There was also a cryptography startup later on called Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow (working on peer-to-peer stuff that I think is slightly akin to Filecoin).
Yuval Noah Harari’s speech on how control over one’s biometric data should be handed to the elites in order to hack the human animal was really inspirational.
I am not a history expert but it is interesting to hear that re: Rome, given the author's background
> Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
The Club of Rome is not composed of specialists in Rome history though. It is a "club" that held its organizational meeting in Rome, in 1968 - hence the name.
Generally you aren't limited in how much you can sell. If Tesla deposits $270m worth, the exchange won't stop them from selling. I think you mean withdraw (there are pretty strict limits on how much you can withdraw)
> Some founders create structured equity that only pays out after the company’s stock appreciates significantly. Other CEOs have out-of-the-money options (Elon Musk is famous for this).
I looked up OTM options and it looks very similar to the first sentence. Basically, you (the founder) tie your compensation to the success of the company. You win big if the company wins big. Can anyone disambiguate the two situations in the quote further?
An option gives the right but not the obligation to buy (or sell) something at a given price (the "strike") in the future. Equity in this case is that thing. The equity can be structured such that it sits behind other investors in liquidation preferences etc meaning it doesn't have economic value until the share price/valuation hits a particular hurdle (similar to the strike price on an option).
So while they are similar in terms of economic impact, the equity can have other rights attached (eg voting, ROFR for dilution etc) that a founder might want. Also crucially you already have the equity so you don't have to pay up to buy it (as you would in the case of a call option).
Finally as always there may be tax implications which make the difference meaningful. Tax arbitrage is often part of the calculus for any kind of weird compensation package.
A lot of dunking happening here - titles like this article's can definitely turn people away, as people have learned that money means something (undesirably) different in "crypto." That said, the article does provide a pretty good job documenting the creative process, the path to minting, and the launch of a campaign. I encourage anyone interested in the space to get past the triggering headline and give it a read.
edit: looks like the submission got flagged/removed from the feed on HN. sigh
Yep. One of the ways reporters mislead people while remaining factually correct. Then they blame factually incorrect news as destroying society while they're just doing the same thing more tactfully.
"factually incorrect news" is not the same thing as "fake news". Fake news is like a fake Rollex. The correctness of the time on the dial isn't the thing that makes it fake. Fake news is fraud without the monetary connotation.
If I went and lifted the NYT CSS files and registered some intentionally misleading domain / company name like "Times of New York", I could go around saying whatever I want and a good number of people would believe it. Fake news is worse than wrong, its divorced from reality. There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with. Fake news is a click farm in Macedonia, not a news outlet that made a mistake.
See also: "deep state" (which has now been bastardized to mean "shadow government").
Well, sure. So "fake news" is like a fake Rollex. But then, what the "regular" news are is a genuine Rollex, except the company secretly swapped out internal parts for low-quality, less-precise but much cheaper ones, and are selling the watch for the same price, with the same SKU[0].
Sure, buying the genuine watch supports the IP holders and gives you bragging rights, but both the genuine and the fake are bad choices when you're looking for a high-quality, durable and precise watch.
> There never was a journalist trying to get it right to begin with.
By this standard, regular news would be fake news too. You don't get manipulative language in the article when someone is trying to "get it right" - it only shows up when someone is trying to get it wrong, on purpose.
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[0] - I.e. what computing hardware and home appliance vendors do all the time.
There's legitimate gripes you can have with news, but you can't say they don't literally send a person out to conduct interviews and whatever. "Fake news" isn't just less precise or some subjective quality issue about the internals of the organization There is no internals. That's the part that's fake.
Fake news is like the man at the store told you it wasn't ticking because it just needs to be wound up, wouldn't let you take it out of the box, and you got home with it to find the dials are painted on and the inside is a few coins glued together. Whatever legitimate gripes one may have about Rollex cutting corners, it would be laughable to pretend like the time on their dials is just as useless as the ones painted on the fake watch and really its all just an opinion which one is "real".
What do you call something that looks deceptively like a watch but is actually just a prop? I'd call it a fake watch. What do you call a website that looks deceptively like a news organization but is actually just outrage headlines made from mad libs for clicks? I sure wouldn't call it real news.
Not wanting to get caught up in this analogy war but I think there's a clear distinction between "proper" news which tries hard to be factually correct and "fake news" that's just made-up lies. The problem I see is that people judge the former type as being informative and the latter as misinformative. In reality, both intentionally mislead people using different techniques - proper news by exploiting human reading comprehension weaknesses to plant false ideas in readers' heads without technically lying, and fake news by exploiting gullibility by actually lying.
As Jim McCoy said, it takes Evil Geniuses to really get the job done.