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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#241

Post by Moodles »

stormbeta wrote: post #190
gonehome wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake, proof-of-work seems like the main innovation of cryptocurrencies that differentiates them from the standard financial industry? If you swap out POW for POS (or worse clearing house type trust orgs like Stellar) then aren't you just putting trust into some incentive based system no different than existing financial systems? Just instead a government you're trusting some other entity. Y…

And this is exactly why I'm so skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general. There doesn't appear any viable way to make them work as currencies that doesn't either have horrendous externalities, simply replicate what existing currencies already do (often poorly and with many downsides), or often both. I don't think it's a coincidence that even a decade plus later, the primary use cases for crypto still seem to be grey/b…

Not to even mention the even more useless buzzword application of blockchains to business to pump up stock prices. I'd go as far to say that cryptocurrency is the most "useful" application of blockchain to date. And even then, it appears only truly useful for dark web transactions and pyramid schemes. Why else would we use a wildly fluctuating currency that takes 20 minutes to send a payment?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#242

Post by sibeliuss »

jude- wrote: post #228
sibeliuss wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth investigating Algorand's Pure Proof-of-Stake model and seeing how it compares to other POS implementations: https://algorand.foundation/algorand-protocol/about-algorand...

If the means of coin production require owning coins, you have these problems that PoW does not have. Definitely true for Algorand.

Owning coins is a means of validating the network and appending to the blockchain, not producing new coins.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#243

Post by bpodgursky »

throwawaybbqed wrote: post #51

I was an early user of coinbase. I only bought a fraction of a coin because of Paul Graham and YC's reputation. Well .. I was wrong. I was not an active trader. It seems they have closed by account and liquidated the btc within (if there were actually btc in my name). I am deeply disappointed that they don't have a telephone number I can call to help figure out the situation. Pretty disappointed.

As other people have alluded to, this might be California "escheating" you out of the account if you haven't logged in for a couple years (in which case Coinbase doesn't have a say in it). You should look into what's in California's unclaimed property registry: https://www.sco.ca.gov/upd_msg.html

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#244

Post by gonehome »

stormbeta wrote: post #190
gonehome wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of proof-of-stake, proof-of-work seems like the main innovation of cryptocurrencies that differentiates them from the standard financial industry? If you swap out POW for POS (or worse clearing house type trust orgs like Stellar) then aren't you just putting trust into some incentive based system no different than existing financial systems? Just instead a government you're trusting some other entity. Y…

And this is exactly why I'm so skeptical of cryptocurrencies in general. There doesn't appear any viable way to make them work as currencies that doesn't either have horrendous externalities, simply replicate what existing currencies already do (often poorly and with many downsides), or often both. I don't think it's a coincidence that even a decade plus later, the primary use cases for crypto still seem to be grey/b…

I remain cautiously optimistic about the underlying idea and core technology (even if there's a lot of pyramid scheme snake oil surrounding it).

Interesting applications do exist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24242005

Its applications are more interesting in countries that have unreliable governments and inflationary currencies (for now).

It also does provide something new (one way 'cash' transfers across a decentralized network).

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#245

Post by tovej »

triceratops wrote: post #237
tovej wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No credible way to decouple production/consumption from emissions has been found. So no, we do need to start curbing consumption, especially among people in the top wealth quantiles (because they consume the most).

> we do need to start curbing consumption You do that by increasing the cost of consumption. Everyone has, even wealthy people, have a price point beyond which something is too expensive for them.

I agree, and what better way than to impose a tax on consumption after X dollars. Or perhaps even a general luxury tax for goods that aren't absolutely necessary for your welfare.

Still better would be to start taxing natural resource usage, or even setting quotas with strict penalties. But it's hard to see politicians going along with it and I don't know if it can be monitored sensibly.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#246

Post by delaaxe »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #130
dehrmann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinbase That was the pitch of crypto. In practice, people are buying it as a bet that it will go up. I suspect most people are only buying it because the value is going up. If bitcoin actually worked like a currency and traded between $8k and $12 for the past 5 years, no one would care.

Global wealth is $400T. All crypto currency combined is worth about ~$2T at this point. So to store 0.5% of the world's wealth, we are using 0.6% of the world's energy. Banks obviously don't use anywhere near this much energy. Bitcoin is estimated to use more energy than all other server farms put together. So we are using 0.6% of the world's energy to store 0.5% of the world's wealth. And Doesn't seem like the ideal…

I like this reasoning in terms of global wealth

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#247

Post by nostromo »

cj wrote: post #161
dd36 wrote: post #158

I still don’t see what the upside is to their valuation? It’s all baked in AFAICT.

Very little. This is a result of the private equity market growing so large that companies can put off going public for very long (Coinbase raised $800 million and the last round was "Series E"). 10-15 years ago, it was much more difficult for companies to raise this much before going public, which forced companies to go public much earlier, before all upside was realized by private investors. The result is private e…

This may be starting to shift as companies are getting much higher valuations on the public markets than they are from VCs.

Coinbase is getting a 10x valuation from public markets compared to what they got from private markets just two years ago. In theory, they've left a lot of money on the table by waiting so long to go public and raising from VCs instead.

(The price is dropping, so who knows if this will be true for very long.)

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#248

Post by px43 »

throwawaybbqed wrote: post #51

I was an early user of coinbase. I only bought a fraction of a coin because of Paul Graham and YC's reputation. Well .. I was wrong. I was not an active trader. It seems they have closed by account and liquidated the btc within (if there were actually btc in my name). I am deeply disappointed that they don't have a telephone number I can call to help figure out the situation. Pretty disappointed.

Eh, maybe a month ago I found a Coinbase account from 2013 that I had forgotten about, and it still had everything in it. Your story makes no sense. Coinbase support has always been pretty good for every problem I've ever had. Why talk to someone on the phone when you can click a button and have a live chat with a support agent instantly?

https://help.coinbase.com/en/contact-us

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#249

Post by gonehome »

plokiju wrote: post #224
gonehome wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best (and also approachable well-written) book on the topic that I've found: https://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/ My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that POW is computationally expensive because that large investment of computation is what creates a chain of successive blocks (the blockchain). This prevents someone from rewriting history of transactions on the public chain (which would allow them t…

> POW currencies are guaranteed to prevent this kind of abuse unless any individual entity is able to get more than 51%. There's an incentive in addition to this because corrupting the integrity of the network would also devalue the currency. Larger networks (like BTC) are harder to do a hostile take over of because it's harder to get that much compute (though mining centralization is a risk). Couldn't this be re-wri…

This comment above does a better job than I did at explaining why the staking incentive is somewhat flawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810686

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#250

Post by delaaxe »

svachalek wrote: post #134
dehrmann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinbase That was the pitch of crypto. In practice, people are buying it as a bet that it will go up. I suspect most people are only buying it because the value is going up. If bitcoin actually worked like a currency and traded between $8k and $12 for the past 5 years, no one would care.

Sadly this is true other than "no one would care". Many would care, just mostly not in countries with stable fiat. But the success of BNB which is basically just a corporate database on a blockchain shows there is a big part of the community that doesn't care about decentralization at all.

BNB is an ERC-20
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