Your quote in the articles says -- "We saw lots of people in the City University of New York system who graduated as computer science majors but weren't going into the tech industry" --- You can't graduate as a CS major without writing any code...So this quote has nothing to do with the people actually in your program?
That quote was part of a longer conversation, it was asking why we saw the need for this. The idea of even students studying CS not having access and opportunities point out the opportunity to open this up to other people in these communities
I know a former CS PhD student at a top 5 program who never coded before going into industry oddly enough - it's probably possible to focus more on the abstract side, although extremely rare.
Twitter had something like $300M revenues[0] at it's IPO and, based on the opening share price, was valued at $14B[1]. That's 46x.
Still seems crazy high, but seemingly not out of line with other recent tech valuation multipliers. There are some other insights in these comments that seek to better explain the valuation.
Generally you can only recognize revenue when you are at risk for it. If you are not taking a risk by holding inventory (or guaranteeing a price before selling a service) then you are an agent, not a principal. You can only recognize the revenue that you are at risk for, the rest is "pass-through." This is addressed in the FASB ASC 605-45 (https://thegaappost.com/sec/605-revenue/605-45-principal-age...).
An example:
1) An advertising agency buys media for a client to place ads in, but their contract with the media company says they will only pay for the media if they are paid by their client. In this case they can only recognize their commissions and fees as revenue, not the cost of the media itself.
2) An ad network buys media for a client but has to pay the media company for it whether or not the advertiser pays them. They can generally recognize the cost of the media as revenue, along with their commissions and fees.
AirBnb does not take risk on the portion of the customers' payments that go to the host: if AirBnb is not paid then the host is not paid, so this part of the payment is not recognized as revenue.
I think it still is a proper P&L perspective to label this revenue. Similarities in other markets:
- a payment processor doesn't label all money flowing through the system as revenue, just their cut of it.
- a marketplace like Etsy has gross merchandise sales that tracks how much has been bought on their platform, and revenue just accounts for what they took in
Perhaps its a good way to validate the idea / test the market? I wouldn't pay a $1 myself, but if they can get 1,000 people to pay $60, more power to them.
Putting up a high friction point seems like a unintuitive way to validate the idea.
I'm taking the founders at their word--they need the money to launch their product. It just seems like they could do it for less--however I don't have much detail so I'd like to understand the money breakdown.
No. Its a closed system. For every dollar that someone spent on a bitcoin, that dollar was received by someone else.
Now, you can certainly say that the money was spent on things like electricity, or GPU hardware, that has little/no value now. But thats irrelevant - the money most certainly spent, rather than "evaporate" into thin air.
> Does the FBI even consider bitcoin as something that actually has any value that requires investigating an accusation of theft?
Market cap isn't money, its an estimate of value based on a premise that is not merely flawed but outright insane -- that every unit of an asset that exists can be liquidated at the current market price of a single unit (that is, that market clearing price is not effected by supply.)
Its used because its easily calculated, and people are prone to want to believe that values that are easy to calculate are also meaningful.
Just because I can buy a bitcoin from somebody for $1000 a few months ago doesn't mean that same person is willing to buy it back from me for $1000 dollars today. The value in that bitcoin has evaporated, disappeared, gone up in smoke. Bitcoins are only worth how much people are willing to pay for them; what was spent on them in the past does not convey to them any value today.
The value hasn't evaporated - if you bought a bitcoin for $1000 a few months ago and now you can sell it for $100, then value of ~$900 (assuming that 'real worth' of USD didn't change much) was transferrend from you to the guy who sold you that bitcoin back then.
You buy at $100 and sell at $1000. Where did the value come from that compelled the new guy to buy it from you at that inflated price? In my thinking, by your example, the new guy wouldn't pay an extra $900 because the value didn't already exist in the bitcoin you are selling.
No, initially you were in possession of the value, as you could have sold the bitcoin to somebody else for that $1000 dollars. The fall of value in a bitcoin did not somehow go back in time, find the person you bought it from, and transfer value to them.
Think of it this way, I buy a nice car for $100k. The person selling it gets $100k in cash, and I get $100k worth of car. A year later, I crash the car and it is now worth $1k in scrap metal. Where did my $99k worth of value in the car go? Did the dealer somehow acquire that value? No, I simply destroyed it. I destroyed the value of the car, it wasn't taken from me. The value of the cash I gave the dealer? That is more or less still the same, but that is his business, not mine.
Value is not zero sum. Creating and destroying value is trivial.
I think its fair to say that scenarios where a service cancels a user account because his/her name was not "realistic sounding" are few and far between. (Assuming you're not entering names like "Doorknob Toothbrush")
Well, the site did generate Iva Lavallée as a French female name for me. I had never heard of someone called Iva, but it seems it's been given to exactly 100 persons in France since 1900.
Iva Lavallée sounds like He's gonna swallow it, really.
