Obviously the usual kind of market isn't applicable here, so I'm curious what you mean.

Both options and RSUs are required by law to have expiration dates. And it's plausible that either or both could have expiration dates within the next 12 months.

My company recently got bought by a privately owned company. Because of the ownership structure of the purchasing company we weren't allowed to exchange our options or let new ones vest so my company's board approved cancelling and reissuing everyone's options with an acceleration clause so they'd completely vest at completion so we'd all get a full payout. They did this because they knew if they didn't that there would be an exodus of employees before the purchase went through.

Employees represent a large % of the value of the company, if they all leave you just have a bunch of tech that no one else knows how to maintain or use. Institutional investors typically have such a large proportion of the shares that it's worth it to them to not just screw over employees because the employee sticking around and keeping shares is worth more than they'd save.

Especially since Stripe has steadfastly refused to go public so far...

Every single competent person would leave immediately and no employee would ever trust them again.

They will if they come with a chatGPT4 assistant as standard.

It's normally the opposite. Public markets are a lot better at judging intrinsic value than a handful of VCs. Every single private company out there is either wildly over or under-valued, more so at earlier stages.

This is why companies with lousy future outlooks will sell for a lower price than their assets - debts.

There is no intrinsic value that private companies can stick to. They just have the power of controlling sales so they take sellers out of the market until they get the price they want at a volume they are comfortable with.

Stripe isn’t “intrinsically” worth anything that anyone will agree on. To one person it would be the cash in the bank minus liabilities. To someone else it would be a hefty multiple on that because they believe in the business.

IPOs typically have a lockup period, which means that employees will always be selling to retail buyers, whether on Day 1 with a direct listing or Day 90/180/etc. when the IPO lockup expires.

It's not a feature of cash that it can be stolen, every object can be stolen. The distinctive attribute is transactions are public and immutable.

A car can be driven by its owner anywhere they like. If someone described a car to you as a suicide box you can crash and die in - you might say yes, the fact that cars can be driven freely by their owners means you might drive into someone else. But that's a consequence of the feature, not the feature itself.

    unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!)

Enough with the jokes! Real question: Sometimes you read about FBI chasing down ransomware groups and recovering Bitcoins. How do they do it? If they can identify the wallet, how do they lay claim? Do they find where the wallet is hosted and force exchange to transfer wallet to FBI?

Please don't read this post as an attempt to defend Bitcoin, nor say that FBI is a good way for me to reverse a fraudulent Bitcoin transaction!

I get to choose whether I want them to sell enough to cover taxes or whether I want to cover taxes some other way,

So you get absolutely nothing liquid when you get your RSUs at Stripe? What’s the point and how is that different from getting stock options?

The transaction layer is arguably the least interesting service the credit card and other incumbent transaction/payment networks provide.

Deciding whether to move money, and possibly whether to move it back, is where the value is created.

A stabilizing bid by the underwriter is effective market manipulation that pretends there is more demand than there really is. It can be retracted at any time as well. Outside of an IPO this is illegal.

They can keep the confidence game going for 90-180 days, and the other aspects of an IPO are better for the company since there would be no reason to sell even more shares since they sold a piece of the company at a highest valuation to the banks in the IPO.

All lies.

> unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!)

Lies. Just write them down and store them securely. You can memorize them if you like. It's also wise to store multiple physical copies in various locations to avoid this exact scenario.

> The cool thing about all of this is that it's a feature of Bitcoin to be able to irreversibly lose your life savings, without any ability to recoup your losses.

Yes, you can't be utterly careless (and I'm not sure what the argument is for wanting to be).

> the only way to make it faster (Lightning Network) is to sacrifice the checks and balances that maxis praise as the hallmark of Bitcoin

Yes, which makes sense for small transactions between trusted parties. Large transactions can and should be done on-chain (also with trusted parties).

--

I'll continue to listen to the signal [1], not the noise. What makes me happiest is that the people who deserve to win the most will win over the people who deserve it the least. It will be the greatest wealth transfer humanity has ever seen and it won't require any violence or coercion.

[1] https://twitter.com/LightningTipB0t/status/16150147987979919...

But how do I detect honesty in first interaction with an unknown party?

> [...] people will avoid hiring you or buying from you if you have a bad reputation [...]

As a merchant, what if I have no reputation? How do I ever get my first customer?

> EBay has already proven, too, that most people are honest by default [...]

...on a centralized platform that can arbitrate trust!

Have you considered that the possibility of disputes and the existence of a framework for resolving them is part of the reason for that?

The world is full of services, valuable, difficult to provide services, that a given person will never consume. Doesn't mean no one else does.

For employees at very early companies that are going the venture route, ISOs are a no-brainer. The company is small enough that the strike price isn't too onerous, the company is too small to hit up against the IRS limits, and they provide pretty good tax treatment under the assumption that the company will grow massively in value - like, 100,000x - which is the the optimistic case that everyone wants to optimize for.

For employees at late stage companies (e.g. last funding round before IPO), ISOs are a rough deal. The strike price is large, so the only people who can afford to exercise them before a liquidity event are people who are already independently wealthy. The tax benefits are also still present, but smaller, because the expectation is that the company might grow 10x in valuation, but not 100x or 100,000x (most $100M companies are not going to grow to $10 trillion in valuation).

RSUs avoid that problem, by requiring zero cash up-front, in exchange for less favorable tax treatment in the "company grows 100x-100,000x" case - which is fine, because that's less relevant.

Of course, the billion dollar question is where the inflection point happens - when do RSUs become a better deal than ISOs? There's no universal answer to that, and some of that depends on specifics of the company, and some of that also depends on who you ask (certain people will benefit more than others from the switch at different points, so it depends on how much the company is weighing each of those [metaphorical] stakeholders).

ISOs also have one other advantage for companies: because they have to be exercised within 90 days of departure, a large portion of ISOs that are granted will never actually be exercised (the employee will choose to leave them unexercised, either because they don't have the money to pay for the exercise price + taxes or because they don't want to). So every option granted is <1 share actually given up (in expectation), allowing the company to grant bigger compensation packages (because some portion of those will not actually be used, and can therefore be reallocated to someone else).

With RSUs, every RSU granted is 1 share actually given up (except in the case where the RSUs expire, which makes the company look bad).

And now the bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection.

The whole point is that it's immutable and transactions are not reversible. That means users are susceptible to losing their money with no recourse.

Seed phrases are also a pain in the ass. No one wants to deal with that, and average consumers would absolutely lose/forget/misplace them and lose access to their wallets.

The risk of ruin in crypto is ridiculously high compared to traditional finance.

It seemed to be popular to do for a minute there after Pinterest did it, then I didn't really hear about it again.

Of course not but you can use the same heuristic by looking at the presentation of what's being sold. Just like in-person, it will be obvious. The only exception would be if you're doing something dubious which already has risks.

> And then passport it to my own store how, exactly? "Trust me, I'm honestseller897 on Amazon/eBay"?

I don't understand what you're asking. By doing that work and building those relationships, you've established a reference to someone who can vouch for you and your work.

> The fact that it does, when required, is the reason for rarely needing to.

Great. Use a business (or start one) to mitigate that risk for you and pay with Bitcoin using escrow.