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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

#191

Post by AgentME »

thanksgiving wrote: post #182
AgentME wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think there's a strange amount of both fans and people who dislike bitcoin that think bitcoin can only be valuable if it's on a path to complete adoption, replacing other currencies. I see it more like a decentralized PayPal alternative, and I keep seeing it pop up in more places that I buy stuff online and I've made personal transactions with it to other people, so it's providing value to me and seems to be…

I know miners will hate me for saying this it will bring up the lightning network but I think the transaction costs are too high. They have to come down (close to zero if not zero) even if it means miners and node operators are working for no gain. I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu. Maybe we need to leave Bitcoin alone and come up with another currency…

>I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu.

What do you mean? People can mine with a gpu, but they won't make much because of the many miners using much faster ASICs. If you think Bitcoin should have been made so that ASICs weren't possible: a number of altcoins agree with that idea, but there's an argument to be made that optimized hardware is always possible, and by making it hard to make, it makes it more likely that a single small group who manages to make optimized hardware will be the only one to do so for a large time period, will be able to make huge amounts of profits funding more hardware, and at that point will easily be able to get up to >50% of the network hash rate (which breaks Bitcoin's decentralization and allows rewriting the blockchain). By using a proof-of-work that's relatively straight-forward to optimize means that when the possible mining rewards eventually incentivize development of ASICs, it's likely that multiple groups will be able to build them.

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

#192

Post by xorcist »

thanksgiving wrote: post #182
AgentME wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think there's a strange amount of both fans and people who dislike bitcoin that think bitcoin can only be valuable if it's on a path to complete adoption, replacing other currencies. I see it more like a decentralized PayPal alternative, and I keep seeing it pop up in more places that I buy stuff online and I've made personal transactions with it to other people, so it's providing value to me and seems to be…

I know miners will hate me for saying this it will bring up the lightning network but I think the transaction costs are too high. They have to come down (close to zero if not zero) even if it means miners and node operators are working for no gain. I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu. Maybe we need to leave Bitcoin alone and come up with another currency…

It doesn't need to be another currency. You could have a lower security blockchain tethered to the main one, with higher capacity and lower fees but still carrying Bitcoin transactions. In general those are called sidechains, and there is a particular proposal right now called drivechain that might be worth a second look.

There are several other ways of transacting in Bitcoin outside the main replicated-everywhere-forever blockchain, Lightning perhaps being the most well known (with the defining feature of instant transactions).

Most of these systems are hard to implement without unmalleable txids, so interest will likely pick up now that we have segwit on the main chain. Those systems never left the idea stage while transactions were free but there's significantly more interest now. There are lots of interesting developments going on.

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

#193

Post by Meekro »

Even in the bitcoin community, I think many people don't realize just how big Coinbase is. I have a paid Alexa account, so I can grab traffic data to for any website. Let me show you how Coinbase compares to several other sites you guys might be familiar with:

  coinbase.com - 4.8 million monthly unique visitors from the US
  4chan.org - 5.3 million
  chase.com - 47 million
So Coinbase is almost as big as 4chan, and is 1/10 the site of Chase.

Let me repeat that again: The largest bitcoin exchange has 1/10 of the traffic of the biggest general banking site in the world.

That is huge.

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

#194

Post by Fej »

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 transactions in which the payee retains the currency instead of immediately exchanging it for USD, EUR, GBP, or another usual currency are largely done for illicit purchases, especially those involving narcotics.

This is done because Bitcoin is extremely easy to launder through "tumblers". Unlike, say, paper currency, an individual 'unit' of Bitcoin (insofar as that exists) is not tracked with a serial number.

Additionally, in the US, the IRS is underfunded and prolific sellers are smart. Unlike banks, Bitcoin does not inherently have names attached to accounts/wallets, and so it is much easier to evade taxes than with typical currencies.

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

#195

Post by Domenic_S »

dahdum wrote: post #130
ryanSrich wrote: post #67

Hopefully they spend all $100mm on support. I've never experienced such bad support.

They added 1 million users in just 1 month (June), so the volume of inquiries went off the chart. They weren't prepared for that, and I can't say I blame them.

They've always been awful

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

#196

Post by Domenic_S »

fpgaminer wrote: post #133
45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance on cryptocurrency holdings? might be hard to find a provider that would accept that level of risk and volatility. Would the premiums increase with the value of the BTC? What if there just isn't enough bitcoin in circulation to cover the loss (there is a 21 million cap on BTC). Bank robberies don't usually leave the bank with nothing :-) Exchange gets rolled, it might not even afford the claim. Agree about a…

> What if there just isn't enough bitcoin in circulation to cover the loss (there is a 21 million cap on BTC). It's being defacto established that when a cryptobank gets robbed, the funds are repaid to customers using local currency, not BTC, priced at the time of the loss. So, from the underwriter's perspective, it's just insuring whatever total USD value Coinbase currently holds, with consideration given to Coinbas…

Read that again and see why it makes no sense

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

#197

Post by vadym909 »

Unrelated, but it still blows my mind- that the creator of this cryptosystem thats now worth $50B is still unknown.

He has to have been lived somewhere, gone to school somewhere, studied, worked somewhere, left some track somewhere about who he was.

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

#198

Post by cma »

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…

> So, theoretically if you replaced the world's currencies with BTC, having a single BTC would make you incredibly wealthy.

The rules can and have changed with just majority (of compute power) consensus through forks. They could be changed to make it inflationary.

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

#199

Post by __s »

utexaspunk wrote: post #102
aresant wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chin…

>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. Couldn't Crypto itself be the big pyramid scheme? It…

The biggest pyramid scheme is the fed

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

#200

Post by keypusher »

vadym909 wrote: post #197

Unrelated, but it still blows my mind- that the creator of this cryptosystem thats now worth $50B is still unknown. He has to have been lived somewhere, gone to school somewhere, studied, worked somewhere, left some track somewhere about who he was.

Dave Kleiman - Look him up. It's actually all a kind of sad and sordid story. The myth is far better than the reality.
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