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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#291

Post by base698 »

paulpauper wrote: post #258
Fede_V wrote: 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…

the problem will fix itself after the bubble bursts. Bitcoin doesn't provide anything of much value. It is just a speculative instrument.

If you haven't seen the DeFi space you are missing out. 10-20% interest on crypto holdings. If you know where to get interest rates like that...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#292

Post by cwkoss »

meowkit wrote: post #276
danimal88 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that -might- be true, the question is whether the dollar, the RMB, the CAD, and every other currency have anything like the -direct- pollution cost of bitcoin, which my understanding is that they do not

Can you share how Bitcoin has a direct pollution cost? Last I checked BTC primarily uses excess electricity in the cheapest regions of the world. What if BTC only ran on solar power?

Of the estimates I've read, it seems like BTC uses about 60% green energy. Which is about double the 'green-ness' of the broader energy economy, but it's still a significant amount of 'direct pollution' from carbon sources.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#293

Post by divbzero »

purple_ferret wrote: post #23

Coinbase is definitely a success story in how to appeal to the masses. There were always alternatives, but coinbase always came out on top despite the high fees and poor customer service. I think Coinbase as a publicly traded company will be very interesting to follow. Not only is it a massively cyclical industry, but the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinb…

> coinbase always came out on top despite the high fees

Commissions tend to come down as markets mature (with some exceptions like real estate) so I will be curious to see if this occurs in the crypto market as well. I suspect that appeal to the masses will not be a long-term durable advantage.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#294

Post by dd36 »

nscalf wrote: post #227
dd36 wrote: post #158

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

This is assuming valuations are based off fundamentals. The market is absolutely disconnected from what companies can actually deliver, and instead has become a place to park the surplus of money in the system.

Yeah. I was trained as a fundamental analyst. Multiple expansion doesn’t even explain the relative valuations. It feels like a popularity contest sometimes.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#295

Post by base698 »

Aunche wrote: post #266

Coinbase is very profitable and has huge cash reserves for a company of its size. I don't see any reason why they would feel the need to IPO if not to take advantage of people's FOMO.

Paying for a lobbying org seems like a pretty good reason: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3679495-square-fidelity-coinba...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#296

Post by lotsofpulp »

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 would include the energy needed to maintain trust in other currencies including efforts to prevent counterfeits, which I might argue includes some portion of a nation's militaristic might. Trust is an even more ambiguous, yet crucial aspect of maintaining a currency's value, tied up in the "order" or predictability of the society using the currency, which involves various legal systems and at the most basic level, relationships between its peoples.

It takes a relatively minuscule amount of energy to maintain a database of numbers associated with certain people and entities, but quite a significant amount to make it mean something.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#297

Post by jude- »

melolife wrote: post #255
jude- wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is open-membership, because the means of coin production are not tied to owning coins already. All you need to contribute is computing power, and you can start earning coins at a profit. PoS is closed-membership with a veneer of open-membership, because the means of coin production are tied to owning a coin already. What this means in practice is that no rational coin-owner is going to sell you coins at a fast en…

Open membership is arguably a worse problem than stake requirements, as PoW participants do not have a vested interest in preserving the integrity of the chain. Ethereum 2 actually throttles validator entries and exits for exactly this reason. As an example, any sufficiently powerful entity can temporarily and affordably commandeer computational resources with the intention of disrupting the chain. Under PoS doing so…

Open membership means that the chain stays alive as long as anyone in the world wants it to. This isn't true for PoS chains -- you must to acquire tokens to keep the chain alive.

> As an example, any sufficiently powerful entity can temporarily and affordably commandeer computational resources with the intention of disrupting the chain.

A sufficiently powerful entity can DoS enough staked nodes that quorum can't be reached, and thereby force a PoS chain offline indefinitely for far less energy. If they're clever, they'll buy some PoS coins first, so that once the offline nodes all get slashed, they'll be the majority staker.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#298

Post by jude- »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #281
jude- wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is open-membership, because the means of coin production are not tied to owning coins already. All you need to contribute is computing power, and you can start earning coins at a profit. PoS is closed-membership with a veneer of open-membership, because the means of coin production are tied to owning a coin already. What this means in practice is that no rational coin-owner is going to sell you coins at a fast en…

Staking rewards for new block generation is inflationary, so you are just not losing value by staking. Additional value is generated by fees and store of value. With PoW coin you are constantly devaluing your share of the blockchain by paying some third parties operating giant gpu farms and hydroelectric dams.

> block generation is inflationary > store of value.

I stopped reading at this point.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#299

Post by randomopining »

Tenoke wrote: post #60
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Bitcoin miners and investors have a huge incentive to keep the status quo. Bitcoin is no longer the scrappy renegade alternative currency. It's big business now, with big institutional money behind it. The investors in these Bitcoin businesses do not want to see Bitcoin fall out of favor, and they're going to do everything in their power to keep it popular and profitable to mine.

Sure, but that's a Bitcoin problem not a crypto as a whole problem. And let's face it - all the projects being built on crypto which can cause it to grow much further cannot be built on Bitcoin in the first place.

STX - Stacks is built on top of Bitcoin and allows smart contracts through proof of transfer.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#300

Post by capableweb »

cj wrote: post #180
capableweb wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as people still want to buy/sell cryptocurrencies when prices go down Is this true? If you look back at the price graphs, there's typically a huge run up every 1-3 years, followed by a crash, followed by another run up 1-3 years later. We're in the middle of a run up. The run up is when people get excited and buy. After the crash, I would guess that enthusiasm about crypto will lessen, until the next run up. I thin…

> Is this true?

Yes. Go here: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ and select before February this year (big spike in volume) and look at the transaction volume chart below the price chart. Steadily increasing rather than jumping, going down and jumping again. I'm guessing transaction volume for Coinbase looks the same way, as people need fiat money for cryptocurrencies and others place fiat money in cryptocurrencies no matter if the price goes up or down.

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