financial services are used. People think, “Oh, we know everything about that. So we’ll just go subpoena. The bank will give us these records and we’ll just go get the money.” That is just so far from the reality of the situation. .......... I prosecuted many of the Justice Department’s largest online money laundering schemes. In fiat systems, 99.9 percent of money laundering claims succeed. Actually, the thing that really stands out about the ransomware attacks — the Colonial Pipeline is a great example of this. It is unprecedented that the Justice Department would be able to recover the proceeds from international criminal activity so quickly. ........

One of the only things that unites Congress lately is China

, and I think U.S. policymakers and lawmakers are starting to realize that China and other countries are moving forward, recognizing that crypto and blockchain is a real priority, and that we are behind, unlike in the internet, where DARPA and the U.S. government had a hand in helping create it. ............. There’s something fundamental going on right now with the internet and culture, and I think crypto is at the epicenter. .......... A lot of people that I talk to about NFTs think, “oh, yeah, digital art.” I think it’s so much more than just about art. It’s about much more than gaming, it’s about much more than goods. It’s about this new business model for creators and bringing entirely new audiences to crypto, entirely new types like creators, sports fans and media types......... Then the third category is DeFi or decentralized finance. ......... With crypto, we think that its potential for growth is as big as the potential for the internet.





Katie Haun on the Dark Web, Gangs, Investigating Bitcoin, and the New Magic of “Nifties” (NFTs) (#499) . Previously, she spent a decade as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, where she focused on fraud, cybercrime, and corporate crime, alongside agencies including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. ....... While serving as a federal prosecutor with the US Department of Justice, she also prosecuted RICO murders, organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. She held senior positions at Justice Department headquarters in both the National Security Division and attorney general’s office, where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. Katie has testified before both houses of Congress on the intersection of technology and regulation. .......... She teaches a class on cryptocurrencies at Stanford Business School and previously taught cybercrime at Stanford Law School. ....... Katie clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. ....... Katie gives us a rundown of how blockchain technology both powered the Silk Road darknet market and dropped the breadcrumbs that led to its downfall — as well as the arrest of the corrupt agents who were exploiting the investigation for their personal enrichment. .......... As a federal prosecutor, Katie never lost a case. ...... While working to put violent criminals behind bars, what was the self-talk that kept Katie level-headed when risks to personal safety were of valid concern? How large are these criminal organizations, and how much reach do they have in the outside world? ........ What developments does Katie expect to see in crypto or blockchain over the next three to five years? .





From Crimefighter to ‘Crypto’: Meet the Woman in Charge of Venture Capital’s Biggest Gamble Kathryn Haun was the Justice Department's go-to prosecutor for Bitcoin-related felonies. Now she's one of cryptocurrency's most important investors. Here's why her career change is a watershed moment...... In one corner is Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate in economics. In the other is Kathryn Haun, an accomplished federal prosecutor recently turned venture capitalist. .

Federal Prosecutor Kathryn Haun On How Criminals Use Bitcoin -- And How She Catches Them . The first time federal prosecutor Kathryn Haun heard about Bitcoin was when someone asked her if she’d like to prosecute it. ....... The assistant U.S. attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in San Francisco, who had previously focused on organized crime, prison gangs and murders, very quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible — that it would be like “trying to prosecute cash,” but it set her off on a path of discovery. She is now also DOJ’s digital currency coordinator, teaches Stanford Law School’s first class on digital currency and cybercrime, and, last year, put away two federal agents who tried to steal more than $800,000 in bitcoin. ......... begins with her being tipped off by an investigative journalist about one of those agents ....... when I started looking into this matter, I was doing it from the perspective of, I want to clear this person’s name, but I quickly learned that wasn’t going to be the result.” ........ She describes how she uncovered what were actually “the perfect criminals” — being federal agents, “they knew how to cover their tracks,” she says. ......... she was able to follow the bitcoins, how tracking those patterns revealed to her that there were two dirty federal agents, not one, and what telling detail led her to suspect the second must also be a federal agent. ........ she thinks it would be particularly revolutionary in the area of public records. “Of all the kinds of cases that I’ve ever done, whether you’re talking about the Hell’s Angels, marriage fraud, the bank officer I prosecuted for impersonating dead people or the criminals I’ve prosecuted using cryptocurrency, they all have one thing in common: there’s always been, somewhere along the way, a forged, counterfeit or stolen public document — even a murder case I tried,” she says. ........ in the United States, more than 6,500 entities can issue birth certificates on 14,000 different types of forms, making it easy to counterfeit a birth certificate. “We call these ‘breeder documents’ — because they quite literally breed new identities,” she says. “You get a forged, fake or stolen birth certificate and a name, and you take that down to the DMV and you get your photo taken with that, and now you all of a sudden also have a driver’s license. You take the driver’s license and birth certificate to the passport office and now you’ve gotten yourself a passport. And all of a sudden, with these three kind of identity documents, the sky’s the limit on what kind of criminal activity you could do — you could file for fraudulent benefits from the government, you could commit some kind a terrorist offense, you could purchase weapons, you could traffic in people, you could obviously commit drug smuggling.” ............. Another problem she sees in public records is that they are kept in centralized databases, which are subject to tampering. For instance, in 2008, the city of San Francisco’s network administrator became disgruntled and changed all the admin passwords and held all the records hostage. .

LinkedIn

Biden Takes Step Toward Regulating Cryptocurrencies The president signed an executive order that will coordinate efforts among financial regulators to better understand the risks and opportunities presented by digital assets...... President Biden signed an executive order on cryptocurrencies Wednesday, in the face of “explosive growth” in digital assets.Credit... ......... President Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that will direct the federal government to come up with a plan to regulate cryptocurrencies, recognizing their popularity and potential to destabilize traditional money and markets. ......... The order, under development for months, will coordinate efforts among financial regulators to better understand the risks and opportunities presented by digital assets, particularly in the areas of consumer protection, national security and illicit finance. ....... The order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six areas: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation........ “We’re operating in a gray zone and in a sandbox. And time and again, someone comes into the sandbox and arrests somebody, and that’s not the best way to grow an important part of the economy.” ........ “We’ve seen a complete lack of any strategic direction or thought from the federal government for years. The industry still doesn’t know what’s a security, for example, and what’s a utility token that is exempt from regulation. Those are things that would help us.” .

Crypto-related companies and funds jump after Biden signs executive order on cryptocurrencies
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Crypto And Climate Change

Those of us who believe in the science of climate change think of this as something existential. A few degrees of warming and earth becomes uninhabitable. There is chaos. If the monsoon were to leave South Asia, what would happen? Climate change could do that. It is an unthinkable scenario.

I have argued for years inequality is similarly existential. And the solution there is crypto. We need the Blockchain to empower individuals everywhere, to democratize money, to narrow the inequality and make it manageable.

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