> Participating in modern e-commerce for the unbanked/underbanked
From my experience, the unbanked hardly have a chance to own cryptocurrency because they don't even have internet. In my country, MPesa is pretty much ubiquitous and that is because it doesn't need the internet to work.
Are there any ideas on how to overly SMS functionality over cryptocurrency in order to truly bank the unbanked? One idea that is bouncing in my head is a sort of agency model where agents can actually have the internet set up in physical premises and they can be the ones to set up crypto-wallets and withdraw/deposit fiat. The unbanked users can simply continue to use SMS based systems to operate their crypto-wallets.
Only problem is that they wouldn't necessarily truly own their coins - most users on HN may care about that but these folks wouldn't. If it works, it works and that's all they'd care about.
I just thought about the idea now when I read your comment so it isn't necessarily refined.
> come up with a solution which is easy to implement
This might be better phrased as, "a solution that's easy to scale". I don't think the implementation part of most valuable things is remotely easy; at least from my experience.
I must admit I haven't ever thought about these numbers but it strikes me as insanely high. How can this be explained? Is it a feature of just America or is it reproducible in other countries as well?
"... that almost a third of men [in Britain] have a criminal conviction by the age of 30, according to the Home Office. Research on men born in 1953 showed that about 30 per cent had clocked up a standard list offence - one that is dealt with by the courts but excludes minor motoring offences - by their thirtieth birthday. Research in Scotland points in the same direction, suggesting that about 25 per cent of men have a record by age 24."
It's easier to rule over people who live in fear, so just make more things illegal, process people through the system, and you get your total state without anyone raising an eyebrow.
The parent is confusing criminal record with incarceration duration. The UK has nearly just as high of a criminal record ratio among adult men for example. The difference is the US assigns far longer incarceration times for the same crime vs the UK. Further, Europe as a whole has a higher crime rate than the US does. [1]
70 million jobs has plenty of room for international expansion accordingly.
"[2011] Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the United States, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the ‘reversal of misfortunes’."
Interesting paper. From the abstract: We find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime. Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe.
if i'm reading that right, they're suggesting that European incarceration policies/rates/sentences (or something) are too lenient (?). so, Europe has the opposite problem when compared to the US?
Yes, that happens when you lock up five times as many people per capita, crime goes down a bit. Hardly surprising, there's nothing mysterious as to why.
Keep in mind that the exploding US prison population started in the 1990s; 'thirty years ago' is before this happened.
Not for a managed hosting with 1-3h of allocated maintenance work plus HA guarantee. It's cheap, for that level of service.
Either you want cheap mass hosting, then you have to live with support that can only assist you with basic stuff (and most don't have any support other than FAQ pages), or you pay more and get support that can actually help you. For example, a hoster I know, when you go to them even with the most hipster tech stack imaginable, they'll educate themselves on said technology and will help you until the app is set up successfully.
Indeed, it is guaranteed HA and autoscaling, no hassles on peak traffic, and dedicated maintenance work. It isn't cheap as such, but it is very price competitive.
> This includes 1/2/3 hours support/site changes respectively
$150 surely includes 1 hour of billable time. For many, this is in the $50-100/hour range (though higher isn't unheard of), so this seems pretty reasonable.
Very curious how you price this...per fix or standard monthly fee? If it's a fee, how do you deal with absurd feature requests whose development costs far outstrip what you've quoted?
I had been doing the hosting with 3rd party providers but I realised that I could actually do it better myself if I built a multi tenant platform. For the support, I was doing a lot of the support anyway so I realised I might as well do it in my own platform.
For these reasons, I've deployed my app on a Vultr server, have a couple of clients on it for my beta and so far so good.
I'm still working on the billing system for my clients so that when they renew their hosting the next time round it will be on my platform.
A couple of things I didn't want to touch include domain selling and email hosting. My platform has turn key ecommerce tools that are good enough for customers to want to pay for. Domains are still done by a 3rd party (but they're mostly cheap) and as for email, I would rather provide integration with Zoho or google apps. I don't like the headache of email deliverability; it's not worth the effort at this stage in my startup - heck, even Shopify don't touch it.
Once I'm done with billing, my next big problem to solve is logistics. I need to find a way to help my merchants ship to their customers easily as it is still a very big problem for them. It will mean partnering with a myriad of logistics providers and creating an ecosystem for just this.
On a serious note though, I don't disagree that indeed your statement above is true but because we are weak creatures, we must rely on systems. Making the world a better place is many a time correlated with some sort of validation by consumers in a market based system. I.e. solve problems/make life better or easier for someone, get rewarded by more and more patronage.
Granted, this is not always the case but majority of the time, this has been in my experience the most unbiased and reliable way to do good in the world. Simply by solving other people's problems for your and others' sustenance, you somehow also end up making the world a better place. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
My reference is to majority of the time and in a sustainable way. If doing good will last, there must also be a way to sustainably compensate the actors; they also need to have their needs taken care of.
I would rather have Uber crash and burn under the stewardship of Kalanick (unlikely scenario) than have the same happen under a clueless board and a replacement CEO (likely scenario).
I said it before and you can mark my word. This decision to hire Immelt as Travis' replacement only goes further to solidify my claim. Bad decision. Very bad decision.
I agree. Immelt is an HBS educated manager. <- Full stop. That's the only thing about him. He has no Silicon Valley experience and worked for the GE his whole life. The only thing I would hire him for is to stabilize the company to finally go public. I bet the VC's plan exactly for that. I would not expect any innovation in Ubers business from now on. Immelt will bring Uber in shape for Wall Street, VCs cash out and then the whole thing can go to hell. As bad as Kalanick was, he was aggressive and hungry for success. Immelt is nothing of that. Bye bye Uber.
I hadn't seen it that way but like @dna_polymerase pointed out above, it may very well be. I still maintain it's myopic and undeserving of a company I'd like to think of as the next facebook/amazon/google/microsoft
These are outfits that have provided tremendous value to the entire planet. My view was that Uber could have followed the same trajectory. Now, not so much anymore.
Mistakes are made all the time. I swear to you, there's an exaggerated amount of hate towards Travis. You'd think he's the devil. What has he done that's so bad? He simply founded a company that was super successful within a short time, with an idea that seems so easy that everyone thinks they could've done it and along the way some missteps were made.
Are you sure you would've done better? Would you like it if the plurality of stakeholders in your ecosystem vilified you in a similar way? I'm sure you wouldn't. Cut Travis some slack!
> He simply founded a company that was super successful within a short time, with an idea that seems so easy that everyone thinks they could've done it and along the way some missteps were made.
Yeah, I suppose if you elide every reason he was removed he doesn't sound so bad.
"Trust, but verify" is well-regarded modus operandi. Why is it acceptable in other circumstances but not this one?
If "trust, but verify" can be a legitimate threat mitigation strategy, how does one conduct the verification in good faith and avoid such verification being labeled as being an "attempt to discredit"?
I honestly don't see how rape differs from any other accusation of wrongdoing with respect to due process. Is it not the right of the accused to question the accounts of their accuser and conduct their own investigation?
But could you expound on this part here
> Participating in modern e-commerce for the unbanked/underbanked
From my experience, the unbanked hardly have a chance to own cryptocurrency because they don't even have internet. In my country, MPesa is pretty much ubiquitous and that is because it doesn't need the internet to work.
Are there any ideas on how to overly SMS functionality over cryptocurrency in order to truly bank the unbanked? One idea that is bouncing in my head is a sort of agency model where agents can actually have the internet set up in physical premises and they can be the ones to set up crypto-wallets and withdraw/deposit fiat. The unbanked users can simply continue to use SMS based systems to operate their crypto-wallets.
Only problem is that they wouldn't necessarily truly own their coins - most users on HN may care about that but these folks wouldn't. If it works, it works and that's all they'd care about.
I just thought about the idea now when I read your comment so it isn't necessarily refined.