Will purse.io transform into a scam political attack tool under Roger Ver's ownership or he should be cheered because he saved it?
It wasn't already?
I've heard from multiple people that underwent some pretty awkward contact from law enforcement after using purse.io early on. By all appearance its primary use was creating plausibly deniable laundering for identity thieves into cryptocurrency.
There have been other services that bridge Bitcoin to gift cards-- even ones without a bunch of altcoin shilling. But what they don't have is astronomical discounts like 20%, presumably that's because they aren't being powered by stolen funds.
The staff there engaged in some pretty reprehensible attacks against me personally-- and as a result I will never associate with anyone that has anything to do with them.
But... it sounds like a perfect match for Ver's business ethics.
Largely about maintaining an image I'll guess. All of these crypto companies secretly dream of being stumbled across by a Peter Thiel and being scooped up and they think SF is the place to be for it to happen. There's so much noise there you'd likely be better off in Idaho where a potato billionaire gets a boner for that thar tech stuff.
If people are interested in doing something real, I'm confident that they would be better off in many other places. If, instead, they want to put on a show and cycle through failed startup after failed startup then would be hard to beat. You can think of what these companies and, more importantly, their investors is doing is fuzz testing the market. You take some random people, you take some random business, you filter out some of the obvious crap and you see if it goes somewhere. If it does, you gas it up and ride it to where it takes you-- if it doesn't, you let it die and try something else. The winners win big enough that they pay for all the losers and then some.
I've met people who've worked full time out here for over 20 years and worked for a dozen companies (what?) and never worked for a company that ever successfully shipped any kind of product. It's crazy. I can't imagine what that does to people's self esteem-- though I guess many just develop a blindness to how absurd it is.
There are, of course, also good people-- just from weather and environmental conditions, northern California is a pretty great place to live and so if you could pick anywhere in the world to live this would rank highly (which is part of how they can get away with relatively high taxes!
). But hot shots here can make close to mid six figures working at Google. Most of the people your SF startup can easily hire ... aren't that.
