https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262170&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262170&p=3
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
Also they view this as a major risk: •the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins;
Second thought, what an incredible business and growth.
1.14bn in revenue on 193bn in trading volume: thats 60bps on every dollar traded. These are insane fees ripe for disruption.
To think that coinbase started with a no-fee model:
Coinbase will make money more like an exchange down the road, 0.5% to convert money into our out of bitcoin, but once you have your money in bitcoin there are no transaction fees (it mentions this on the homepage, but admittedly it's still a bit confusing)...
It would be much easier to just say "no fees" - this is simple and shows a clear benefit of using bitcoin. If you have to explain to people that "sometimes there are fees, but they are a lot lower, etc" it loses some of it's punch. Right now we can do zero fees and transactions still get confirmed. In the future we may be able to do it by eating the cost and have this be a cost of doing business, but that is a decision for later."
The disruption is already well underway. The only thing that slowed down DEX's eating of a bigger part of the market share is the current high fees on Ethereum.
I think ETH2.0 or some other network certainly might make DEX's even more popular, but if those swap fees don't come down the centralized exchanges still have a financial benefit to some users. I imagine if they do come down and volume goes up, it lowers the low volume fees on places like Coinbase, which would be nice.
They know really well, that best business during gold rush is to sell shovels.
This means that Satoshi's BTC (~1mio.) are potentially liquid which would mean a gigantic influx of fresh bitcoins.
It's quite plausible that any movement of these old wallets would crash the Bitcoin price for quite a while.
No other exchange today has my trust, I don’t care if they compete on fees. When your btc is at real risk of they by an exchange, trust is everything. There is no FDIC insurance for exchanges.
Now if Chase were to do BTC exchange at better rates... i would probably switch.
https://support.gemini.com/hc/en-us/articles/205823016-Are-m...
>U.S. dollars in your Gemini Account are eligible for FDIC insurance, subject to applicable limitations. Please see the FDIC Insurance section of our User Agreement for more information.
It's also whether the institution can effectively do cyber and key security. This is where a non tech first company like Chase would have a lot of trust to build.
Wouldn't this just cause Coinbase to lower their fees like any ofther commodity? Alternatively, they could also be in the position to offer differentiated services.
This seems analogous to any other brokerage services. This will likely play out like when discount brokerages arrived on the personal investment secene.
The more I think about it, the more this feels like traditional banking/investing.
Coinbase's trading fees are *outrageous** compared to what we're used to in the world of normal equity/option/future/fx trading. Literally 100x+ what we're used to paying. You have to do absolutely enormous volume before they'll give you anywhere near a sane rate.
I'm not surprised they're printing money.
Very few people outside the US trade on Coinbase because they have monopoly margins.
"To the extent any registered stockholder chooses to sell shares of our Class A common stock covered by this prospectus, we will not receive any proceeds from any such sales of our Class A common stock."
This is a direct listing, so I think its primarily a liquidity event for investors and employees.
Have a look at Reddit to see what's going on with this company:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/new/
It's not ok to brag about your business when many of your customers are in deep emotional stress because you mess with their money.
Tried Gemini, and it was night and day. Same day or next day responses. Friendly communication. Concise answers. Quickly established account, got it funded within 24 hours, and executed a trade. Family member is pleased.
We're in a huge bull run for an emerging asset class with little institutional support. Since no can ever perfectly predict when the herd is going to start to stampede, it's not at all surprising that the exchanges have been overwhelmed by support requests.
Worst support I've ever experienced, I honestly don't know how this is legal.
If they weren't IPO'ing I would've assumed they were insolvent.
I don't know how it's legal for a company to lock your account w/ funds with no explanation for this long.
Thankfully I had installed the mobile app on an old phone, and I was able to login through the app and withdraw my funds.
That's damning both for their customer support and their security. Good thing they have decent existing and upcoming competitors.
I don't see the $100B valuation sustaining unless it becomes another meme stock ala TSLA. But then we're back to our issue, most Tesla users love their car, most Coinbase users hate it. How could it get widespread retail endorsement?
Plus the direct listing is a giant middle finger to traditional banking and overall establishment, right?
Like : Here are the new rules this new internet will be playing by. Direct, decentralized. Adapt or die?
Despite the narrative, Bitcoin isn’t really competing with traditional banking at all. It's additive. It has become another asset for banks to sell to people, collecting relatively high exchange fees in both directions on the trade.
This is more of an indication that Coinbase is now a traditional establishment banking institution. They’re also very centralized, given that they’re on the short list of exchanges and most users prefer to have Coinbase keep their coins instead of withdrawing to the Blockchain (for additional fees, which go to increasingly centralized miners).
Coinbase took the risk by being the first big entrant, but other big banks would be more than happy to sell you Bitcoin (for a fee, naturally) if they didn’t think it posed a large legal risk to the rest of their business. Coinbase has the benefit of not having another banking business, so they can go all-in on it.
Coinbase is the institution now. If crypto buy/sell becomes mainstream and the legal risk becomes smaller over time, other institutions will gladly sell you Bitcoin as part of their product lineup. If history is any indication, this will drive trading fees to $0, destroying Coinbase's current source of profit and unique position in the market. It will be interesting to see what they do to stay relevant as exchange fees dwindle.
This is certainly the current narrative, and I think that you do a very good job at illustrating what CB's role plays in all this. However, most people that made money in crypto are leaving their assets in crypto, they are not giving it to banks or exchanges for custody. Even if they want to hold dollars, they do so in DAI or USDC (indirect bank deposit ATM). So while this is still a very small threat to the banking industry at the moment, the seed has been planted, we are still very very early. The current banking industry has almost 200 years in the making, it won't be undone in 5.
This in itself will probably add a few billion in market cap...
Like uhm ok then.
https://ventures.coinbase.com/
Number one priority with the new cash: addressing downtimes in periods of high trading activity / market volatility.
However, when it comes to anything crypto related, the emotions really come out. It's all "bitcoin/crypto is useless, doesn't solve any problem, waste of talent."
For a community of hackers, there really seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to crypto specifically.
Source: Day 1 HN post -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852
If you have a truly revolutionary idea, expect the conventional wisdom on this website to be extremely negative.
That thread wasn't the Day 1 post about cryptocurrency either. That would be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253963, which is even more interesting. If HN had a hall of fame, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253999 would surely belong in it.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Except we aren't normies, a lot of us may have non CS backgrounds, but we have the World's best cryptographers, and some of us with some relevant tech backgrounds, particularly found in the Anarcho-Capitalist/Crypto-Anarchy/Cypherpunk crowds from the early days, also grew up n the internet. I learned how to solder from hacking and modding playstation, gamecube, and Dreamcast consoles and sold ripped copies of those games to fund my first startup in HS in fact. My friends online hacked DirecTV for fun on their time off and introduced me to what zero days were when I was in the 8th grade!
I was browsing newsgroups and IRC since the early 2000s and spoke to software engineers at many mega corps, and even met a few who worked in the auto industry in my early teens at meetups or drifting events.
I honestly think it's because we ushered in a paradigm shift that makes them question if they wasted their time/life entirely and we are incredibly vocal about that, not because we want to brag (most times) but because we want you to apply your Human capital and skill set to this movement as we need so much more infrastructure to make it become what we all think it can become as its still possible to be incredibly rewarded for doing so.
But many, especially here, have these delusions think they were meant to be Musk, Chamath, or Dorsey if they kept pluging away as a lowly foot soldier on a H1 visa at a FAANG: it was just a matter of time until their unicorn idea let them get to that table. It's really just sad to me, but I saw it with my own eyes so many times I cannot deny it. Hell, Chamath has even said in his recent podcast what he did is entirely unobtainable anymore, which is why he works in the spaces he does.
It's really sad, Bitcoiners as a whole are generally collaborative, and super generous people with their time and crypto (we gave so much away!) but all we ever get from the FAANG types is jealousy, scorn and resentfulness; we may be brash in our demeanor and are often very anti-Silicon Valley (even for those of us with roots there) but that is just our culture. A lot of us were channers, too. I heard it several times before I joined and posted on BTF in fact.
It's easy to imagine having early awareness of cryptoassets but dismissing them as tulips when the total market value was $1m.
It's also easy to imagine not admitting the mistake after the next 10x to $10m. In fact, that explosive growth helped confirm the skeptics' thesis that it's a Ponzi about to implode.
So now that we've 10x'd five more times since then, it would be a tremendous psychological blow to capitulate now.
Those who preferred the comfort of confirmation bias to the discomfort of admitting they've been wrong all these years have paid an enormous price for that comfort.
The lack of vision panned out. Bitcoin is not a good currency, it is not bringing us into a decentralized land of milk and honey, it is environmentally ruinous, and all that it has accomplished is creating yet another financial gambling market. Broadly speaking, we already have enough of those. And I guess you can still use it to buy drugs. (Although, with $10 transaction fees, probably not. The drug folks would kindly prefer it if this whole bitcoin mania could blow over, and people could go back to gambling in Vegas, or on out-of-the-money GME calls, or whatever, so they could do their business in peace.)
Of the bright predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, the only relevant one that came to fruition by 2021 is 'Many people speculating on bitcoin made a lot of money.'
Of the dour predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, only the ones I listed came true.
To be fair as a Bitcoiner, Coinbase represents THE WORST most toxic aspects of our ecosystem since MTGOX, and that may be stretching it because at least Mark didn't try to behave like a bank, he just kept messing up and was way over his head in a nascent economy. Coinbvase is a YC and VC backed compnay, eith all the trimining a predatory survielence based business from the valley has on top of MTGOX's unreliability.
Honestly,and used to want to work for them in the early days: screw coinbase, I hope they get wiped out before they sell to a institutional bank and hand over their large BTC reserves. I'd welcome the large price drop if they did, too!
Vulture capitalism is what they did before, so...
Even if I were optimistic about cryptocurrency, I would be opposed to places like Coinbase. The whole point is supposedly to get rid of banks and replace them with cryptography. Coinbase is building the same old banking system all over again, but with slower databases and regulation set back to the 1930s.
Bitcoin is not made to be efficient, it's made to be a self-sufficient decentralized monetary system. Decentralization isn't efficient compared to centralization, but it offers other benefits that are powerful.
The whole point is not to get rid of banks and replace them with crypto. It's about building a system that's more democratized, robust, and resistant to loss of purchasing power over time. Bitcoin has done that well, and it's the cornerstone of the new decentralized financial infrastructure.
I find it interesting that about 2/3 of their trading volume (and thus revenue) is from institutions. Also that 44% of their trading volume is from "Other Crypto Assets", which implies that there must be a rather large bit of institutional activity in "Other Crypto Assets", and it's not just the stereotypical retail crypto investor trading in alt-coins.
[1]: https://www.axios.com/coinbase-valued-100-billion-direct-lis...
"Those shares in the largest crypto exchange in the U.S. are changing hands on the Nasdaq Private Market at $303 a piece, according to two people with knowledge of the auction. That implies a total company value of about $77 billion – greater than Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange." (1).
It will be interesting to see how that translates to the public markets.
1. https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-valuation-nasdaq-private-m...
Subscription and services revenue increased $25.0 million, or 126%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019.
Wow, $1B transaction revenue and $44M subscription revenue. These guys are making a lot of money for a pure digital product.
In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system.
But I’ll never understand the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I don’t have any real need to be independent from banks, and I am lucky that I live in a pretty stable society where that’s true.
At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ ) .
What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange.
Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash.
EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.
What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?
In an unstable or even collapsed society things are different. While true that historically gold could be used to buy things it might be at a very depressed buying power or it can be used when dealing with a stable outside society. A hedge for a unstable society is something that actually has "need", for example, antibiotics. Even then, once violence is a standard part of life and interactions the usual calculus of interactions changes.
History provides examples for societies that kind of collapse but sort of kept going on money surrogates that could get daily necessities at a high price; history also has examples for the violent kind of collapse/instability and there I would not count on bitcoin or gold to help absent access to violence.
Getting downvoted on this. I am not complaining about the downvotes, but seriously, please enlighten me...
I view the main value of Bitcoin (or gold, especially paper gold) is as a gamble or hedge against currencies collapsing, in a situation which leaves Bitcoin (or gold) relatively unaffected.
Without doing the formal calculation, I'd guess that Kelly criterion will suggest that an average person with an average risk profile should hedge 0 on this basis (exactly what the vast majority of people have done).
If you've invested more than that, it becomes in your personal interest that currencies collapse in precisely that way.
If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value.
Crypto assets are their own things, it's not helpful to associate them to something that has different properties such as gold.
Most people are using bitcoin for this reason today (store of value).
What OP was talking about was the original purpose, which seems to have been mostly lost.
_Now_ many (most?) people use bitcoin as a store of value. But I think this is more out of necessity: Bitcoin as a currency is semi-dysfunctional.
> the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin
I have not met a single person in my life with that motivation. However, I have met people who want to see the current system collapse, but mainly because it's not working for them.
In my opinion, I think that Bitcoin derives its value from the idea that one day it will become a widely used currency that can be exchanged universally for real-world goods and services. This has what has driven it to become a speculation tool; because at the end of the day when Bitcoin finally becomes a "universal" currency, everyone wants to be left holding a lot of it. But what if Bitcoin never becomes a currency, what happens to it's value then?
I can write a book on why this is, but since 2008 we have seen economic collapse after economic collapse starting in the very cradle of Western Civilization (Greece) and has gone from their.
I despise the doom porn side of Bitcoin, especially because I actually focused and even lived in some of these collapsed societies, and have seen the misery, violence and overall worst of Humanity first hand. Whereas those guys are often people with small holdings that have a very detached view of the World. It's like asking a trophy wife of a celebrity to understand the plight of a factory worker at Amazon during the Pandemic when her trinket is late... it's impossible understand what goes in tier mind, but I'd argue a lot of it is borne of some type of mental illness and is only possible due to such wealth disparity. BUt the haves and have nots is nothing new so I won't delve into that.
With that said, I'd say you also have a version of that (detachment from reality given your statement) and if you live in the Valley and in tech and cannot see the reason why a World run of fiat has led to the homelessness problem, and over all misery, and what it is, then you are in for a very real awakening as this is happening with or without you understanding. The Chinese central bank just started woring with several countries testing its digital currency transfers, JP morgan tried doing payments via satelites using 'blockchain' tech, and has the most patents utilizing 'Bitcoin-like' technology.
In short: Satoshi created this technology with the intended purpose of giving people an option to opt-out of the predictable and inevitable central bank destruction, it's coded into the very genesis block; those of us from the early days were from all walks of life and various networth, but one thing we all noticed was a stark dissatisfaction for the status quo and what the limited options we had to really do about it from within, so it was worth dedicating our time, labour skill set if we even had the slightest chance at reforming the World for the better.
It's hard to explain, but in 2010 (when I saw the community go against satoshi in order to support Wikileaks) I dor the first time wanted all those guys in that thread who donated to Julian Assange and made Satoshi say regarding the NSA 'we kicked the hornet's nest' to have the resources necessary to disrupt our Industries and our countries for the betterment of Humanity, getting rich wasn't the goal it was the means of making a better World we wanted to live in... A guy like Elon makes perfect sense to me, and he has never been the eccentric billionaire in my eyes, he should be the standard: instead we get the worst like Bezos, Gates, Zuck etc...
Now those tables have turned and Musk is the darling of the masses and anything he does makes people take notice--for good or for bad. I hope we usher in a new era of people like this and Bitcoin will have played a significant role in making that happen.
Look up /u/Pineapplefund if you want to see more, try Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest. Our History and our culture is rich, and best of all it's not race/gender based which was so damn refreshing given how absurd things have gotten this last decade alone.
Silicon Valley being the parody of all the worst things in tech which lung on to this maxim--making the world a better place--because it sounded good to say during a pitch for the most pointless, non-sensical app/project, but I still recall a tech article from like 2013 I had saved on my old laptop that died in some event and the reporter concluded with 'unlike most people in technology, when Bitcoiners say they 'want to make the World a better place' they actually mean it and go out and do it,'
I consider myself from that generation of Bitcoiners, which was common pre-2013's bubble. My entire career reflects that, and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had it, even if I have trauma and bad memories that induce anxiety at times.
I left a career as a (miserable cog) university trained lab scientist after working 60+ hour weeks to pay down crippling student debt wasting away my best years but I sought to try and make my suffering mean something and try tackle the 1-2 killers in the West at the time which are both diet based illness: diabetes and heart disease. And when I left that phase of my life I got to make environmentalism profitable in the process, and have many adventures that made me love Life itself, the good and the bad, and while this wasn't monetarily lucartive (the exact opposite actually) and quite honestly had I just held on to the coins I had I'd probably have a net-worth in the xx of millions in USD had I continued to passively buy, but that wasn't the goal: our vision and our impact mattered more than promise of wealth.
And that's why I don't think you will ever understand the best of us, and why the latter 'moonboi' 'when lambo?' meme guys are what you could at best be able to relate to and cling on to. We lived completely different lives, and no amount of money you have would make me even exchange my darkest year for your entire Life.
I don't expect you to understand, I really can't see how you could, but that is one reason and I probably shouldn't have shared as much as I did.
Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation?
All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point.
As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.
- anyone can transact with anyone on the blockchain
- the fed can't print more of it
Anything else is a disctraction.
Besides that it's pretty obvious that Coinbase is centralized, regulated etc.. mainly because it deals in USD, not Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Do you pull your funds from interactive brokers after you're done trading?
What about vanguard? 401k?
I think the speculators know exactly what they’re doing. They want a speculative instrument and they don’t want a currency that people spend (creating sell pressure), so thats what these services have evolved to provide.
Bitcoin’s lack of fundamentals is the key to the narrative that it has unlimited upside. If you can remove all of the fundamentals, no one can argued that it’s overpriced.
Lots of things evolve and change and their original intent is twisted. It’s ok. Life goes on.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean that a technology is still useful after it's lost its unique selling proposition.
We wanted bitcoin because govt control of money results in:
(1) new $ is unfairly distributed, (2) manipulation of $ to force consumer spending, (3) use of $ to fund wars and other govt programs, (4) threats of war are used to sustain $'s status as reserve currency, (5) absence of any innovation in $
and bitcoin addresses these problems, while being censorship-resistant. BTC has been a great success for sending remittance payments, providing a store of value in countries with hyperinflation, and spurring innovation in the financial sector.
With crypto I can choose how much of my assets are going to be in crypto that I control (long-term savings, DeFi investments), how much is going to be in a custodial wallet (could be for my scheduled on-ramp DCA buys, could be to keep more liquid trading) and how much I am going to keep in a regular traditional bank for more "traditional" investments, my checking account, private pension payments, credit cards, etc, etc.
This wouldn't be easy to achieve if we don't have reputable centralized exchanges. I am not dependent on them to control the funds I already moved out, but I am relying on them to have a functional system to fill in the gaps that the current permissionless/trustless systems can not provide.
Who is “we”? Outside of criminal enterprises, no one has ever used Bitcoin for anything other than speculation and the occasional novelty purchase.
There is a decentralized version of every service that Coinbase currently provides and many more they don't, with the exception of fiat on/off-ramps. Until regulations change that's going to mean centralized entities that cooperate with the existing financial institutions.
That fact alone does not invalidate the significant progress being made in every other part of this space with regard to decentralization. Once my USD are converted to crypto I can leave Coinbase and fully engage with the decentralized ecosystem, only going back to a custodian like Coinbase if/when I want to return to USD or other fiats.
It seems that the vast majority of retail sales is into and out of USD and other fiat currency for speculation/investment. Here central markets will always have the advantage that you'll get a 'fair' price due to the mass of buyers and sellers (ignoring market manipulation) over finding someone to trade with you.
Depending on your definition or "internet," it was to connect military computers to each other.
I’m going to hijack the negativity here and ask if anyone has any advice on writing a first smart contract.
I feel like I cannot fully understand ETH or BTC lightning until I write one for fun. Does anyone have any advice on how to get started?
Banks provide professional money movement, I dont see a problem having an insurance backed entitity managing my lively hood, I call an insured plumber instead of plumbing myself.
- Scaling solution: Visa.
- Custody: BNY Mellon.
- Trading: Centralized, trustful exchanges.
- Unlimited money printer: Tether.
- The same insane unregulated over-leveraged garbage derivatives products that triggered this whole horror show in 2008: DeFi.
- Volatility: Unbelievable.
What exactly has been achieved? This is the first IPO I plan to short on day one.
A new asset class (like Gold) which everyone wants to invest in because they think everyone else values it (just like Gold). And with a few benefits over Gold like it can be transferred easily.
That this has sustained for 12 years is amazing and the longer it stays, the longer it will further stay.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully. As far as that goes, though, this comment doesn't say anything that the parent didn't already say.
The steel-man argument is that the monetary policy of central banks can cause hyper-inflation of a fiat currency, and holding onto an asset that is immune to that, and potentially even being able to transact with that asset is a reliable way to break free from the monetary policy of the central bank. The fact that one may place this transferable asset into a centralized institution that we may call a (lower case b) "bank" isn't at odds with the aforementioned principle.
Put another way, the dollar doesn't depreciate because of my credit union, it depreciates because of the Fed.
I thought that coinbase is more of a store that buys a stock of crypto then resells it with huge fee mark up.
The original promise was being able to buy drugs and gamble.
How much this has changed since then is left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't care if it is centralized or not
If I sell you a robot, which is capable of cleaning and trading stocks, and that robot owns $100 of crypto, it can trade and randomly give you things, if it profits. This is possible with crypto.
It'd be doable with fiat.. i suppose the robots would be considered a trust or something, and they'd just be "leased" to the customer or something, but that sounds like bs. I just wanna sell people a robot that also owns crypto.
so really: who cares man.
At least as an investment asset BTC has found a niche.
Especially with billions of tether issued without any fiat behind it to keep the market extra liquid.
You can go to Coinbase and simply transfer all your funds to your own wallet in a matter of seconds.
But as with many idealists, Satoshi and his crypto friends probably didn't think too hard about the problems outside their expertise.
It's just that these valuations are getting crazy.. Everyone is already pricing in like 10+ crazy years of growth. Not everyone can grow like Facebook did...
EDIT: Yes, it is valued at more than ICE and NASDAQ combined with a fraction of the revenue and significant risk. Most optimistic outcome priced in at $100b. Is the benefit of *NoPOs” that there is no underwriter to push back on the valuation? Maybe you can get a few suckers at a super high price therefore you should?
I don't know how it's legal for a company to lock your account w/ funds with no explanation for this long.
Bitcoin makes 0 sense to me as an investment. It's pure speculation with no underlying intrinsic value. It's the Dutch Tulips 10.0 basically.
And now because the value of bitcoin is unbelievably volatile, it now makes 0 sense as a means of payment.
How does that differ to investing in fine art, scarce wine, old/rare stamps and coins, limited edition/novelty items, historical artefacts, or even gold?
There's loads of things that have kept value for centuries despite having no intrinsic value.
Especially given that this one exchange itself has only 11% of the top exchange's volume[0].
On the other hand, it's not as easy for institutional money to get into crypto directly as it is to buy Coinbase stock. Additionally, Coinbase is (likely) a less volatile investment in the future of the whole crypto market rather than picking specific winners.
I appreciate the glossary
I’m not an economist or even a very well versed person in the matter, but it is my understanding that Argentina is always almost out of dollars in its reserves and the local currency has been devaluated steadily since 2001. People figured out rather quickly that holding dollars is the only way to save money, but if let free, the demand would make the exchange rate skyrocket. So the Government (who put us there in the first place) has put limits on how much people can acquire per month.
This of course has implications for the whole economy I’m not equipped to answer or understand, but by “faking ” a lower official rate, most legal business happens at the official rate, while the street market dictates what the real value should be close to.
If you do business internationally and it’s bank to bank and all legal, you exchange at the official rate.
If it’s cash business then you exchange at the blue rate. Or if it’s in Pesos but it’s an imported good, calculate pesos value based on blue value.
Currencies that don't fall checks notes 26% in 4 days.
Generally folks look to switch from one problem into a solution, not into a different problem.
Can you elaborate on this? If you can't do so in public, then I'd like to have a conversation about this. I'd like to know more about inflation issues and unbanked issues with regards to cryptocurrencies. To me, it always feels like "crypto marketing" (for lack of a better term), but I am also realizing that I'm living in a far removed bubble and find it hard to get out of it.
My email is in my profile if you feel it's handier to have a private conversation instead.
I think crypto is fulfilling one need at the moment which is: if you happen to have a super crazy inflationary national currency and you don't have access to actual dollars, then there's always cryptocurrencies that are most likely less crazy (in the inflationary sense).
> ^1 In May 2020, we became a remote-first company. Accordingly, we do not maintain a headquarters.
Total tangent here, but every time I fill out a really old-school form (e.g. loan stuff), it asks for my company's address and phone number. It gets harder every job to figure out what the hell that number should be. In my last job I has to give out one of the founder's cell phone numbers for it.
Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Any support for new currencies have to researched, developed, tested, deployed and maintained (unless they are ERC20 tokens, then they'll require less of everything but still needs work to be added). So there is no way they can offer "free for all" as not all crypocurrencies are created equal.
interesting observation. it seems to be the case for binance as well. i see coins gaining 20-30x before or right when it gets listed. perhaps “insider” trading right before a coin listing?
As for coin curation i suppose thats as a means to filter out scams.
In fact, the way crypto works, I can only see Coinbase' (and other companies in this space) valuation going up, because for all the hype, crypto is still in the very nascent stages of the adoption curve. A lot is left to be figured out, and that's part of the reason why skeptics and proponents disagree so vehemently. Thus far, the skeptics have been losing, and in my opinion, would continue to.
Coinbase is a YC company, and if some of the predictions are accurate, will be the highest valued YC company so far.
It all started with good intentions, but those seem to be gone now.
I’m curious how bullish they were after the crash a few years ago.
In fact, I can't figure out a single thing that Coinbase is the best at in the cryptocurrency industry. So what do you mean with brainchild here?
(but hey, I still used it! Couldn’t be bothered to work out how to buy Bitcoin a few years ago and they made it easy)
