flavio87

don’t know if this qualifies as big in your book, but there are some well marketed advances here:

https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/

Scientific search engine/agent to surface papers with commercial potential (patent, moats, etc.) - eventually wanna expand to cover any search query. Imagine having someone reading 1000s of science papers on your behalf, with your goals in mind, and then telling which papers to pay attention to and why

How much time and $ would it cost to register your tokens as a security? Would it be possible without any financial history? I remember Lending Club was able to have them registered and offer securities with their peer to peer loans to unaccredited investors.

This sounds awesome. However I'm a bit saddened that there is no mention of CO2 or climate change in this discussion. What about building solar planes vs just faster planes will do even more harm to the environment if people start flying more because time is now shorter?

congrats to Will, Robbie, Chris and the entire team. to the moon and more :)

May I suggest the following https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness_(psychology)

Can you find a question (not an answer) that can help you look at things differently? Who is it who is jealous? How does it feel to be jealous? What's going on right now?

seems like their executing incredibly well and big congrats to the team. I do wonder a bit how defensible this model is - it seems to me that safeway already has most of the infrastructure available to do deliveries and then could significantly outperform instacart deliveries from safeway in terms of customer experience for example.

- they always know what's in stock in which facility when you order, no more replaced or missing items - they don't charge the high 20-30% markup that instacart charges to their customers

in terms of marketing, they could probably have lower cost of acquisition on scale as well. - they could market their app in-store very aggressively at every single checkout counter.

what Safeway is most obviously lacking is a frontend that's as good as instacarts, but now that instacart has shown how to build it, it should be easy for safeway to build this out.

maybe they don't have their distribution setup such that they could actually deliver within 1-2 hours? what else am I missing? how can this be a defensible business long term?

Na'ama and the idea are awesome. congrats on the raise and good luck!

snapclass - although this happened a lot in the past, we are now curating the platform much more and also our repayment rates are in the 85% area. If you diversify well and go for A/B rated borrowers you can definitely make very positive returns.

We are now doing around USD 1M per month, are growing the number of borrowers rapidly - which allows for more diversification and better returns (on average)

this is really awesome. was always hoping caltrain would introduce that - never occured to me that you could hack the system like you guys are - very amazing and wish you best of luck!

We are serving investors who don't want to expose themselves to bitcoin price. The current bitcoin price reflects pretty exactly the aggregated sum of expectations (wisdom of the crowds style) of what the likelihood is that bitcoin will go such astronomic levels.

We allow investors who think and breathe in USD (or other fiat currencies, for that matter) to invest all around the world 'using btc', without exposing them to btc. The returns we generate are so high because we have borrowers whose only alternatives are pay-day loans with 3000% APR (checkout wonga.com) or credit-card interest (checkout brazil's crazy 120-200% APR on outstanding credit card debt) If we provide 30-40% APR interest for them, that is a huge win, they can refinance their high interest debt and repay at a much lower rate. At the same time, that is how investors can make 19% a year after some defaults.

> nobody will ever lend bitcoins out for productive uses.

that is not true. Checkout https://btcjam.com. Investors have funded over $4M in loans so far, growing quickly. Loans can be linked to USD (if your revenue is in Fiat) or BTC (if your revenue is in BTC, for example for a miner). In other words, you get a loan denominated in USD, but paid in BTC and you are removing any exposure to the volatility. If the BTC price has doubled when you repay your loan, simply pay half the amount of BTC.

The bitcoin price doesn't matter for the linked loans. Bitcoin is more than just a store of value - it is also a means of sending value across the world for very low fees - and in this case, giving credit to people who can't easily obtain it at affordable rates.

(disclosure: I work at BTCJam)