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Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

blog.coinbase.com

41–50 of 242 posts

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#42
post #9

That money would have had better upside if invested in bitcoin directly.

Yeesh, now I'm getting worried that if everyone just puts all of their money into speculation instead of investment its going to be really bad for the economy in the long run...

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#43

I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…

Are there any instruments like options or futures for btc? Seems like these could be used to solve this issue.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#44
post #2

Why does Coinbase need another $100M when it's making tons of money with its fees?

Raise when you don't need it. VCs are desperate to part with cash ("use it or lose it"), and Coinbase probably has the best chance (after perhaps Stripe and Braintree) of becoming the de facto home for the crypto payment/trading industry.

Even so, a 1.6 billion dollar valuation of coinbase is certainly very high. Assuming that over the course of the long term they are comparable to something like intercontinental exchange (the owner of NYSE/EURONEXT, and controller of the clearing house for 50% of the worlds oil futures/derivative products).

The total market cap of coins traded on their platform would need to be magnitudes larger to justify this valuation unless they can somehow either continue to justify their high fees amidst competition, or they would need to totally monopolize all future cryptocurrency banking, something that could certainly involve large amounts of competition in the future as well.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#46
Somebody stole my identity and created a Coinbase account with it. I made a ticket on their system over two weeks ago and they haven't even bothered to respond. I'm baffled that such a shady company is able to raise funds like this. I mean, imagine if your bank just one day stopped answering the phone.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#47
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While downvoting this is warranted, this is certainly true. To catch up on the biggest news that has come out of Bitcoin, I'd suggest reading on 'Silk Road' and Ross Ulbricht. Wired has a very good 2-set long form on this[1]. If you don't want such a verbose story, Ars Techica follwed it well too[2] [1]: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2 [2]: https://arstechnica.com/…

That is not the most recent or biggest news, the largest (by a very wide margin) successor to the Silk Road, AlphaBay, was busted just a month ago [1] [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/07/20/alpha...

By volume, sure, AlphaBay was definitely a bigger successor, but Silk Road was unprecedented. Something like AlphaBay was inevitable after Silk Road (Next was Hansa, but turns out was already a honeypot by that time).

Silk Road was the first to bring forward the notion of how cryptocurrencies can be used for something much more malicious than coffee. The news it made, and with a face to the organization made it a bigger story, and with Federal Officers involved in a related crime, I will maintain it is a much more important story than AlphaBay.

On a sidenote, AlphaBay isn't the all secure operation you think it was, the 'admin' used a clearnet personal email address for some sort of welcome message, and several other stupid mistakes (check out the document posted a couple days ago in detail and a link to a forum in the comments).

There will be another market which will be bigger than AlphaBay. Currencies with more privacy oriented features are coming baked in, so it will be harder to catch them too.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#49
post #13

How in the bloody hell does Coinbase not fund its own operations with profit??? I figured they made over a $100m every quarter.

Do we have any source on what is their revenue? I sincerely doubt they are making 100 million in profit every quarter. I would be surprised if they were actually profitable.

With the fees they charge, and the volume on the exchange, I don't see how they couldn't be making a profit? Of course I'm not a business guy, might be something I'm not thinking of.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#50
Coinbase is positioning themselves to be the first legit cryptobank. Fidelity now feeds their customer portfolio data (on BTC, LTC and ETH holdings) from their user cold storage holdings at coinbase.

Its extremely risky to hold client keys that hold money. Making a CryptoBank is like making a regular bank on hard mode.

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