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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#301

It's a tiny bit pedantic, but the Coinbase offering today was not actually an IPO, I learned, but a DPO (Direct Public Offering). It was not a fundraising event for Coinbase, only a liquidity event for shareholders, and unlike an IPO no explicit valuation process occurred to select an offering price.

What difference does it make? Shares trading openly on the market is as explicit a valuation process as it gets.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#302
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what's the average time to a $100B IPO?

Getting closer to infinity every day.

I echo this sentiment lol, in general, why would you? I think it's pretty barbell shaped. Either you're going public in the sub-20B range, or you wait until you hit $1T+ like Aramco. That's not to say there won't be folks in the middle. But why go through the reporting requirements if you have no trouble raising capital, and only have to answer to a small group of smart money? May as well just buy back shares from your employees at secondary.

I know there's certain pressures - like the 7 year clock on RSUs, and there's still a cap on outside investors right?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the uninformed, what mathematical guarantees does POW have that POS doesn’t?

PoW is anchored in some real-world value, the cost of electricity. PoS is not. Most of PoW’s security and tamper-resistance advantages derive from that characteristic.

Ultimately, proof of stake has the same property. The value of the network that the stake protects is rooted in some kind of real world value. The tokens from the network can be traded for fiat money that is worth something. So, unless the value of the network being protected falls to zero, the stakes themselves are worth something. An attack on a proof of stake network still requires the resources to procure the attacking stakes. So, you still have a direct relationship between the item being protected and the cost of the protection.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#304

It's a tiny bit pedantic, but the Coinbase offering today was not actually an IPO, I learned, but a DPO (Direct Public Offering). It was not a fundraising event for Coinbase, only a liquidity event for shareholders, and unlike an IPO no explicit valuation process occurred to select an offering price.

What difference does it make? Shares trading openly on the market is as explicit a valuation process as it gets.

I don't know much about finance but based on what GP said, the biggest difference (aside from the acronym) is that one is a fund-raising event and the other is a liquidation event for shareholders. I read the latter as Coinbase's investors said at a board meeting, "Ok, we're ready to cash out now." so they held the DPO.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#306
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, how can what's on the book be be fake if my trades are executed faster, the spread is smaller and I can take advantage of the higher liquidity?? Those things aren't just arbitrary numbers with no effect, if you are trading it's pretty noticable where the volume is higher even if you don't look at the order book.

Sorry? They most certainly can be arbitrary numbers. [1]

You know 99% of all LTC trading on Coinbase was one account trading back and forth with itself a couple years ago. Spoof trading involves putting up a big order, then yanking it at the last second before it gets executed.

If you're the house, you can do literally anything if only the fox is watching the henhouse. As the peer response states, if you're the house, you know which orders are yours so there's zero risk of them accidentally getting filled. You put fake orders on the books, you fake close them, and report them as a real transaction in the log. The liquidity can just be pretend.

[1] https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/cftc-f...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#307
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.

I expect Coinbase becoming a publicly traded company benefits them to a greater extent in reducing the chance of regulatory destruction than they benefit from additional access to capital.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#308
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good to know.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. I struggle to comprehend how an energy obliterating and (relatively speaking) primitive technology like Bitcoin is the top dog in this space. Sure, first mover advantage counts for something, but come on - how has superior tech not yet left it in the rearview. In a space that moves at such rapid pace with heavy investment and buckets of innovation, at some point the crowd surely will migrate en m…

Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that is very hard to change. This property is critical for sound money, including for the emission schedule. Other coins are easy to change and so cannot be relied upon to preserve any properties, including emission schedule. Vast majority of coins is also not decentralized at all and being so prone to get effectively regulated.

This is just plain incorrect. Every cryptocurrency's rules can be changed via hard fork. Bitcoin doesn't have any magic property that guarantees there won't be a hard fork affecting the emission schedule.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#310
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.

At a certain point people want to stop being billionaires on paper and to become billionaires with actual liquidity.

And the timing seems right -- Bitcoin is sky-high and could crash tomorrow. (I'm presuming here that Coinbase and BTC will be highly correlated, but who knows.)

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