

Silicon Valley Bank says no to Bitcoin businesses - tlack
https://bitcorati.com/2013/10/30/silicon-valley-says-no-to-bitcoin-businesses/

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gph
The pretension in the bitcoin community is starting to really wear on me.
Maybe it's just me, but I can hardly read through a lot of these articles, it
comes off like propaganda. Possibly the greatest innovation of our time? I
suppose time might make me look the fool, but really?? And then the Gandhi
quote...

Just accept the fact that a bank has decided bitcoin isn't worth the risk yet.
Don't act like they spit in the face of social justice and all that is right
in this world.

~~~
vacri
I thought it ironic that the author was talking about 'bitcoin being the
greatest innovation of our time'...

... over the internet.

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gwern
I don't know about you, but the Internet was innovated long before my time. So
Bitcoin actually has a better claim to that pretension than the Internet
because it was invented well after I was born.

~~~
vacri
Perhaps if you didn't have such a selfish definition of 'our'?

Also, are you less than 15 years old? Because most of the social changes
brought about by the internet have happened in the last 20 years or so. The
first web browser has only just hit 20.

~~~
gwern
> Perhaps if you didn't have such a selfish definition of 'our'?

I believe the rather selfish definition of 'times' was rather the issue I was
pointing out.

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luckydude
Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, used those guys when I was starting BitMover, very
quickly moved away from them. They act like they help startups, my experience
was they provided nothing over any random bank and they charged more.

That was ~15 years ago, maybe they are better now, I have no idea.

~~~
dmk23
My experience exactly. I left them years ago when they jacked up basic banking
fees to ridiculous levels.

When I was a client them they did organize "meetups with VCs/lawyers", but for
the most part those events were mostly designed to pander to the guests' egos
and I presume make them feel valued enough to drive their companies towards
SVBank for higher-ticket services, like large credit lines.

~~~
luckydude
Yeah. Back then we could have used a credit line of about $2M. That would have
helped. They were telling me how grateful I should be for a $50K credit line.
At the same time I was consulting at a $8K/day rate doing perf work for web
sites. Thanks for the "help" SVB. Bank of America, for all their crap, was
actually more reasonable. No love for BofA but SVB was useless in my opinion.

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dubfan
Why does this site have its own scroll handler? It looks very strange and
floaty and doesn't play with touchpad gestures in Chrome for OSX.

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bpicolo
Can't 2-finger swipe back. Super annoying and unnecessary.

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chrisva
tldr; Banking regulations are complex, and (for very good reasons) slow to
adopt innovation. Bitcoin doesn't fit in yet, and someone is annoyed.

(And honestly, considering that Bitcoin transactions approximate anonymous
cash transactions, companies with bitcoin assets will scare the hell out of
the US banking regulators and make it difficult to do wire fraud detection and
proper auditing)

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joejohnson
The "first they ignore you..." quote is often attributed to Gandhi, but he
likely never said it:
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Disputed](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Disputed)

Also, somebody should start a Bank of Bitcoin. There's no reason why the
benefits of banking couldn't be applied to bitcoin.

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arbuge
I remember these guys once turned me down when I was starting an affiliate
network. I got the impression they thought affiliate marketing was some kind
of scam...

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dboat
In their defense, it very often is. The reputation is well earned.

I used to work in a major affiliate marketing ad network, and they have these
events where the most successful affiliates are taken on a vacation. One time,
this took place at the company headquarters, so I spent a little bit of time
getting to know them.

Not hating, but what a bunch of unscrupulous rogues they were! To say they
were a pack of untrustworthy hooligans would be politely understating the
point, which is exactly what I will do.

~~~
tluyben2
Yep. A while (10 years I think) ago I made a lot of money by 'accident' by
replacing my ads with affiliate offers on a very busy site I had. I had no
clue what affiliate marketing was or how it worked; I read a spam email by a
company doing it and it sounded like it was worth a try. It worked; it
converted like mad and my income from this side project rocketed. The company
invited me to one of these vacation things on a ship; the people I met
there... I like the affiliate concept but indeed a lot of companies and people
involved are just borderline criminals. I also noticed that most of them just
know nothing; they accidentally rolled into this and it worked for them, but
they don't know business (the money tap is just on or off; most of them don't
do bookkeeping or pay tax) or anything outside 'Must Make Money Easily'. Not
sure if the latter changed as I never went again.

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headgasket
This article is semantically interesting. It's a negative title, but it has a
kinda positive message for "the rest of us" (apple circa 1985). You see, the
FBI now has 3.5% of the whole currency(not the float, of the WHOLE shebang)
--ref the silk road shutdown. So there's a need to keep the appetite of the
crowd that can buy this vision wet. I say we all cash out real fast; just for
kicks.

~~~
Phlarp
3.5%? By my last count they had less than 2% of currently issued coins and
less than 1% of the eventual 21 million?

~~~
headgasket
My bad, a At the moment they have about 1.5% for a total of 30+M USD.
Source:[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-
say...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-says-its-
seized-20-million-in-bitcoins-from-ross-ulbricht-alleged-owner-of-silk-road/)

