She’s the Investor Guru for Online Creators Li Jin, 31, began backing creators years ago. She has raised her own fund to invest in influencer-related start-ups. ...... If there is such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, Ms. Jin, 31, would fill the bill. ....... A Harvard graduate who was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ms. Jin is also aggressively pro-worker. She has made it clear in podcasts and her Substack newsletter that creators should get the same rights as other workers. Among the ideas she has championed is a “universal creative income,” which would guarantee creators a base amount of money to live on. ........ Marina Mogilko, 31, a YouTube creator in Los Altos, Calif., said Ms. Jin “started the whole creator economy movement in Silicon Valley.” ........ “She was talking about the creator economy years and years and years before anyone else was,” said Jack Conte, a co-founder and the chief executive of Patreon, a crowdfunding site for content creators. “She really sees the future before other people do.” .......... Ms. Jin posts frequently on her Substack newsletter, leads an online course teaching creators how to invest in start-ups and has created Side Hustle Stack, a free resource to help influencers find and evaluate platforms to leverage........ Ms. Jin, who was born in Beijing, immigrated at age 6 with her family to the United States, where her father pursued a doctorate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their early years in the country were lean, she said, until her father left school and got a job. ....... At Harvard, she studied English and continued her creative pursuits. But at the urging of her family, who she said “wanted financial security for me,” Ms. Jin switched her major to statistics and did banking and corporate marketing internships. After briefly working for Capital One after college, she moved to Silicon Valley at age 23 to work at Shopkick, a shopping rewards app, as a product manager. ....... In 2016, Ms. Jin landed at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, the firm was focused heavily on investing in marketplaces like Airbnb and Rappi, the Instacart of Latin America. ...... Ms. Jin became fascinated with how different marketplaces worked and wrote prolifically about them for the Andreessen Horowitz blog. She also began thinking about how different marketplace systems could evolve to help people build businesses on the internet. ....... “Her being at that big storied firm and saying these things felt like, ahh, finally someone’s saying it,” said Mr. Green, the YouTube star. ........ “I realized I had an opportunity to start an entirely new fund that was devoted to this thesis and that would be on the forefront of evolving the nature of labor and work on the internet.” ........ In May 2020, she quit Andreessen Horowitz and started Atelier Ventures. She has since invested in creator-related start-ups such as PearPop, which lets influencers profit off their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances. She is one of the few investors whom large influencers know by name.
......... Ms. Jin has also publicly criticized the funds that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to make content for their platforms. She has implored the tech industry to “stop celebrating” the funds, calling them “bread and circuses,” and argued that creators needed ownership over the platforms that made money off them. ......... She has named a podcast that she co-hosts “Means of Creation,” a play on Marx’s means of production. ...... Her views have made her a subject of fascination in the tech industry and in leftist political spaces. ........ “There’s been a simmering awareness for my entire life,” she said, “that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness.” ......... Since starting Atelier Ventures, Ms. Jin has moved away from Silicon Valley and run her fund out of her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was nomadic, traveling around the world surrounded by a changing cast of internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.
New digital platforms enable forms of work we’ve never seen before
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What will happen to cryptocurrency in the 2020s
What happened in crypto over the last decade
DISCUSSING THE IMPACT OF BIDEN'S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON CRYPTO In this episode of "Bitcoin Bottom Line," the hosts and guest discuss the potential impact on Joe Biden's crypto-related executive order. .
Mobile is the Future of Voting – Nimit Sawhney, CEO, Voatz
BITCOIN CAN BE THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS The bad guys can’t stop Bitcoin, but Bitcoin can stop the bad guys. ....... 60 years ago, it was not Syrians, Afghans, Iranians and people from various African states who had to leave their homes and sought refuge. It was Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Russians and Germans who needed a new home before, during and after World War II. Displaced by an occupying power, by the ruling government and by hunger and war. ...... Reading these 30 articles, it becomes clear that the potential bad guy is often seen on the side of the state or government. ........ Bitcoin separates money from authorities. Bitcoin cannot be steered, created, destroyed or controlled in anyone's favor. Bitcoin is independent, antifragile, democratic and secure. ......... Proof-of-work makes Bitcoin the only independent cryptocurrency.
.......... 2.2 billion people are unbanked or underserved financially. ....... Bitcoin is the fulfillment of the desire for sound money. It exists. Compared to all other articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is almost no need to fight for this right. It is unstoppable! .
BITCOIN IS A MONETARY SYSTEM OF INTEGRITY Many of the failings we see in society today are a result of the values of fiat money being absorbed. ........ each individual is incentivized to seek the greatest fiat returns for their individual words and actions, as all are stuck on the fiat flywheel – all struggling to simply remain afloat amongst a sea of debt. ......... Integrity, the most important of all values, as none of the above virtues carry weight if integrity is found lacking, or inconsistent. Integrity encapsulates the basis for which an individual’s words and actions are deemed worthy of trust. ....... A society’s functionings (and provided incentives), when based upon a currency that is solely rooted in a lack of integrity such as a fiat currency, produce a citizenry that ultimately adopts the values of the currency itself. .
WHY THE PROPOSED EU BITCOIN BAN WOULD HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE The proposal, while shot down, is an example of growing misdirection in regulatory stances. .... You might not trust me, because Bitcoiners are all far-right drug-dealing gamblers that are environmentally bankrupting the planet as a hobby, according to the media. Let me tell you that I’m opposed to all of these things and yet spend the majority of my time educating others about the positive impact Bitcoin can have (and already has had) on the world. The good part is that you don’t have to trust me. .
The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto's Future . Vitalik Buterin, the most influential person in crypto ....... He doesn’t drink or particularly enjoy crowds. ...... the 28-year-old creator of Ethereum to celebrate. Nine years ago, Buterin dreamed up Ethereum as a way to leverage the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin for all sorts of uses beyond currency ........ Ether, the platform’s native currency, has become the second biggest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves. Ethereum has brought thousands of unbanked people around the world into financial systems, allowed capital to flow unencumbered across borders, and provided the infrastructure for entrepreneurs to build all sorts of new products, from payment systems to prediction markets, digital swap meets to medical-research hubs. ........ Ethereum has made a handful of white men unfathomably rich, pumped pollutants into the air, and emerged as a vehicle for tax evasion, money laundering, and mind-boggling scams. “Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong,” the Russian-born Canadian explains the morning after the party in an 80-minute interview in his hotel room. .......... Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives. But he acknowledges that his vision for the transformative power of Ethereum is at risk of being overtaken by greed. .......... has left Buterin reliant on the limited tools of soft power: writing blog posts, giving interviews, conducting research, speaking at conferences ....... “I’ve been yelling a lot, and sometimes that yelling does feel like howling into the wind”
......... The war is personal to Buterin, who has both Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. He was born outside Moscow in 1994 to two computer scientists ........ At 4, he inherited his parents’ old IBM computer and started playing around with Excel spreadsheets. At 7, he could recite more than a hundred digits of pi, and would shout out math equations to pass the time. By 12, he was coding inside Microsoft Office Suite. The precocious child’s isolation from his peers had been exacerbated by a move to Toronto in 2000, the same year Putin was first elected. His father characterizes Vitalik’s Canadian upbringing as “lucky and naive.” Vitalik himself uses the words “lonely and disconnected.” ........ Vitalik soon began writing articles exploring the new technology for the magazine Bitcoin Weekly, for which he earned 5 bitcoins a pop (back then, some $4; today, it would be worth about $200,000). ..... At 18, he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine and became its lead writer, earning a following both in Toronto and abroad. “A lot of people think of him as a typical techie engineer,” says Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who first interviewed Buterin in 2014. “But a core of his practice even more so is observation and writing—and that helped him see a cohesive vision that others weren’t seeing yet.” ........ The blockchain, he thought, could serve as an efficient method for securing all sorts of assets: web applications, organizations, financial derivatives, nonpredatory loan programs, even wills. Each of these could be operated by “smart contracts,” code that could be programmed to carry out transactions without the need for intermediaries. A decentralized version of the rideshare industry, for example, could be built to send money directly from passengers to drivers, without Uber swiping a cut of the proceeds. ....... In 2013, Buterin dropped out of college and wrote a 36-page white paper laying out his vision for Ethereum: a new open-source blockchain on which programmers could build any sort of application they wished. .......... Within months, a group of eight men who would become known as Ethereum’s founders were sharing a three-story Airbnb in Switzerland, writing code and wooing investors. ........ The ensuing conflicts left Buterin with culture shock. In the space of a few months, he had gone from a cloistered life of writing code and technical articles to a that of a decisionmaker grappling with bloated egos and power struggles. ........ Buterin still does not present stereotypical leadership qualities when you meet him. He sniffles and stutters through his sentences, walks stiffly, and struggles to hold eye contact. He puts almost no effort into his clothing ....... Buterin is wryly funny and almost wholly devoid of pretension or ego. He’s an unabashed geek whose eyes spark when he alights upon one of his favorite concepts, whether it be quadratic voting or the governance system futarchy. Just as Ethereum is designed to be an everything machine, Buterin is an everything thinker, fluent in disciplines ranging from sociological theory to advanced calculus to land-tax history. (He’s currently using Duolingo to learn his fifth and sixth languages.) He doesn’t talk down to people, and he eschews a security detail. ....... Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit and a major crypto investor, says being around Buterin gives him “a similar vibe to when I first got to know Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” the inventor of the World Wide Web. “He’s very thoughtful and unassuming,” Ohanian says, “and he’s giving the world some of the most powerful Legos it’s ever seen.” ............ There was the ICO boom of 2017, in which venture capitalists raised billions of dollars for blockchain projects. There was DeFi summer in 2020, in which new trading mechanisms and derivative structures sent money whizzing around the world at hyperspeed. And there was last year’s explosion of NFTs: tradeable digital goods, like profile pictures, art collections, and sports cards, that skyrocketed in value. ........ Proof of Humanity, which awards a universal basic income—currently about $40 per month—to anyone who signs up. ...... Inequities have crept into crypto in other ways, including a stark lack of gender and racial diversity. ........ frustrated users are decamping to newer blockchains like Solana and BNB Chain, driven by the prospect of lower transaction fees, alternative building tools, or different philosophical values. ........ On his blog and on Twitter, you’ll find treatises on housing; on voting systems; on the best way to distribute public goods; on city building and longevity research. ........ His blog is a model for how a leader can work through complex ideas with transparency and rigor, exposing the messy process of intellectual growth for all to see, and perhaps learn from. .......... He sees the technology as the most powerful equalizer to surveillance technology deployed by governments (like China’s) and powerful companies (like Meta) alike.
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Crypto Cities
