Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing

> Is it even demonstrably secure against the potential of malicious original owners/operators running away with large sums of money?

Are you talking about Bitcoin itself here? There are no operators holding your money. It's secured by standard cryptography implemented in open source code, and the entire ledger is public.

There are developers who fix bugs that come up, and make minor improvements to the protocol occasionally. Ultimately it's everybody running the software who decides whether the changes actually deploy.

(If you're talking about Coinbase, they do hold your money and they are regulated and audited.)

> If there's a similar distinction between the business models of Coinbase and e.g. CME Group, I have yet to hear it.

Traditional finance and crypto finance are often hard to compare, but here's a surface level comparison: Coinbase is an exchange, a brokerage, and a clearing house all wrapped into one. I'm not aware of entity in traditional finance that is all three, though plenty are two out of three (Robinhood is a brokerage and clearing house, CME is an exchange and clearing house).

Yeah they don't tend to talk very openly about who is doing the buying for what. Occasionally in the last few years Buffett will indicate if it was him specifically buying something, usually outsized positions.

I think either Ted or Todd is likely is doing the buying on Snowflake (at least instigated the premise), perhaps with Buffett's sign-off (given it's an increasingly large position). I also think one of the other buyers is likely responsible for Berkshire's position in VRSN.

There's a high risk that Snowflake position will humiliate Berkshire Hathaway. I think it's a mistake. It wouldn't be Berkshire's first mistake in dabbling in tech but it looks like it could be the biggest.

I have great respect for Buffett's historical performance, however I consider him mostly done at this point. He's conservatively managing the end game of his career now, he seems to be intentionally avoiding doing anything that might stretch beyond his lifetime now (I don't think he wants to do anything that might need a decade to manage that he might have to offload onto the next person). I think he should have taken advantage of KHC's weakness for example, to strip Heinz back out of the conglomerate and break it up and sell off the rest of Kraft, the stock was so cheap at times you could have almost gotten Heinz for free in the process. Instead Buffett is sitting on a hundred plus billion dollars yielding squat (KHC was down to near half the market cap it currently sports, which was the general time to grab it to try to get the Heinz business, and then sell off the lesser pieces, either after you repair what was ailing KHC or immediately depending).

stock exchanges separate (and occasionally reacquire for commercial reasons) trading from custodian services.

I'm not at all up to date but I long ago presumed bitcoin needed to move to a custody transfer market instead of processing on the block chain and the expense involved or beholden attachment that creates to a miner.

if Citi (eg) will lend me to trade against collateral of my existing holdings finding risk less (cp counterparty and ops*) liquidity from stock borrowers (typically short players) and happily create a new income that's limited by the value at risk of my trading up to my collateral underlying assets and therefore greater than the principal, surely so can Coinbase. I assumed that was why the London Stock Exchange invested in them.

edit I forgot *: see Herstatt Risk inherent in closing currency cash dealing causing the eponymous bank's failure in 1974. possibly more interesting to today was a year earlier in the Cedar Bank crisis in '73 that although little known was the most existential threat to the markets certainly pre LTCM and I'd say still far more dangerous. relevant today because Cedar was a pseudo official shadow bank living by profits from high risk secondary mortgage loans. Cedar was only a bank under a statutory loophole the infamous (to my career at least) Section 123 of the English banking act. interestingly none of the UK so called challenger banks are clearing banks the only new one in 400 years is a white label specialist running on Azure called Clear.bank at that url. a notable lot of UK transactions are happening on Azure with Clear.

What I meant to convey with my original reply is that making as much money as possible and trying to improve society aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Then you proceeded to seemingly present a mutual exclusion of either someone making art for art's sake or making art simply to make as much money as they can.