Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Friday, January 12, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. How did Bitcoin do on its first day of ETF trading? Where are all of these tech layoffs coming from? The weird case of eBay executives allegedly harassing people, a look at the AI company taking direct aim at Google Search, and of course, the weekend long reads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. How did Bitcoin do in its first day
of ETF trading? Well, the price of Bitcoin is down a tiny bit at the time of this writing, but according to analysts, the new ETFs saw $4.6 billion worth of shares traded yesterday, their first day of trading, grayscale, blackrock, and fidelity, apparently dominated trading volumes,
quoting Reuters. Fees on the new Bitcoin ETFs range from 0.2% to 1.5% with many firms also offering to waive fees entirely for a certain period or a certain dollar volume of assets after its ETF started trading Valkyrie cut its fees a second time to 0.25% and waive them for the first three months. As the ETFs began trading on Thursday, market participants were closely watching bid-ask spreads. The difference between the price for a trader to buy into an ETF and the price can be sold.
ETFs with narrower spreads are typically viewed as more desirable. Trading volume, internal plumbing, and the number of participants involved, quote, are critically important to driving the spreads to a good spot. Said Jason Stoneberg, director of Product Strategy at Invesco, who's ETF with Galaxy Digital debuted on Thursday. Some analysts caution that the euphoria
around the approval might be premature. The broader investment community still views cryptocurrencies as risky with scandals such as the implosion of crypto exchange FTX in 2022 adding to investors weariness. A Vanguard spokeswoman said the firm had no plans to launch its own crypto investment products and that its focus remains on core asset classes such as stocks bonds and cash, which it views as quote, the blocks of a well-balanced long-term investment portfolio.
But this got me thinking, there's a certain camp in crypto, the line go up camp for whom this milestone trading Bitcoin on public markets is one they've been dreaming of for years now. But what about the other camp, the OG decentralized true believers? Coin desks takes a look at that dichotomy quote. These hard-won approvals for ETF trading are largely viewed as a leg up for an industry hoping to rebuild its reputation after 2022 spectacular market collapse fueled by
Sandbankman Frieden others. But for long-time crypto advocates, considerations may go beyond market recovery. Some fear that fraternizing with crypto's original enemy traditional finance tradify big banks and Wall Street, which early fans of the Bitcoin blockchain had in their sites threatens to break its original promise of decentralizing financial services. Others contend that Bitcoin the cryptocurrency was intended for the masses and that some form of alignment with
tradify was unavoidable with benefits to both parties. It was always an inevitable part of the process of going mainstream, Jamison Lopp, software engineer and Bitcoin advocate said during an interview speaking about crypto and tradfly colliding through the creation of Bitcoin ETFs. Wall Street wants a cut of the action he said however these Bitcoin ETFs will quote accelerate the flywheel of adoption and make the asset class quote less of a scary concept to mainstream
audiences he added. If Satoshi Nakamoto releasing the Bitcoin white paper 15 years ago was an all-mighty active rebellion against tradfly like the Greek god Zeus fighting his Titan father, Kronus to avoid being eaten up like his siblings, then Bitcoin was supposed to be the people's weapon against the unchecked power of big banks whose irresponsibility and greed brought the global
economy to its knees in 2008. It's unsurprising then that to some purists on both sides the ETF approvals not only represent the convergence of two worlds designed to be rivals but the potential
corruption of both. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs will inevitably turn out to be a very bad thing for Bitcoin decentralization said proof of decentralization podcast host Chris Black on X while ETFs will see new institutional and retail money flowing in the crypto Nikki Gomez senior partner at X-REG consulting warns they will also influence more centralization moving Bitcoin quote further
away from its true value and potential. Ultimately this will spur a larger divide with the crypto purist Gomez said in a statement shared with coin desk and quote. It is my job to obsessively trend spot in the tech industry and I'd like to think I'm good at it but I have to admit to you the latest round of layoffs that have been happening for a good six
weeks now have taken me by surprise. I thought we were done with all this but apparently not. Discord is laying off 17% of its staff or 170 people after growing its workforce by 5x since 2020 according to its CEO quoting the verge CEO Jason Citron said the move is meant to quote sharpen our focus and
improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization. The cuts were announced today to employees and in all hands meeting and internal memo I've obtained they'll impact 170 people across various departments based on Citron's message to employees and my understanding of
the business discord isn't in dire financial straits though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic in his memo to employees which you can read in full below Citron said discord grew its head count too fast over
the last few years an emission that has become quite common among tech CEOs as of late we grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster increasing by 5x since 2020 Citron wrote as a result we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated end quote these cuts are
discord's largest to date after the messaging app laid off 4% of its staff last August they add to the layoffs that continue to sweep across the tech industry including deep cuts at Google and Amazon just this week discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in funding it has more than $700
million in cash on its ballot sheet and the goal to become profitable this year according to people familiar with the matter the company has been contemplating going public since it turned out a $12 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft in 2021 though I'm told it's nowhere near close to
doing so end quote ebay will pay $3 million to resolve charges over a harassment campaign by staffers who sent spiders and other disturbing items to the folks behind the e-commerce bites blog I believe I told you about this some time ago but I continue to find this whole story just so
bizarre the US Department of Justice has charged ebay with stalking witness tampering an obstruction of justice going the New York Times the charges which will be dropped under a deferred prosecution agreement if ebay maintains a good record for the next three years stem from actions taken by the
company in 2019 to undermine and silence the writers of an e-commerce newsletter that was mildly critical of some of its behavior the intimidation efforts included various forms of cyber stocking and harassment that were continuing when the perpetrators were arrested and its agreement with
the government ebay will engage an independent corporate compliance monitor it also agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $3 million the maximum fine for its six felony offenses the government will not move ahead with the case unless the company violates the agreement although the money is
inconsequential for a company that had more than $5 billion in cash on hand and its most recent quarter than notoriety is not ebay engaged in absolutely horrific criminal conduct said Joshua S. Levy the acting US attorney the company's employees and contractors involved in this campaign
put the victims through pure hell in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the ebay brand end quote David and Ina Steiner writers and publishers of a new site and blog called e-commerce bites live in natiq massachusetts ebay is based in San Jose
California during the course of the harassment campaign ebay security team members flew the boss into accelerate their activities against the couple in person when they were caught they began a cover-up and destroyed incriminating messages the forms of harassment included threatening direct
messages over twitter the social media platform that is now called x attempts to install a GPS device on the Steiner's car posting ads for fictitious sexual events at the Steiner's house and sending anonymous and scary items like a bloody pigs mask to the couple's home a 24 page
document detailing the charges that was released on Thursday bronze the number of ebay executives in the case in earlier documents only two executives were mentioned the chief executive and the chief communications officer now there is a third executive identified as ebay's senior vice
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now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash ride there's another big new ai player that i don't believe i've told you about before perplexity ai is a generative ai search engine you know how people are like why do you need
Google to answer questions if you've got ai yeah perplexity is that they're going directly after google search they call their product an answer engine perplexity was founded by former researchers from open ai meta and kora they launched in December of 2022 so right on the heels of
chat GPT but before the Bing chat integration or whenever microsoft called that when they raised a 74 million dollar round at a 520 million dollar valuation a couple weeks ago with participation by elad gill Jeff Bezos and others they claimed to have around 10 million
monthly active users and now the information says they doubled annual recurring revenue to around six million dollars just since october quote i've been testing out perplexity search engine for the past few months and it has many of the features that i found missing in alternatives
like open ai's chat GPT google's barred and microsoft's Bing its answers are concise into the point it includes citations to articles to back up at statements and it doesn't have an overly cutesy distracting personality despite all its strengths and investor hype though the odds are stacked
against it most notably that it's competing against the silicon valley powerhouse google other companies have tried to take on the search engine giant and failed last year ai powered search engine niva acts its consumer business after struggling to attract new users in may niva sold
itself to snowflake for a hundred and fifty million dollars supervised reported just half of what it was valued at in its last fundraising google's revenue from advertisers has made it a cash cow however because perplexity doesn't offer sponsored results to user queries like google does
it can't take advantage of that lucrative ad business model instead it charges subscription fees for a premium version of its search engine that allows users to ask unlimited questions choose their ai model and upload documents this is similar to the approach niva took as well
as elan musk and others have discovered though persuading people to sign up for a paid subscription to something they can get for free is very difficult however founder avarand strino vass pointed out that perplexity doesn't need to make a serious dent in google's traffic to do some damage you only
need the top five to ten percent of americans to use you more than google he explained to me when that happens it's already a big dent because advertisers care the most about premium users getting to the top five to ten percent of americans isn't an easy task though still perplexity
is making some progress even if its business model remains tiny since october perplexity's annual recurring revenue has doubled from three million to around six million according to a person familiar with the situation that growth will hopefully justify the expensive multiple ivp paid
in the startups latest fundraising 150 times forward a rr to put that in context open a i is reportedly raising at a one hundred billion dollar valuation 63 times the startups forward revenue and thropic has told investors it would be generating revenue at around a two hundred million
dollar pace by the end of 2023 implying a multiple of 75 times forward revenue for its ongoing fundraising round still even though syrenavus admits that the company needs to think about what a sustainable business model could look like in the future that could include its current subscription
model letting developers access its in-house model through an application programming interface or taking a page from google's book and adding advertisements to its search results he said and quote time for the weekend long read suggestions first up remember when zuck sort of stopped talking
about the metaverse at the time it felt like there were financial reasons for this rescuing the stock and all that but this big piece from Bloomberg business week suggests it was also because his head was turned by the emergence of AI quote in the summer of 2021 during a private moment at the
alan and company conference in the Idaho mountains google chief executive officer soon darpichai complemented mark zuckerberg on a technical breakthrough by facebook's artificial intelligence team the only problem for zuckerberg and Idaho was that he had little idea what breakthrough pichai was
talking about according to people familiar with the meeting zuckerberg is now making a i his top priority after his conversation with pichai zuckerberg returned to met his headquarters in menlo park california and asked to be briefed on all the latest work by its a i research group called
fair for fundamental artificial intelligence research he educated himself a lot more says Jerome pacenti met his former vice president for artificial intelligence and quote then in this week of a hardware having a breakthrough moment word of another one tab a i this is sort of a necklace you
wear all day to record everything that happens to you quoting fast company tab is a small puck that hangs around your neck and listens to everything you and the people around you say essentially just a microphone and a battery that lasts up to 30 hours between charges it uses bluetooth to beam
your audio to your phone and into the cloud where chatshe bt currently transcribes your conversations and various a i models will extract insights for you its ux isn't final but assume you'll use your phone screen for most anything you want to do ultimately tab is meant to be an a i companion
or what shifman calls a clarity machine that rides along in every moment of your life tab is not an assistant period i'm not building something that's going to connect to notion or your emails anytime soon i'm solely building a friend that morse into your creative partner life coach or
therapist as needed he says what i'm trying to do is create a new relationship in your life radical transparency without concern of judgment i think this is a relationship people used to have with god but is lacking in the modern world and quote and finally if you haven't played around with
it yet ours technical has a sort of walkthrough of mid-journey version six quote it's definitely a crazy update both in good and less good ways artist julie wildland who frequently shares her mid-journey creations online told ours the details and scenery are insane the downside for now
are that the generations are very high contrast and overtly saturated in my opinion plus you need to re-adapt and rethink your prompts working with new structures and now less is kind of more in terms of prompting and quote in our testing of version six which can currently be invoked with the
v6.0 argument at the end of a prompt we notice times when the new model appeared to produce worse results than version 5.2 but mid-journey veterans like wildland tell ours that those differences are largely due to the different way that version six interprets prompts that is
something mid-journey is continuously updating over time quote old prompts sometimes work a bit better than the day they released it wildland told us and quote okay bonus episodes christ and i finally did a proper tech meme ride home experience episode last night and yes it was
with the great john grueber it was great we talked AI hardware we talked apples AI strategy we talked vision pro we talked about christ's concerns about the way in which threads has adopted hashtags or not as christ would tell you so that is coming to you on saturday or you can watch it
on youtube as soon as i uploaded which should be around the time you hear this as i said one of the reasons i've been reviving the tech meme ride home youtube channel is because when i record these bonus episodes over zoom i have the video the fact that i've not been posting the video anywhere
has frankly just been ranked laziness on my part so going forward whenever i do an interview i'm going to post it on the youtube channel as well and then since it's a holiday on monday i'm not going to do a 15 minute news rundown that day but i will give you my picks for the coolest things at ces this year that too has been on youtube all week so if you hear something that you want to see more of check that out but also it will be in your ears on monday talk to you on twosday