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Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

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Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#221
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? With BTC (and I would assume most other cryptocurrencies), by transaction fees.

Wait is my whole calculation wrong then? I thought miners only got paid for receiving bitcoins. They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above?

> They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above?

Yeah, the basic design of bitcoin is for the block rewards to dominate early on with no/low transaction fees, but transaction fees to gradually take over as the main reward for miners maintaining the network.

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#222

I am afraid that we might be on the verge of another dot com level bubble. It's interesting to see how one inflated asset is propping up another. Tesla - which rose by 1000% in 2020, bought bitcoin. Ark Invest Etfs - some of the biggest actively managed etfs, hold significant amount of Tesla, and with the profit generated from Tesla's phenomenal rise, they are investing more on bitcoin. I believe in the future of cry…

Could credit cards not be considered a "hacky patch" or really a layer 2 solution to the slowness of adoption and traditional banking policies? And they eat up 2%+ fee even for people that wish to pay in cash?

No.

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both can be true. ie. wanting to build something cool and potentially good for society while also enjoying the fruits.

Certainly. Just look at some of the people on Etsy. Some of them are pure artists who do what they do because they love it, not because they were hoping become a 100M brand some day. Some of them make good money because their products are so great and unique. But those same people are generally not looking to sell their company.

You don't think an Etsy artist who became popular enough to hire employees and make a large brand would ever sell shares of their business? Or is that type of Etsy user immoral/incorrect? Not clear to me what point you're making here.

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#224
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually how do miners make money once there are no more coins to mine? With BTC (and I would assume most other cryptocurrencies), by transaction fees.

Wait is my whole calculation wrong then? I thought miners only got paid for receiving bitcoins. They also get additional payments in fractions of a bitcoin for transactions and this is in addition to the costs I wrote above?

miners are getting payed for every transaction. if you don’t include transactions fees your transaction will spend a lot of time in limbo and may actually never be mined.

the way it works, let’s say you have A bitcoins and you want to pay someone B bitcoins. you create a transaction that say: I want to move A to B and A-B-fee the miners see it and see the fee. it gets included (ie mined) in a block.

actual example 50BTC -> 20BTC + 29BTC

when the miner mines it, it will send the tx fee to its own wallet

also, most miners sort transactions by the most profitable to less profitable and mine only the most profitable ones

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some if it is time and experience. Seeing markets come and go, seeing valuations come and go. You could perhaps study historical markets to gain some of that, but there is no better teacher than going through it (including taking some beatings along the way, along the process of learning and instilling discipline). The absolute easiest things to look for (things most anybody can do), is growth vs valuation, along wit…

Thanks for all the detailed responses. Very much appreciated food for thought. I have a specific question about the calculation of the fair value. My understanding is that there are two steps: 1. Project the future earning (that is the difficult part) 2. Discount the earnings and get the NPV - the fair value of the company Currently the interest rates are so low that the NPV will be quite high and not that far from t…

When I say fair value, it's what I consider to be fair value. As an investor you always have to ultimately make those decisions for yourself, or you have to defer to another person's judgment on the matter (whether a talking head on TV, or pump & dumpers on Reddit, or newsletters, etc). I'm not basing that on something some guy put into a book 70 years ago about how to value a stock, even if some textbook'ish knowledge can be worth learning to use as you go about coming up with your own valuing formulation (as in the case of Ben Graham). It's based on my past ~26 years of experience with stocks and what I look for in investments. You'll find with experience as an investor, if you're self-educating and or managing some or all of your own investing, you'll come up with your own tests for investments, your own way of valuing what you're buying & selling (or you should anyway). You can take pieces here and there from others and assemble it based on how you like to invest, inevitably over a lifetime it no doubt becomes an amalgam from what you learn.

So for example if I think the fair value for Coca Cola (KO) is 30% to 50% lower than where it's at today, that's not based on a textbook valuation approach. I base it on what I'm willing to pay for growth, and Coca Cola is a pathetic non-growth machine (not to mention a giant sugar liability). I look at Coke's financials and, with some understanding of their business, I ask: what am I willing to pay for zero or negative growth across time? China's boom has come and gone and Coke's growth - as a global business - has recently been stagnant, mediocre, so what are their prospects going forward? I don't like that picture at all. I might be willing to pay somewhere between 8 to 15 times earnings for zero growth (depending on context; I might pay less for a financial firm than a tech firm, and so on), if there is something I like about a company. Coke's multiple is closer to 27-33 lately. Why would anybody ever pay 30 times earnings for zero growth and bad prospects for growth? Coke is a very easy fair value calculation as far as my personal judgment is concerned, their persistent growth problems make that a super fast decision. I'll look elsewhere. McDonald's is in a similar boat as Coke, it's a horrific value proposition, 30+ times earnings for a business with very little (or negative) growth. I might pay 12-15 times for MCD or KO, maybe. Personally I tend to really dislike companies with no growth or weak growth prospects going forward, it's a giant negative in the margin of safety calculation (growth is a first-aid kit for problems that inevitably crop up in a business over time, random messes, it applies a bit of a balm, helps as an offset in the value calculation; if you don't even have growth, inevitable problems are that much worse when they happen).

Fair value means I've looked at the stock in a way that I prefer to approach a stock and I've made a determination for myself, for my investment purposes, as to how much I think it should be worth. And I may come up with a few versions of that, one for an average market (with typical multiples), one for a slightly bubbly market; typically I disregard trying to come up with a value based on a mania, I'm not a buyer at that time in most cases. Those variations, models, are meant to inform myself as to the flex in my investment. If valuations merely go back to where they were in 2012 or 2016, how might my investment perform if its multiple is reset 1/3 lower? Will I get killed on the price I paid? It's modeling.

Interest rates will absolutely distort the context of deciding what something is worth, that falls into the variations, models, you build for different scenarios. The point of doing that is to check / prepare your position against a bad outcome. People claim that low interest rates will keep stocks inflated, so there's nothing to worry about; I like to point out that multiples were far lower at numerous points in the past decade when interest rates were at zero and we also had QE going on. How about if we just roll back to where multiples were in 2014 when rates were zero (and our economy was better positioned in 2014 than it is now, although our headline unemployment rate was similar)? If I were a buyer today I'd absolutely be running that simulation for myself whenever I buy.

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it easy to verify? How much did a house cost 20 years ago? A 4 year college degree? How much were you paying per month for health insurance in the 90s? Salaries have not kept up. They’ve been amazingly static my entire life.

You've mentioned three items that have experienced specific inflation at higher than the general rate of inflation (but even then mostly not at rates anywhere in the remote neighborhood that would qualify as hyperinflation [> +50%/month] even if they were the rate of general inflation.) So,yeah, when even the rapidly inflating segments aren't anywhere close to hyperinflation, it's pretty clearly not general hyperinfl…

They also just listed the set of the largest expenses for a vast majority of our society (even if you don't pay for education)

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you're running a company that facilitates the exchange of high-price trading cards. If those cards are popular and expensive, and the market thinks you're worth 22% as much as JP Morgan, it's a great time to cash out. They might be eyeing a direct listing because institutional investors know that price is ridiculous, but also because they see Coinbase as something of a competitor, so the only interest…

If somehow you could dissociate the tech from the currency aspect, would you still qualify cryptocurrencies as "high-price trading cards"? I wonder because where some people are attracted to crypto because of the monetary gain and then learn about the technology, others are turned off by the constant focus on the $ value and then don't learn about the technology. I truly find it fascinating to imagine our future runn…

What projects do you believe truly can bring value to people?

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#228
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is high, but it's nowhere near enough to explain the recent market mania. Likewise, stimulus isn't enough to explain the market mania, especially after you subtract out COVID economic losses. Personal savings rate is up, discretionary spending is down, people are stuck at home, and everyone is glued to their phones. I think a lot of people's extra money is going into crypto and the market. FOMO reigns supre…

Inflation isn't high at all. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA

CPI might not be high, but inflation can show itself in different places. Asset inflation has been increasingly high since 2019, which is clearly visible in stock market, real estate and commodity markets. Similarly, construction materials are up significantly.

It may or may not show up in consumer prices eventually.

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#229
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was wrong then either. I think this is a greater fool style of bubble like the famous tulip bubble, eventually we'll run out of fools. That's my opinion, but we'll see.

The other possibility is that it will be widely used in the future as a store of value or for some other purposes. Might be rational to put at least some percentage of your net worth into it. People need and want something like that to exist where they have complete control over their assets without any worries about government or institutions.

I get this argument if it was for e.g. gold. A physical asset, thousands of years of people appreciating it, nothing else like it. But why might it be rational to put some of your net worth to bitcoin? What speaks for bitcoin existing in a meaningful form 50 years from now, instead of some improved, different (blockchain-based or not) digital asset?

Re: Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

#230

We're just at a point in the economy where it doesn't make sense to hold on to cash. It's just completely losing its value thanks to a long sustained QE. People are just putting their money into anything as a hedge - real estate, stocks, crypto, gold. Until the value of the at can be sustained and inflation comes back, it's unlikely much else will change.

Isn’t cash losing value the definition of inflation?

conceptually holding more cash than you can usefully spend reduces your cash value and doesn't have to happen with inflation

I remember Buffets letter to shareholders apologising Berkshire Hathaway wasn't able to continue delivering the same historic returns because that trajectory would require them to own every publicly traded asset in the world after ten more years.

even now you can potentially eliminate the major inflationary risks by holding property without debt and rely on policy consumer price regulation to hold basic necessities in check but I personally think that energy risks and not only exceptional weather events put that out of contention for sanity sake. In fact if energy infrastructure and general infrastructure development is increasingly critical for the future it makes little sense to have a cash savings incentive in the economy despite this is unfortunately not a explicit case for the generational savings deprecated in a way that I readily appreciate.

edit to remove accidental negative from I personally [don't] think that energy risks....

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