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Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

nytimes.com

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Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#281

Post by PeterisP »

kbody wrote: post #45
travisjungroth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Coinbase. If you want the inside scoop: "game room" is a bit of a misnomer for that room. It's a large room with a big theater screen. All day it's full of meetings and presentations. There are a bunch of games on shelves as well, and some people play them after hours.

Btw, do you have any engineers capable of working to upgrade the platform to use SegWit? I find it weird that Brian advertises open positions like there's nobody there capable of doing it.

I'd treat such an advertisement not as a signal "there's nobody there capable of doing it" but rather as a signal "we'd like to do this thing, but it's not important enough to divert anyone who's working on stuff that matters to us, so someone new can tackle it".

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#282

Post by PeterisP »

kgwgk wrote: post #279

Slightly offtopic, but this is so funny: (From today’s “money stuff” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-sha... ) Happy Bitcoin 13,000 Day. I mean, that was yesterday. A few hours after I sent out Money Stuff saying Happy Bitcoin 12,000 Day, which was also yesterday. At this rate we'll have Bitcoin 25,000 before my "Bitcoin 25,000 Before Dow 25,000" hats get here. Happy Bitcoin 14,000 Day. That w…

This aspect isn't anything new, stock markets (which are even more volatile in certain types of stock) and forex have been doing that for ages - stop loss orders are a thing; in your example someone who was short bitcoin on Monday would have been forced to sell e.g. yesterday and eat the loss even if bitcoin started to drop today.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#283

Post by mancerayder »

curun1r wrote: post #149
joering2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACH does not work in read or in write-only mode. Once you provide someone your ACH info, they can deposit you money.. or empty out your bank account! I had few rough service providers who tried to come up with some magical charges (technical fee of $500 per year) after agreement was signed and had to change bank numbers to make sure they wont take the money out since it would be more than $500 to fight them in court.…

It's pretty simple to do a hot/cold account setup at most banks. I've got a checking account which is unlinked to all other accounts and I try to keep it at a $0 balance. The online banking site makes it easy to transfer money into and out of that account from the accounts I keep money in. It's a little more work to stay on top of transferring out money when it gets deposited and putting it in when I want to spend it…

That's an excellent idea. My bank(s) have a so-called Savings Account (separate from the main Checking Account) that yields a microscopic amount of interest, which I never use since I 'save' money elsewhere. That might be a great use case for what you describe.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#284

Post by PeterisP »

plaidfuji wrote: post #97

What I find most interesting about Coinbase is that they quote your selling exchange rate the moment you place a sell order. If I click "sell" right now, they lock in the $13,000 exchange rate or whatever it is. The amount that shows up in my bank days later is exactly what they quoted at the time I placed the sell order. When people start selling off, this policy is either going to drive them to bankruptcy or create…

That's not a symptom of a problem - the time delta of settlement with you has no relation with the time delta of them balancing their position. It's just as big bank forex deals work; if a customer of a big bank sells $100m euros for dollars in their bank, the bank (most banks who don't want to play market maker) will often get a matching deal within minutes, but the deal can often be actually settled on the next business day or the day after that.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#285

Post by ethagnawl »

ethagnawl wrote: post #117
drawkbox wrote: post #18

With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be pa…

Based on my experience* over the past ~week, "robust" is not a word I'd use in the same sentence as "coinbase". *In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.

UPDATE: My "pending" transaction was marked as "complete" and the coins appeared in my coinbase wallet this morning (almost 11 days after I initially moved the coins). I'm not necessarily chalking it up to this comment, but I suppose it's possible.

Fortune favored me this time around, but I don't know if I can trust coinbase again. If the price had dipped, I'd be out a bunch of money. (Just to be clear: they received the coins days ago, just didn't credit them to my wallet.) I wish there was an option to sell BTC directly from your local wallet, which would set a strike price and ensure that users don't get screwed if/when this sort of thing happens. (Note: This option may exist and I'm just not aware of it. I tried to log into coinbase just now to verify that ... but the site is down again.)

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#286

Post by IamNotAtWork »

So can you actually withdraw money from coinbase, if you say had 100 coins (I don't). Everyone said back then that Mt. Gox was safe because it was the biggest. It being based in Japan was a huge red flag, but nobody cared until all of its money disappeared.

Coinbase being based in the US probably won't happen because there could be consequences for them if they disappear with the coins, but having been burned by Mt. Gox fiasco is making me sit out of crypto, but with some sour grapes because each day bitcoin just go up and up. Was $13000 yesterday and it's almost $16000 today. It took a week to go from $10000 to $15000. Insane.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#287

Post by swalsh »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #60
kvee wrote: post #28

Most interesting thing I learned from this article: Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"

Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technica…

"He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years."

Maybe he boasted what was best for the currency, but propaganda won in the end. So he switched knowing a manipulated currency is not an investment he is interested in?

It's important to realize that bitcoin's message is being manipulated by blockstream. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's conspiracy reality. Subreddits like /r/bitcoin had moderation schemes that buried support for the change, and boosted opposition.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#288

Post by emXdem »

PeterisP wrote: post #275
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't momentary. It is decentralized savings.

The total long-term value of bitcoin ecosystem is the value of bitcoin as a transactional instrument . There's a plausible justification to invest in bitcoin now if you believe that in future it'll have a large total capitalization because be used as valuable information of e.g. uncensorable pseudonymous transactions, and you'll be able to sell your bitcoins with profit to those people who'll want to use them for tra…

I like to think of bitcoin as the censorship resistant settlement layer on which payment networks/systems can and are being built (like lightning network, which just passed all tests). There are some pretty sweet video demos of lightning network/payment channels in action.

Don't forget that it's now possible to broadcast bitcoin transactions via satellite - without internet...

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#289

Post by IamNotAtWork »

ssharp wrote: post #270

With the wild price swings, Bitcoin has practically no value as anything other than a speculative investment. Are any of these people downloading Coinbase and buying coins really interested in transacting in Bitcoin or are they just buying Beanie Babies? Although, as someone who thought the bubble would burst at $1,000, I'm quite impressed at how much interest it has garnered. I just don't seeing it end well for many…

Why? Most people just put money they don't need into it, like spare cash. Depending on when you bought, chances of ever going down to that level now is incredibly small.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#290

Post by swalsh »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #192
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technica…

Armstrong was right about Bitcoin's 1 MB limit leading to massive fee increases and retail unusability, and he was right about Ethereum becoming massively adopted. Your characterization of Armstrong's position as being pro-centralization is typical of the total disconnect between the 1-MB-Bitcoin crowd and reality. According to your logic, Satoshi Nakamoto was pro centralization when he described a future with GB blo…

For people who want to understand more about the context of this, this is a great read: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...
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