reinventing the bus

Like “reinventing the wheel”, but for techbros.

More precisely, it is to spend an incredible amount of money, time and mental effort to finally come to a solution that was actually figured out decades or even centuries ago.

Bonus points if you end up making yet another app using the blockchain, so that in order for you to use it, you need to put your SSN on a distributed public ledger so that it can get pwned by Russian hackers.

“Ok, pitch it.”

“Ok so like basically we get people to pool their money together into one thing and then invest that thing into Bitcoin and use the profits from that investment to pay everyone involved once a month, and then when someone dies their portion of the investment goes to the other participants.”

“…you just described a tontine.”

“A what?”

“A tontine. The thing you're describing. It's been around since the 17th century. Are you reinventing the bus again?”

“No way, man! This one's different, this one uses JIT-compiled vue.js and blockchain smart contracts to keep track of the system!”

“Brilliant. Here's a million dollars, we're gonna be rich!”