You can't project a16z's performance based on what happened on exchanges.

During the ICO boom, they got access to tokens before they ICO'ed, usually at 70-90% discounts. They also make a lot of equity investments into the companies behind the protocol.

I have no idea what their numbers look like right now. And it will be hard to judge as most of their investments are illiquid at this point and don't know how they'll work out. Chia, Filecoin, Libra, ... haven't launched so could end up being worth a lot or could be worth 0.

Silly to look at % down from ATH when we had a massive bubble that peaked and popped. If you look at return overall, crypto beats ALL stock market investmets.

If you look at it back from when nobody cared, sure, but you can't tell me you wouldn't rather invest in Uber's seed round than BTC.

From a brief google, Uber's seed round is up 5000X so that beats my example. But Ethereum did pretty well; their equivalent of a seed round was in 2014, when one Bitcoin was worth $600, and as of today they're up 700X since then. That's down 85% from their peak of 4600X.

And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor. If you just look at the public companies available to everyone, another quick google says the best in the last decade was Netflix at 40X gain.

> And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor.

If you ask the SEC the majority of ICOs aren't available to the average investor either, and never should have been. Because the vast majority are pure, hot, unadulterated garbage like Dentacoin and IOTA - which emulates a ternary computer for literally no reason anyone can identify.

Nevertheless it was available and the SEC is fine with Ethereum today. In any case, as far as the Crypto Fund goes my second paragraph was irrelevant anyway.

If you include crime, you can't beat the ROI of a successful bank robbery, though, even if the DOJ retroactively decides not to prosecute.

Uh, I'd take BTC from 2009-2012 over Uber's seed round any day. Bitcoin is the best-performing asset class of all time.

See: https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-pizza-day-celebrat...

I mean, look, the point is that you can't compare when bitcoin first opened up to an asset, it was a toy that surprisingly people pay for today even though it's being propped up by Tether and Bitfinex. It's akin to comparing the par value (1/10th of a cent) per share that the Uber founders received at formation - a 5,000,000% return. That makes the returns quite comparable. Starting something can be lucrative.

It is by no means the best performing asset. Anyone with shares from the formation of a startup has outperformed.

Yeah but the difference is the founders had to put in sweat equity while Bitcoin is a passive investment.

Equity is passive investment once you own it whether you remain employed or not. It's capital gains once you own the shares, not ordinary income. You can also include anyone you want in the cap table at formation, not just employees -- if you wanted, you could easily issue your advisory shares at that time.

Not to mention, at formation, you're more than welcome to pay market salaries to your founders, that's your perogative as a founder.

Not a startup. They don't just go from seed round to IPO on idle. The founders had to invest thousands of hours and immense stress to get it to IPO. Meanwhile a holder of 1000 BTC from 2012 probably continued to work their day job until 2017 when they incidentally became multi-millionaires.

This is the reason bitcoin will never be more than a way to move funds illegally and for a few gamblers to trade it online.

Society is fine with startup founders and "employee number 5" making their fortune because they put in actual effort to build a company.

The bitcoin millionaires happened to mine a few coins in 2011 before most people knew about it and then just did nothing as you said. Zero contribution to society from making that paper (or bit) fortune.

Why on earth would everyone else not on the right internet forum in the early 2010s make the few that were fabulously rich?

Investing in stocks is a similar passive income, but at least in that case the investors money is going towards some business that pays a wage to workers or provides some net benefit to society (hopefully).

A start-up is just any company that's founded, usually with aspirations, and what I'm saying is that, technically, you can throw anyone you want on your cap table at formation [note]. I'm not saying it's typical or common, just that it's fundamentally possible. Same with founder compensation.

Bitcoin as a "passive investment" is such a lame comparison because it does, literally, nothing, just like hanging onto some beanie babies. Beanie babies, but much more wasteful.

[note] Anyone who's an employee or an accredited investor.

There were thousands of people who participated in Bitcoin's early days, tens of thousands by 2012. And back then they were giving away Bitcoin on faucets. You could also mine it with a basic graphics card.

It's not a lame comparison at all. If you bought Bitcoin in 2010, you've seen a 8,900,000% ROI. The asset may go up another 10-1000x from here. Bitcoin will outlast Uber. And if you're still comparing it to Beanie Babies 11 years later, it's likely you don't understand finance or blockchain, and you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the past few years.

> The asset may go up another 10-1000x from here.

Or it may go down to 0. Your assertion is as likely as mine, and you’re not basing it on anything it all. Past performance != future performance.

> Bitcoin will outlast Uber.

Ok, that doesn’t mean it’ll be worth anything. Or if it does that doesn’t mean anyone will have their keys haha. Every random walk down the timeline results in 100% of keys lost haha.

> And if you're still comparing it to Beanie Babies 11 years later, it's likely you don't understand finance or blockchain, and you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the past few years.

It’s because I’ve paid attention. Citing the divine scriptures of satoshi isn’t sufficient dismissal.

It may. I mean, oil just went negative a couple weeks ago so anything is possible.

When analyzing an asset class you have to look at probabilities. Probability of Bitcoin going to zero during a financial crisis, where people are losing faith in local currencies around the world:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Lebanon-PM-bla...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/demand-for-bitcoin-surges-in-...

...is near zero. It's much more likely that adoption continues and Bitcoin matures as a financial asset class, not just in the developing world, but here in the U.S.:

https://www.cryptopolitan.com/caitlin-long-to-build-a-crypto...

https://decrypt.co/resources/bakkt

https://bankless.substack.com/p/9-going-bankless-w-maker-and...

As for the random walk and 100% of keys being lost...maybe if you march out the timeline long enough, the whole human species isn't going to exist any longer...so there's that. But I would argue strongly that Bitcoin (and Ethereum) has better prospects than any other digital infrastructure.

In the mean time, the next few decades look very bright indeed.

> When analyzing an asset class you have to look at probabilities. Probability of Bitcoin going to zero during a financial crisis, where people are losing faith in local currencies around the world:

BTC has dropped 50% in value over the last three years, while the currency has inflated 5%. I know which I'd rather hold. Actually I'd rather hold neither, I'd rather be invested.

> It's much more likely that adoption continues and Bitcoin matures as a financial asset class, not just in the developing world, but here in the U.S.:

Fewer people care about it than practically ever:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=bitcoin

> As for the random walk and 100% of keys being lost...maybe if you march out the timeline long enough, the whole human species isn't going to exist any longer...so there's that. But I would argue strongly that Bitcoin (and Ethereum) has better prospects than any other digital infrastructure.

20% of BTC has already been lost.

Probably more if you count Satoshi's wallet, which likely belongs to Paul Calder Le Roux, currently working with the DEA as penance for his many, many crimes. [1]

The price is largely propped up through a massive fraud perpetrated by Tether and Bitfinex. All the folks with those heavy, heavy bags have no interest in surfacing it, as it has become too big to fail within the crypto community.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...

a16z isn't investing in coins. I don't know if Coinbase was in Crypto Fund I, but it if it was, then I don't think Fund I could have done too bad.

It certainly is. They put in quite a bit into Maker and Dfinity, for example.

I think they have invested directly in cryptocurrencies (that is why they decided to register as an RIA), along with a range of other bets that include Coinbase, Compound and Anchorage.

Are you sure about that? The Winkelvii sure did. Plenty of funds were set up solely to invest in various coins. Why would a16z be any different?

So you're saying the fund invested at all time highs into small cap shitcoins, or whats your point? FB is 10% off all time highs - Are all investors doing terrible?

Seems like you just have an axe to grind.

I'd say if $AAPL were down 98% from ATH then investors probably shouldn't be running out to buy the next $AAPL. Who's running out to buy the next GameStop? In fact GameStop is only down 90% from ATH so you'd have made out 5X better on a $GME investment at peak than you would have buying $ZEC.

It's like a16z launching a fund to invest in retail video game sales (due to the overwhelming success of $GME) in shopping malls but also run by criminals and utilizing more power than your average country. It's stupid technology.

And for the record, I've no axe to grind, I made a bunch of money in the run-up, and sold all my crypto at BTC$17000. That doesn't mean I think it's at all valuable, or would recommend literally anyone buy any, ever.

Maybe you weren't around for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002, stocks had lost $5 trillion in market capitalization since the peak.[39] At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1,114, down 78% from its peak.[40][41] Many online shopping companies, such as Pets.com, Webvan, and Boo.com, as well as communication companies, such as Worldcom, NorthPoint Communications and Global Crossing, failed and shut down.[42][43] Others, such as Cisco, whose stock declined by 86%,[43] and Qualcomm, lost a large portion of their market capitalization but survived, and some companies, such as eBay and Amazon.com, lost value but recovered quickly.

Mmm indeed but those companies did things that weren't just heating the planet to solve math problems.