Blockchain in Online Casino Sites Online gambling has been on the rise since the end of the 1990’s, and we’ve seen few signs that this will be changing anytime soon. However, this does not mean that there are no changes to how online gambling functions, and in the last few years the industry has gone through several large-scale alterations and revampings. One of the last changes to enter the scene, is the appearance of blockchain in online gambling. For many players, this might still be new and unknown territory, but all the signs point to this being the way forward for safe and transparent gambling in the future. In addition to some BitCasinos, where you can preferably deposit and withdraw with the cryptocurrency, many renowned Canadian gambling sites to play have also added BTC as a payment method. Transactions can be classified more quickly than with conventional currencies. Only the payouts may take some time, but this depends heavily on the selected casino website. Bonus programs have proven to be just as reliable. Buy cryptocurrency with iDEAL Casino Due to the increasing demand of cryptocurrency exchanges, online casino operators developed tools helping to buy crypto with as few steps as possible. No technical knowledge is required to have access to cryptocurrency account. Bitcoin and other crypto casino payments are possible with iDEAL. Owner of a Dutch bank account, can quickly transfer money to trusted online casino iDEAL. Transaction is processed immediately, chosen cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin will be delivered immediately. Immigration I spent months last year petitioning the U.S. government to grant my mother a green card. Just last month she walked into the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, and learned that our petition had been approved. On her nightstand now lies a dense and official-looking sealed envelope, to be opened exclusively by whichever immigration agent receives her upon arrival to the country, containing (we assume) all the relevant documents authorizing her entry and stay in the United States. We were ecstatic to even hold it. Now we’re terrified about its potential insignificance. The one-way flight we’d bought for March, we changed to February. Our little Caribbean half-of-an-island may be far removed from the countries and nationalities singled out by Trump’s executive order, but its message affects every non-American in the world who hopes to move to the United States. Including my mother, a successful former diplomat and international negotiator who wants to move here to be closer to our family and start a business. I’m not depressed over this issue because I believe we the people largely oppose its ideology. So instead I choose to be optimistic about the great opportunity we have to use technology to re-engineer our social systems. I saw glimpses of that opportunity two weeks ago at Debug Politics showcase, and I see it every day at my job working with companies like Jobbatical whose mere existence is an act of resistance against the ideals behind the policies pushed by Trump. Me, I’m going to continue my work to further understand, promote and invest in blockchain network architectures because I believe this design has the potential to not only undo the centralization of the web (which Trump exploited), but also fundamentally change the incentive and reward structures of modern society as we continue our transition to an information economy in a way that increases social cohesion. And I’m also going to support the ACLU on a monthly basis and look for other opportunities to support opposition movements. But that’s not going to help my mother’s angst or any of those who today share the same feeling of desperation. What’s been most helpful in that regard, actually, is seeing people show up at JFK and other airports around the country protesting the policy and receiving foreign travelers with warmth and love and balloons and hugs. That gives me confidence.

Fat Protocols I blogged a bit about blockchain-based protocols at usv.com earlier today. It’s an exploration of how tokenized blockchain protocols shift value away from the applications layer to the protocol layer of the Internet. What’s most exciting to me right now is how increasingly clear the business of blockchain protocols and applications is becoming to us as a firm. We’ve been believers, promoters and investors in (now five) blockchain companies since Fred invested in Coinbase in 2013. We’ve always had a big hunch that blockchains were going to be the future of the web and today we’re getting better at articulating exactly why and how as we continue to work with our blockchain portfolio and this (still nascent) market keeps developing. What I love about blockchain is how the deeper you go, the more boring most everything else in tech seems in comparison. Few things out there are fundamentally changing the structure of markets at a macro scale the way blockchains are. And what gets me going the most is how little attention most of the venture business seems to be paying. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to spend my career working on this and I want to thank everyone who’s taken the time to geek out on distributed systems with me over the past couple of years.

Jobbatical Today we’re announcing our investment in Jobbatical. I wrote about it on the USV blog. Jobbatical is our first investment along a thesis we’re calling The Nomad Stack. I will write a bit more about this thesis in the coming weeks, but today I just want to welcome the team to the USV family. They’re an awesome group of ambitious people with lots of conviction, we’re very excited about working with them.

How Bitcoin Is Like SMTP For a while, we’ve been arguing in favor of Bitcoin as a protocol, on top of which a new architecture for internet applications is emerging. Fred likes to compare Bitcoin to e-mail by remembering the way e-mail used to work before SMTP. In the 80s we had e-mail services like AOL or Compuserve Mail that only allowed you to send email to other users of the same service, similar to how today you can only send a DM or Facebook message to another Twitter or Facebook user. Then in the early 90s e-mail became interoperable thanks to the adoption of SMTP. Suddenly, AOL Mail users could now e-mail Compuserve users and vice versa, and new services were instantly compatible with the established ones. Because SMTP is an open protocol, there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can create an e-mail client and participate in the network, and nobody can shut them down in the same way that Twitter or Facebook sometimes cut off applications built on top of their platforms that threaten their business model. As a result, despite its shortcomings, we have seen a lot of innovation in e-mail over the past decades, and it is one of the most popular internet applications. Bitcoin is like SMTP in that it can be the bridge between different financial applications. A Venmo user could send money (in fiat, even) to a Square Cash user if these applications adopted the Bitcoin protocol in the background like AOL and Compuserve adopted SMTP in the early 90s. And just like with SMTP, Bitcoin will enable a lot of innovation by making it easier to create new kinds of global financial applications. This is the same thesis behind all other emerging decentralized protocols. They too can be the bridge that connects the applications together to both create collective value and foster innovation. OpenBazaar could connect different marketplaces together, Openname could bridge your identity across social networks, and a Canonical Content Registry could link our content across all the different channels it travels through. What’s important to understand is that the collective value created by a network of networks is greater than any single individual network, and a decentralized protocol provides the perfect mechanism to make this possible. A Venmo that can send money to M-Pesa is more valuable than a Venmo that only works in the U.S. I don’t expect many of the incumbent services to embrace these protocols like AOL embraced SMTP decades ago, for a variety of reasons, but we might get lucky with their successors. And there is always a successor. The challenge we’re still trying to figure out is how to get protocols adopted by the market. Looking at history we have found several ways, but not one definitive pattern. In the mean time, we’ll keep making bets on a more interoperable future.

Don’t Automate, Obliterate Last Friday we did a deep dive into our investment thesis at USV. During the meeting Albert introduced us to a great paper titled “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” by Michael Hammer, which was published published in a 1990 issue of Harvard Business Review. Fred wrote about the paper and our session on AVC. The point of the paper is to show that the greatest improvements in productivity are not obtained by automating existing processes, but by obliterating and replacing them with something completely different. To illustrate that point, Michael Hammer provides two examples from Ford and MBL of how obliterating produced drastically better results than automating. I’d like to extend that with two modern examples from our portfolio of companies who are succeeding by obliterating instead of automating: Lending Club To get a loan, it used to be that borrowers would have to go to a bank – usually after shopping around – and fill out a paper application, which would then go through the bank’s (slow) internal processes where it would usually take weeks to be processed. One way the banks tried to make this more efficient was to automate some of their internal procedures to reduce the time it takes to process a loan. Another approach (this time coming startups instead of the banks) was to try and automate the process of “shopping around” for a better. Neither of those worked very well: it still could take up to several weeks to close the process. Instead, Lending Club (which recently went public) came along and obliterated the entire process by replacing it with a marketplace model where lenders (including banks) compete more efficiently, so consumers get better loans in a few days instead of a few weeks. eShares The only boring part about working at USV is keeping tabs on our portfolio’s cap tables and financial documents. It’s especially painful at the end of each year which is when we get audited by a third-party accounting firm which produces a report for our limited partners. The reason it’s boring is because it takes a lot of time to gather all this information. We have to bug each company’s CEO or CFO via e-mail and request up-to-date (Excel!) documents, an ostensibly simple task that can take several weeks when you have to do it for over 60 companies. Throughout the last audit my colleague Jonathan and I constantly dreamed up several different ways we could make the process more efficient by automating things like reaching out to companies and uploading documents to the Drive we share with our auditors. Were we to implement some of these ideas, we could probably make the audit 20% more efficient. Instead, take eShare’s online cap table management software. It provides private company shareholders with a single online cap table – which is always up to date – as well as real-time financials by plugging into the company’s existing accounting software. This obliterates all the steps for getting up-to-data from our companies, so we don’t have to bother them anymore.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov This short story was introduced to me in junior high by my first Computer Science teacher. I stumbled upon it again today and re-read it. It’s just as wonderful today as it was when I was a kid.

Isaac Asimov’s novels got me interested in the future, which got me interested in computers. I doubt I’d be working in this industry without them, so they occupy a special place in my heart. I had forgotten how great this story is. I am posting it here so that I may not forget it again. If you haven’t read it, or haven’t in a while, I encourage you to do so.

Deep Web Marketplaces Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been frequenting the deep web marketplaces most famously used for buying drugs online with Bitcoin. I wanted to see if there was anything we could learn about how these illicit marketplaces work that could be applied to improve the legal marketplaces we invest in at USV. As part of my research, I purchased an item on Evolution (no, not drugs – a pair of furry boots) in an effort to understand the dynamics of these marketplaces, from trust and safety to flow of funds. This is what I learned in the process.

The Shared Data Layer of The Blockchain Application Stack This is a follow up to The Blockchain Application Stack. I suggest giving it a quick read if you haven’t already. It’ll provide useful context for many of the thoughts contained in this post. There were many insights left out of that post that I hope to articulate in the ones that will follow. If I didn’t get to answer your question, please bear with me as I’ll try to do a deeper dive on the more recurring ones after we’re done going through the stack in detail. Today’s post is about the Shared Data Layer.