this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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A16Z should be shut down and all their mid to senior level employees should be required to pick between real community service work (de-mining, live-in janitor at a hospice service, custodian at an infectious disease hospital) for 20 years or doing 40 in jail. Full asset seizure in both cases.
The thing is, what they're doing isn't technically criminal. It just violates the terms of use of most social media sites and apps.
Their crypto pyramids schemes and pump and dumps were also technically legal in the US (I am assuming). And yet it is impossible for a pyramid scheme to work, can any US lawyer or judge show how a pyramid is viable? Of course not, because they are scams.
You have "technically legal" schemes in other countries too. If there is a desire to address criminality a way can be found.
If you want to achieve something, coming up with excuses around why it is not possible rarely bring results.
Pyramid schemes are not legal in the US.
There are some systems that have some aspects in common with pyramid schemes that are legal (Social Security sometimes gets called a "pyramid scheme" by people that don't like it, for example, and MLM schemes are legal, though they can, in practice, partially work something like pyramid schemes).
I assume people arguing this also don't have any other form of insurances?
I am not a lawyer, so I can't make any claims about US law.
If, as you claim, pyramid schemes / ponzi / pump and dumps are not legal in the US. , how is it that A16Z leadership wasn't arrested for investing in Axie Infinity?
A business model like Axie Infinity is mathematically impossible. The same cannot be said of government safety net systems.
I'm not familiar with Axie Infinity, so I can't tell you off-the-cuff.
Ah yes the old legal vs right argument.
It would be wise to make openly manipulating social media systematically (with or without AI) illegal, immediately.
Social media is for real people to freely engage and share their viewpoints, not for bot farms and other forms of organized astroturfing to shape opinion by appearing as independently-affiliated real people.
Discourse is an incredibly valuable tool for humanity, and we can't let this be taken away from us - especially by those making a killing off of it or those paying for the privilege.
Too complicated. Arson is much, much simpler.
No point. I'm sure that they're not the only ones, and there will be more.
One possibility is that we just have to have expensive identities
the "Reddit model" where anyone who wants to can just create a new, anonymous identity doesn't work. We can maybe be pseudonymous, but we might not be able to create lots of identities the way we do today.
Or maybe we'll have to have a more-elaborate reputation system.
Shutting down the legal entity isn't that strong of an incentive, I agree.
Having to do 20 years community service as a junior janitor at an infectious disease hospital in rural congo and losing all your money (every last cent) is exactly the type of incentive that would work with American VC types.
Not saying that US society (as it stands today) is capable of reforms, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't take a sober attitude when evaluating the type of incentives that could work.