Which Would You Buy: A New CDO-Squared or a Bitcoin Start-Up?APR 26, 2012 9:47am ET By Marc Hochstein
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Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, is teaching a course on start-ups at Stanford, and one of his students, who apparently is the world’s greatest note-taker, has posted a reconstruction of one of the class discussions on his Tumblr. David Brooks summarizes Thiel’s ideas in his Times column this week, but really, just read the lecture. It’s a fascinating, provocative reconsideration of widely held assumptions about the desirability of competition and the undesirability of monopolies.
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Turning to today’s would-be disruptors in financial services, a group of prominent VCs are investing $500,000 in a start-up called CoinLab. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it’s noteworthy because CoinLab’s business model involves Bitcoin, the decentralized digital currency that Sen. Chuck Schumer thinks is a threat to society. Nothing obviously illicit about CoinLab, though. As we understand the model from reading the write-ups in Forbes and Ars Technica, CoinLab generates revenue for online gaming companies, by essentially renting players’ computers to “mine” Bitcoins in the background while games are being played.
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http://www.americanbanker.com/the-scan/the-scan-thursday-april-26-2012-1048770-1.htmlAs for me it is notable as one of very few fully positive press appearances for BitCoin.