Coinbase announces proposed direct listing • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#161

Post by pmorici » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #76

throwaway803453 wrote: post #68

Given the hype, the most likely scenario is a > 2X price spike in the first few minutes of trading regardless of the initial market cap ($100B+?). For those of us who believe that, what is the best strategy for purchasing shares ? It's doubtful brokers will allow market orders the previous night since the ticker might not yet exist, and if one places a market order during the first few minutes the cynic in me predict…

I think generally you can place an order before the market opens, maybe even the day before, but that doesn't really give you any pricing power. It will still pop at the open and your order may not clear until it does. But that may still put you ahead of the Robinhood masses. Better option might be to try a pre-IPO trading platform like EquityZen.

CB just did a private offering through Nasdaq private market formerly Second Market. Couldn’t figure out how to participate in that.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#162

Post by dannyw » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:12 AM UTC

boring_twenties wrote: post #137

xiphias2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uniswap is already huge. For Bisq to succeed governments needs to clamp down on central exchanges, but so far that is not happening.

Uniswap can only trade ERC-20 tokens, though.

The tokenisation of everything will happen; much like securitisation. You already have WBTC (wrapped Bitcoin).

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#163

Post by marcinzm » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:13 AM UTC

girvo wrote: post #109

marcinzm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I prefer to not be stabbed to death by a starving person who lost their life savings on GME so they can steal $10 from my wallet. Massive societal implosions tend to have a large blast radius.

So basically, “heads I win, tails you lose” for the institutional investors because you’re worried about the possible fall out?

The comment I replied to was "Good free markets should be free. No government bailouts no problem." Not "no bailouts for hedge funds doing shorts." See the distinction?

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#164

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

meowster wrote: post #142

qixxiq wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would bitcoin be where it is today without Coinbase? Not to say it's impossible, but their work and approach definitely helped bring Bitcoin to the masses.

Same reason why the 10,000 BTC pizza was necessary. If no one ever bought anything with Bitcoin, Bitcoin would remain worthless.

This is still a highly debated thesis. Just using BTC to store value away from a volatile fiat currency and eventually exchange for a different, more stable currency, is another candidate for the underlying valuation model, no widespread medium of exchange beyond currency trading needed.

If you live in Venezuela, converting to BTC even if you cannot buy anything with it but perhaps Columbian or Brazilian currency at a slight loss, is a hugely valuable capability, with significant advantages over both traditional fiat currency exchanges and custodial stores of value like gold.

What is the total global demand for cryptocurrency for this use case? Certainly not anywhere close to the total market cap of first world fiat currencies, but also probably still much higher than today’s total market cap of BTC.

This stands in contrast to smart contract and d-app marketplace currency like ETH, which has a completely different hypothetical valuation model.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#165

Post by thekyle » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #56

fortydegrees wrote: post #40

Slightly off topic but can anyone explain to me why a massive company like coinbase uses Medium as a blogging platform/software? Why are they not hosting the blog within their own ecosystem/site?

I could imagine coinbase have critical cookies containing user sessions attached to coinbase.com. If they have a wordpress blog at blog.coinbase.com, then any xss attack in wordpress can steal customer accounts. Sure, it's a fixable problem (by moving high security cookies into login.coinbase.com or something similar), but that's a big migration, and probably nowhere near the top of the engineering priority list.

So instead they point the domain at Medium and any XSS attack on Medium can steal their customer accounts.

I highly doubt either WordPress or Medium are susceptible to an XSS attack, but if I had to bet on one being safer I would bet on the open source software already used to power thousands of high profile websites.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#166

Post by lmm » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

throwaway803453 wrote: post #157

svachalek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think generally you can place an order before the market opens, maybe even the day before, but that doesn't really give you any pricing power. It will still pop at the open and your order may not clear until it does. But that may still put you ahead of the Robinhood masses. Better option might be to try a pre-IPO trading platform like EquityZen.

For a direct listing, does that mean Coinbase could conceivably charge any price they want for a market order given they are the only seller when it is first listed ?

Other existing shareholders can sell as well (there's no lockup), and I guess short sellers could sell immediately? But yeah issuing a market on open order for a new stock would be a "courageous" move (but IMO that's true of any market order - don't use a market order instead of a limit order unless you're genuinely willing to buy at $999 / sell at $0.01).

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#167

Post by lmm » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

bluedevil2k wrote: post #112

harryh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with a direct listing. Coinbase shares would be subject to an auction and the market for them will open at the price where supply meets demand.

Not entirely true - since people had to enter a single point on their demand curve as a price and quantity of shares (instead of their entire demand curve) the market clearing price was artificially low. Hence the price pop on day one. To think about it more in depth - assume I enter a bid of 100 shares at $100. If the market clearing price is $50, I’ll be awarded 100 shares at $50. However, I was willing to buy far…

You can issue your whole curve as orders, can't you? Something like: buy 50 shares limit $200 on open, buy 50 shares limit $100 on open, buy 100 shares limit $50 on open.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#168

Post by jcliff » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #72

zionic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the plan is to raise tons of fiat then pump their BTC holdings via grayscale.

They are thenselves institutional BTC holders, so I'm not sure if they need to outsource it. Microstrategy is using Coinbase.

not only that, but they custody grayscale's btc. they definitely don't need grayscale.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#169

Post by lmm » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

whb07 wrote: post #26

marcinzm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then eventually things implode, society collapses, a dictator takes over after claiming they will help the starving masses and so on. Starving masses who have lost their life savings do not make for a good place to live even if you avoid being one of them. Society should be protected from the fallout of capitalism to a reasonable degree.

Protected by people with lofty ideals like yourself? Where are these high minded incorruptible individuals? Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.

> Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.

Organised groups of people do these things, governmental or not - private corporations are responsible for plenty of similar occurrences, and so are NGOs (e.g. religious groups). Centralisation of power is bad, absence of checks and balances is bad, lack of accountability is bad - but insisting that limited-liability corporations be allowed to grow arbitrarily large is the opposite of avoiding those problems.

Re: Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

#170

Post by lmm » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

xur17 wrote: post #144

funkisjazz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, and you are right on this front. That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees. But you're right that from the merchant's perspective, depending on country (e.g. the US) things can be worst. Then again, from the merchant's perspective cryptos seem to have much larger downsides, after all there's a reason why they aren't widely used, an…

> That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees. Are you saying that you only pay 0.1% in fees for accepting credit cards? Is this in the US? If so, please tell me whom because that's an insanely good deal, and they are surely losing money. Some other pieces you aren't including - credit cards are prone to fraud. Despite paying 2-3% in fees to banks…

> Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.

Which customers don't want. Customers like paying by credit card because they know that if your product/service was fake, the credit card company will make sure they get their money back.