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Coinbase Index Fund

blog.coinbase.com

291–300 of 346 posts

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#291
Most cryptocurrencies (especially the few that Coinbase trades) are still so pegged to the Bitcoin price that it's hard to see any value in this, especially considering the management fee.

Click between any of the currency graphs on their main page - they all move together, just with different base values.

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#292
post #3

Interesting. The fund creates another potential source of revenue for them and at the same time, the more people that invest in it, the higher it's likely to go. Why would anyone choose to invest in a fund that is basically the same as investing in the 4 currencies they currently support directly (without fees or limitations on trading)?

Automatic and cheap balancing. Its a great business for coinbase: if it had plenty of investors, then they have a very definite measure on what to ask coin makers before putting their coin on their exchange. Figure they can ask 10% of the outstanding tokens in exchange for the legitimacy that will pump the coin sky high.

Since it's marketcap weighted, rebalancing is minimal; the only variance comes from the slightly different issuance rates.

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bot requires users to have a Binance account ... (trade only, no withdrawal access) > Users will always own their own coins. To be fair, users do not actually own the coins if Binance owns the coins. Sounds like a cool bot though, and great looking site! I signed up for the private beta. Looking forward to the open source!

Blocknet is an awesome open source project you may want to look into. It's an interoperability protocol and one example use-case project they built on it is a trustless decentralized exchange that allows you to trade directly from your wallet.

What are the tax implications of owning your own coins when trading, compared to someone else owning the coins but giving you rights to it?

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocknet is an awesome open source project you may want to look into. It's an interoperability protocol and one example use-case project they built on it is a trustless decentralized exchange that allows you to trade directly from your wallet.

What are the tax implications of owning your own coins when trading, compared to someone else owning the coins but giving you rights to it?

Identical

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#295
post #268
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting mix hey (theirs). I still wonder why bother with 4% LTC. You'd be better off doing 50, 50, 0, 25 imho.

Isn't LTC the main coin that uses a lightning network ATM? Because if so, it is still a decent choice if you want a lightning network. BTC is moving in that direction, but it might still not go there.

LTC was just surpassed by BCH in transaction volume. It's creator peaced out two months ago.

Dunno if an unused payment channel means more than stuff like that.

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#296
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole regulation is unneeded. You can bring your money to a casino and put it all on zero. Or buy a thousand lottery tickets. But investing in risky businesses needs to be walled off to the wealthy. What we really need is the real consequences for fraud / false financial claims.

Gambling is one of the most heavily regulated businesses on the planet.

Yet anybody can walk into a casino and gamble.

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#297

I have attempted to duplicate this index fund manually by purchasing the top 25 cryptocurrencies (market-cap weighted) over the past year or so. I'll say that it was hardly worth the enormous work involved, and these index funds cannot come soon enough to non-accredited investors. In some cases it's not possible to do perfectly alone: NEO has a minimum unit of 1 coin, and so if you wanted it to not be overweighted, y…

I had the same problems with re-balancing my own portfolio and ended up creating a trading bot that automatically diversifies my investment portfolio across the top 20 coins by market cap (10% capped). It is heavily inspired by the crypto20 whitepaper. For anyone that is interested, you can find the project here: www.hodlbot.io I'm about 1-2 weeks from the MVP launch. Only the top 20 coins by market cap fund will be…

The referral link doesn't seem to work for me either. Maybe you want to add the referral link in the confirmation email as well? I lost my referral link after closing the tab on signup, forcing me to signup again :o

Looking forward to it! If only I wasn't 15k in line :D

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#299
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree with all 4 of these: 1) They are publishing which coins are held by the index, so the choice of coins is being given away for free, not just to investors. 2) Coinbase's main product is a SaaS account that lets you buy the same coins without knowing how to manage a wallet - so you can implement the index and skip the management fee using an account with them. 3) Controlling administrative access to an account…

1. I'll mostly concede this one. You're right that investors can look at this index and mirror it, but any investor who does this should be thankful that Coinbase created this fund and gave them something to mirror! 2. Coinbase's main product lets you buy the coins, but storing them safely is another matter. Just wait until c0inbase.com sets up a duplicate site and buys Google ads for "coinbase" so it shows up above…

Debating this should bring up some interesting details!

1) Non-investors have more than that to be thankful for, as Coinbase has offered us a terrific front-running opportunity! Rebalances due to supply changes every Jan 1, and due to added constituents 5 days after trading begins on GDAX, offer great chances to buy with a guaranteed follower. And the more we buy, the more they have to follow! Like the high fees, these gifts to the community are of course extracted from investors.

2-3) You make a good point that withdrawal friction offers a form of security. By far the biggest impact is the fact that withdrawals are "quarterly with 30 days notice". This is the first time I've seen incredibly restrictive withdrawal rights listed as an advantage to investors, but I admit that someone sufficiently risk averse about their account management could see it that way. I still think it's pretty funny to charge a high fee for the inability to access your money. And, we shouldn't pretend that Coinbase's internal handling of capital is uniquely safe -- they are not SIPC insured or such, so a common brokerage account (with no management fee) has better protections against structural events.

4) Keep in mind that this fund trades once a year (plus once more when a currency gets added). There are minimal opportunities for them to exercise expertise in tax characterization -- not to mention that they don't claim they will, and have no incentive to under the terms of the fund. I also would doubt that you're getting a 1099 -- based on requirement for accredit investors, they are probably handing you a K-1, which as a pass-through might or might not simplify your reporting. And finally, producing the most compact tax-form ever would still be something that is done as table stakes for funds with fractions of the management fee.

Re: Coinbase Index Fund

#300
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the fact that it should cost nothing like 2% of AUM / year, securing the private keys pays for itself when they claim every fork/spin-off coin that distributes based on bitcoin blockchain.

Are you saying coinage handling bcc in a sane manner is the exception, not the rule? Are there any other forks that have enough value/liquidity that they should be "given back" to the buyers?

The other fork people mention in this category is Bitcoin Gold, which traded as high as 10% of bitcoin but is now around 1%. There are other spin-offs but I can't easily track them -- great idea for a monitor website!

It don't begrudge Coinbase's handling of bitcoin cash, because it's legitimately expensive to hook a new currency up to their framework, and nobody should be able to force them to do that just by declaring a new currency based on bitcoin.

BUT, everyone should recognize that part of Coinbase's business model is retaining all the privileges associated with holding private keys -- including choices about how to handle spin-offs, secondary services such as account mixing, and so-on.

It's pretty common to derive value from holding on to someone else's cash, so in other products (like bank accounts) some of that value comes back to you as interest, or at least offsets other service fees. Coinbase Asset Management seems to be targeting minimal services, maximum float capture, and maximum fees all at the same time.

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