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Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

blog.coinbase.com

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

#81

Post by joering2 »

wastedhours wrote: post #3
Torai wrote: 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.

Why on earth would it become a "home for crypto". The only reason I use them is because Kraken & Co requires full SSN to buy or sell; Coinbase doesn't. There is no network effect here. I don't buy/sell/keep with Coinbase because my friends or family does. The moment I found some other system that doesn't require my full SSN to be revealed, Im moving on as well.

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

#82

Post by pedrocr »

aresant wrote: post #64

Edit - Moved to comment I was trying to address -

Your currency use cases sound fine to me. The wealth ones however look dangerous to me.

>Crypto could be the biggest store of value. The beautiful math behind bitcoin (and others) is self-limiting creating real scarcity. With mass adoption will come stability.

Currencies should never be used to store value. No one should hold large amounts of wealth in Euros or Dollars and almost no one does. You hold wealth in actual productive assets like land, stocks, bonds, etc. That we price these in Euros or Dollars is irrelevant and we can price them in Bitcoin just as well. Nothing the central banks that control fiat currencies do changes the underlying worth of these assets even if they can generate temporary valuation swings.

>Crypto could become the "people's" wealth vault, and undercut nations ability to tax & control markets by truly privatizing wealth. All it takes is MOST of us to decide.

This to me sounds even riskier. People shouldn't be going out and buying bitcoin to do any of this when there are plentiful cheap instruments out there to actually invest in assets. Go buy ETFs of broadly diversified asset classes (stocks and bonds would suffice but real estate ones also exist) and leave the innovation in crypto currencies to sort itself out.

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

#83

Post by avian »

45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #53
avian wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally. How would a non-digital cryptocurrency work? While signal scramblers, an analog equivalent to digital cryptography, did exist, I have a hard time imagining an analog blockchain.

a block is just a header, a ref to the previous block, a set of tx's and a nonce to satisfy the work function. It being digital is just its encoding. An analog cryptocurrency could be carved into trees or anything.

Are you confusing digital with electronic? Ones and zeros carved into a tree are still a digital record. Digital refers to the fact the you operate on a set of discrete values, in contrast to a continuum of values. Medium is irrelevant.

Just to be clear. I do agree with the argument above that "cryptocurrency" is a much more fitting term than "digital currency".

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #53
avian wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally. How would a non-digital cryptocurrency work? While signal scramblers, an analog equivalent to digital cryptography, did exist, I have a hard time imagining an analog blockchain.

a block is just a header, a ref to the previous block, a set of tx's and a nonce to satisfy the work function. It being digital is just its encoding. An analog cryptocurrency could be carved into trees or anything.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by baddox »

skizm wrote: post #55
stanmancan wrote: post #35

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…

Bitcoin purists will say that, eventually, there is no "cash out" phase. 1 BTC = 1 BTC and who cares about what the dollar equivalent happens to be. Once everything is in BTC you will never exchange it for dollars. Do you spend dollars today wondering if tomorrow the Euro will be worth more or less? No, so why would you care what the dollar equivalent to a BTC is when everything you buy is priced in BTC? This is long…

But be careful about only mentioning the views of "Bitcoin purists." That sounds like a pretty extreme view, and will be dismissed as a straw man by the Bitcoin fans or optimists, who likely vastly outnumber the "purists."

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

#86

Post by JumpCrisscross »

45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #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.

I don't think they're going for bank, but the more-lucrative exchange model. "Bank" means ongoing fees but lots of risk. "Exchange" means low-risk transaction fees.

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

#87

Post by pedrocr »

zjaffee wrote: post #76
0x4f3759df wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use cases (Escaping currency controls,Cannot be seized by government, Asset Speculation, Purchasing legal and illegal things, Money laundering, Donating to people like wikileaks) Bitpay allows you to use bitcoin with a VISA card https://bitpay.com/ Some merchants accept it, Overstock being a famous one.

Many of these things are no different than holding large amounts of normal cash(of any currency really) or something such as gold, with the exception of their being a ledger of all trades that have occurred. Also bitcoins can certainly be seized by the government should they size control over any accounts you hold coins in, take your computers, ect (it's just harder to do so). Also I think your missing the biggest us…

>crypto currencies are by far the best digital payment solution when it comes to the time it takes for transactions to clear

Isn't paypal much faster than crypto currencies at doing the same? The normal banking system is quite slow (in part for good reasons) but the digital currencies that came before the crypto currencies are much better at this already, and better than bitcoin will ever be.

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

#88

Post by 0x4f3759df »

zjaffee wrote: post #76
0x4f3759df wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use cases (Escaping currency controls,Cannot be seized by government, Asset Speculation, Purchasing legal and illegal things, Money laundering, Donating to people like wikileaks) Bitpay allows you to use bitcoin with a VISA card https://bitpay.com/ Some merchants accept it, Overstock being a famous one.

Many of these things are no different than holding large amounts of normal cash(of any currency really) or something such as gold, with the exception of their being a ledger of all trades that have occurred. Also bitcoins can certainly be seized by the government should they size control over any accounts you hold coins in, take your computers, ect (it's just harder to do so). Also I think your missing the biggest us…

There are many aspects to bitcoin I just named a few, I'll bet there are others I've forgotten besides the one you mentioned.

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

#90

Post by aresant »

stanmancan wrote: post #35

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…

Fascinating how many questions / comments in this thread question if crypto currency macro even has a use case in this world.

And for good reason.

Is it a currency? Yes and no.

Is it a store of value? Yes and no but sure is volatile.

Is primary use case illegal transactions? Definitely, sometimes.

Is it a anarchist mechanism to shelter wealth and detach from any nation state? Yes absolutely, probably most of the China money that drove the last price bump was getting cash out of China.

Is it a pyramid scheme? Absolutely in many cases, ICOs are making this way easier.

The answer I've arrived at, and why I am compelled by crypto is that in each use case above it has the potential to be the BIGGEST, at a scale never recognized before.

EG

Crypto could be the biggest currency. All it takes is adoption and figuring out scaling. Way easier to transact in a flat-world with a portable currency.

Crypto could be the biggest store of value. The beautiful math behind bitcoin (and others) is self-limiting creating real scarcity. With mass adoption will come stability.

Crypto could drive the majority of illegal transactions. If they figure out privacy more completely it's the perfect mechanism.

Crypto could become the "people's" wealth vault, and undercut nations ability to tax & control markets by truly privatizing wealth. All it takes is MOST of us to decide.

And finally, because it's entertaining to think about, Crypto could drive the biggest pyramid scheme the world has ever seen. There is absolutely no SOFTWARE of structural limitation to running a $1 trillion dollar end game pyramid on Crypto. In fact you figure out the privacy side, add in mass adoption and you could just leverage the current ICO structure for it.

I love crypto because it's boundless.

You have to have some imagination and blind faith to believe any of the use cases above will become true.

But the fun part is there is no limiter on any of those things becoming true.

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