jegutman

That’s tokens available I assume for all competitors during the competition.

It is odd, but not as ridiculous as it sounds. For one, many companies couldn't issue 10s of billions in debt so you do have access to that much capital (normally at reasonable costs).

That's some nerdy click-bait there.

Yellow journalism is a politicized issue in 2016.

I thought most ad blocking right now depends on the fact that ads are served from different locations than the sites themselves. You can try to block native ads being served by the same stuff that serves the page, but it's reasonably more difficult and prone to false positives.

There's a separate issue that as they try harder to block ads they will also make it less clear what's an ad. For example many ad blockers don't work on google search results because they're fed back with the result content, but it also becomes less and less obvious what's an ad and what's a search result on google.

Wow, this is really cool.

It's not giving shares, it's a share exchange. Again I'm not an expert, but I've seen these types of arrangements before and somehow they got reasonable tax treatment because they were spelled out as such in the original grant (so nothing had actually "changed" at the time).

I actually disagree with the 10yr time frame (although will admit it has its merits), but also agree with some of your logic. I just think that the 10yr "fix" solves some problems and creates others. I think this issue is that you should: A) not rob former employees of accrued stock value B) probably try to somewhat reduce incentives to leave if the company is going to continue to do well

There are a few problems I see here: 1) stock option grants are completely arbitrary and sometimes end up very wrong 2) it's hard to fix that in the future because you'll end up at a higher strike price 3) end up being expensive and tax inefficient to exercise

The closest I've seen to people who seem to get this and have sensible solutions are Andrew Mason at Detour (progressive equity) and Dustin Moskovitz at Asana (larger grants, but back loaded into years 4-6).

I have great respect for Adam D'Angelo at Quora for suggesting a solution to the problem, have known him in school he's certainly smarter than me on almost every axis of intelligence, but I think there are other potentially creative solutions that might be better (although I don't know tax compliance).

For example I think you could keep the status quo, but offer the option for employees to exchange their options for shares (white meat) at the time they can exercise. Example you have options for 100 shares at a strike price of $50, at the time you leave the shares are worth $100, instead of having to come up with $5000, you just get $50 shares free and clear. I think there's still a tax hit issue, but at least it's not doubled with paying for the shares.

I'd be kind of surprised if mutual funds were doing much investing in this kind of ETF. Look at the shares outstanding of FXE, FXA, FXB (currency etfs for euro, australian dollar and pound), they're not very popular. Some hedge funds do use these and famously Paulson was using GLD for his gold exposure (I still think this is pretty dumb, he should've traded futures and EFP-ed into spot gold). Wouldn't be shocked to be proven wrong, but most ETFs don't gain traction. There's also a pretty small cap on how big this ETF can get (at least for now), almost by definition the commodity backing a bitcoin etf has a much much smaller availability than the commodity backing any other etf. I am glad they're using cold storage to store them at least.

This won't be the dumbest ETF, it will be a less than ideal way of holding bitcoin. There are lots of ETFs that make it easy to get access to an asset class and get the full economics (foreign exchange ETFs), these are still probably not ideal, but they're reasonable, but bitcoin is pretty easy to buy and sell not sure what benefit an exchange traded product has.

The Wikelvoss's do have a BTC exchange, is the goal to somehow tie this in? Turn their exchange to a market that gets benchmarked? They did also launch the BitIndex. Seems like trying to control the bitcoin benchmark could have financial value.

Comment below was correct. Sorry, I thought it wouldn't be confusing because it was in comment I replied to. My bad.