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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

101–110 of 883 posts

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake is here in Ethereum 2.0 and it works great. Invest in that because this is the last hurrah for Bitcoin. The next cycle will be the “Ethereum is the new better Bitcoin” cycle. I say that as someone with almost all my net worth in Bitcoin but it has miserable transaction speed and energy usage. History has shown us that not innovating has never worked out for any company I can think of.

If all you care about is energy usage and transaction speed, the traditional finance system still wins. Unless people are actively trading bitcoin enough where the transaction cost because an issue, there's little reason to trade in their tulip bulbs for iris bulbs. A bet on a cryptocurrency is a bet that people will think it's worth more money, not an investment in the underlying technology.

> If all you care about is energy usage and transaction speed, the traditional finance system still wins

Does it though? There are so many things to consider when talking about the "energy usage" of traditional money. All the vans moving money around, manufacturing, items to support PoS systems, sorting, protecting the money and so on.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#102
post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

Just put a carbon tax on everything that has environmental externalities, it's as simple as that, it doesn't make sense to target a specific industry, especially one that uses stranded/renewable energy.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#103
post #35

I'm horrendously worried about crypto gaining more marketshare as long as proof of work crypto remains mainstream. It has significantly worse externalities than just about any company I can think of (including defense contractors/vaping companies), and, if it grows larger before we have clean energy, then we virtually guarantee we won't be able to tackle global warming. We are going to bestow a world that will be sig…

My biggest worry with Coinbase IPO is that it will become too big to ban, as now it will impact the stock market and not just the minority few who own it.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#104
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake is here in Ethereum 2.0 and it works great. Invest in that because this is the last hurrah for Bitcoin. The next cycle will be the “Ethereum is the new better Bitcoin” cycle. I say that as someone with almost all my net worth in Bitcoin but it has miserable transaction speed and energy usage. History has shown us that not innovating has never worked out for any company I can think of.

Maybe I'm a huge cynic, it certainly wouldn't surpris me, but I think the people pumping up crypto this cycle aren't necessarily the kind that care about the difference. If anything they'll stay away from ETH because it lacks a long term cap.

One of the changes going into the July update is a transaction fee change that burns (throws away) part of the transaction fees. That will put some deflationary pressure on total issuance, while at the same time, when they switch to the staking chain total new issuance will be drastically cut since running a validator is far more efficient then mining.

What the long term inflation rate will be then is really set by the demand for transactions and how much congestion there will be on their network, driving up transaction prices and fees burned (or not).

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#105
post #94
post #34

You would think they would raise for BTC/Cryptos instead of USD via IPO. Really says a lot of their faith in Crypto's future.

They're a bridge between USD and virtual currencies. They care a lot about USD's future as well.

Nope they just need capital to exit.

Unfortunately there’s no liquidity in crypto hence why they want USD.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#106
post #34

You would think they would raise for BTC/Cryptos instead of USD via IPO. Really says a lot of their faith in Crypto's future.

That's a disingenuous argument. Just because you won't accept your salary in Euros, doesn't mean you don't have faith in the future of it.

How so?

You would think the currency of the future would be liquid enough to provide capital for their growth no?

Why resort to raising USD?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#107

It will be interesting to see how Coinbase performs compared to a weighted average of the top 3 cryptos directly. Anyway, Coinbase is a good case study on how UX/UI makes all the difference. I'll definitely study them in the future.

I predict a slow, constant increase in value over time, not even going down when cryptocurrencies are going down, as people still want to buy/sell cryptocurrencies when prices go down, so Coinbase will still make a killing as a company no matter what.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#108
post #97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How on earth can you believe their volume numbers haha. They might be inflating their numbers but they are definitively huge. Everyone I know who is involved in Crypto is using them.

I doubt they are inflating them and it's trivial to check by going on both CB and Binance, looking at the order books and executing a few orders against them.

Right, you know in a completely unregulated market, you can just put fake things on the books yeah?

Remember that ETF that was trying to list a few years ago said 95% of all volume in the crypto space was fake. [1] Now, at the time, they included Binance as a legitimate exchange but you know nobody's looking and they can do literally whatever they want.

That designation is especially suspect as:

> Of the 10 exchanges, only Binance isn’t a money services business (MSB)

Consider of course this was 2 years ago.

This whole space is utterly uninvestable.

So let me reverse the question -- on what basis do you believe these unregulated fly by night bucket shops are on the up and up? What have they done to prove their legitimacy to you?

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-calls-out-to-sec-95-o...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#109
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is on it’s way out - Ethereum is moving away from it and there is no reason for other cryptos to not follow. The major player in PoW will remain Bitcoin, which won’t change. But as soon as solar/wind become cheaper than coal, it will switch to green without a blink of an eye. A random thought - I’m genuinely surprised Bitcoin folks didn’t yet crowdfund building a nuclear reactor for mining purposes ;) They crowdf…

Ethereum is quite centralised - people will follow the main developers. Bitcoin probably wouldn't switch - there is no single person or group who could get majority support to force such a change.

Ethereum's development structure is only "centralized" in the same way that linux kernel development is "centralized". There is a big process that generates consensus across the community from a lot of different parties. By the time a change get into a pending hard fork, it's been through multiple rounds of establishing buy-in. Were the developers to push a major change in that didn't enjoy the support of the broader community, it would be abundantly apparent.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#110
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't tell you where their headquarters are "because Bitcoin doesn't have one": https://www.coindesk.com/binance-doesnt-have-a-headquarters-... In fact "Malta ... question mark?" is about as much information as we have. And the KYC evade is just based on opening more accounts before you reach their threshold. Because rather than operating like a real business, requiring everyone to provide KYC during onboarding,…

They do require KYC for any fiat deposits or withdraws and not requiring them for small amounts of crypro-only trading is not unusual nor illegal.

That is quite literally illegal nowadays in many jurisdictions.
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