PiedPiper COIN - Silicon Valley Season 5, Ep7
The Bitcoin craze If that reminds you of Bitcoin’s escalation, you’re not alone. Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) becomes convinced that instead of giving up shares and two board seats to the VCs, Pied Piper should instead hold an ICO, or initial coin offering. It’s the hot new thing; more than 200 were held in 2017, according to CNN. It works by a company essentially creating a new cryptocurrency and then selling it to investors in order to raise money. Gilfoyle pitches Richard by pointing out how cryptocurrencies — decentralized, secure, anonymous and a threat to the established order — are a natural fit for Richard’s vision of a new decentralized internet not beholden to ads, data harvesting and monolithic tech giants. Sure, Bitcoin may be a bubble, Gilfoyle says, but remember MySpace and Friendster? They died, but social media is here to stay. Well, cryptocurrency may be as well, but that doesn’t mean every investor will make out. ICOs vs. VCs The episode presents ICOs as basically middle fingers pointed at VCs and the established VC process. In real life it’s more nuanced, and many VCs are as interested as anyone else in this new mode of raising money. But the show did get right that VC oversight — and profit motive — is real. When Laurie tells Monica that Monica’s unwritten promise to not make Pied Piper sell ads or harvest data on their new internet may or may not be kept, Monica jumps ship to help Richard with his ICO. It’s a bust, netting thousands instead of millions of dollars. Professing no hard feelings (indeed, no feelings at all), Laurie tells Monica that they should each work with companies that share their values. What does that mean? For Laurie, who works with other people’s money, it seems to mean a fiduciary duty to that money and its growth. Her refusal to deal in values outside those is itself a value, an impersonal loyalty to numbers and contracts alone.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/5vrQeNNIElM
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