In 2021, Ulbricht's prosecutors and defense agreed that Ulbricht would relinquish any ownership of a newly discovered fund of 50,676 Bitcoin (worth nearly $5.35 billion in 2025) seized from a hacker in November 2021.[78] The Bitcoin had been stolen from Silk Road in 2013 and Ulbricht had been unsuccessful in getting them back. The U.S. government traced and seized the stolen Bitcoin. Ulbricht and the government agreed the fund would be used to pay off Ulbricht's $183 million debt in his criminal case, while the Department of Justice would take custody of the Bitcoin.[79][80]
I think Gene Wolfe is the one of the greatest authors of all time across any genre. I highly highly recommend the Fifth Head of Cerberus which is 3 short interconnected novellas and Peace, which isn't traditional Sci-Fi but is absolutely worth a read.
He's not just writing, he's constructing beautifully crafted puzzle-boxes that take a lot of time and thought to unpack.
I think the problem here is what you're really asking for is DRM free content. None of the content producers themselves are willing to license their content that way so it would be very difficult to build the service.
I mean it's pretty straightforward right? There are now more dollars in play all after the same amount of goods, each dollar has less purchasing power. Why are you so quick to throw out the simplest explanation?
I predict a massive backfire on this one.. I know Netflix is struggling but as competitors (see HBOMax) get better and better now is not the time to both raise prices and give people a reason to revisit their active subscription. I know plenty of people who only continue to pay for Netflix because they share it with a bunch of people. They don’t really have any killer content right now and as far as I can tell no streaming service has figured out how to deal with people who just cycle between services… This is not the right problem to focus on right now.
I think if you ever want there to actually be content you need a way to grab users and make it easy for them to start generating it.
When you say "it's a chicken and an egg problem" you're spot on. That's the problem for every new social network or user based platform trying to launch. Until you have a ton of users and content I would argue it's the only problem worth worrying about.
I'm not criticizing your business model, I'm just saying as a user who doesn't care about your business model and is just curious about podcast discussions your homepage isn't optimized for me.
If you focus on building a userbase first it will be easier to sell the service later.
As a user I have a billion things competing for my attention, if you don't make it super easy for me to get to useful or interesting content I'm going to move on and that's going to hurt you overall.
Reddit never started by taking me to a giant signup page for a paid subscription.
As someone who was mildly curious and might have checked it out of you presented something interesting I immediately left, maybe think about making the base landing page more interesting in hopes of gaining traction with users and then make another landing page for people you want to sell the service to.
Imagine if there was basically 0 cost carbon capture device that ran completely off of solar power and didn't just store CO2 but also expelled oxygen and miraculously created useful usable materials...
Forget about "with a battery" - everything should have an off switch. Rebooting hardware like the Amazon Fire TV is so annoying, and it's not like it doesn't like up or crash...
It's almost like we're operating in an economy where it's easier and more lucrative to be a huckster than it is to innovate and create something useful. Maybe part of this is just that we've already optimized so many things - what's left to do with the products in question other than up the price and market the heck out of them?
As they say, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"...