Coinbase from YC to DPO

They had the option to exercise whatever options they had vested, yes, subject to the company's normal rules.

Employees who had been with the company two years or more would have seven years to exercise. Those who had been there between one and two years would have 90 days.

Employees who had not yet been there a year would not have reached the vesting cliff, and would not have had vested options available to exercise.

You never explicitly stated, but is your argument that the energy consumption of bitcoin is the negative externality?

First of all energy is not fungible, not in time and not in space. There are times where consuming electricity is actually beneficial for renewables and the environment. I think the main mental block people have is that are trained to "save electricity" and that "all energy usage is negative." I would argue that using electricity during periods of wind or solar oversupply is actually positive for the environment. Because of this non-fungibility of energy, proof of work mining can be a positive sum game for the environment. Let me explain:

Back in the days where all our electricity came from fossil fuels, I completely agree that marginal electricity usage was bad for the environment. However I think that thought has persisted with us even though it is no longer true 100% of the time. With renewables sometimes the marginal cost of electricity to our environment is near 0 or even negative (eg, during periods of higher winds and lower demand)

I predict that in the future as bitcoin mining becomes more and more of an efficiency game that you will see bitcoin mining be kind of a load balancer for the grid, effectively turning off during peak demand (or low supply) times and contributing to the base load during regular times. Of course this would be distributed across the globe, and you would see more plants running midday (with solar oversupply) and overnight (with wind oversupply) than you would during early morning and evening peak hours.

For example, it may even help the economics of building new wind plants. Eg, currently it may not be profitable to build a new wind plant because base load is too low that the excess power generated would need to be sold off at 0 or even negative prices. However if bitcoin mining could be turned on during these times and off during periods of high demand, there will need to be fewer peaker plants in operation and it would positively affect the economics of opening a new wind plant.

Bitcoin mining only cares about the cost of electricity at a given time, it is not like most other electricity demands that are very time based. With the large variance of electricity generation by renewables, I think bitcoin can in the future help smooth demand according to the real supply/demand curve.

It's kind of like a different implementation of the Tesla utility grid batteries. Instead of deploying power, you force the grid to build more renewable capacity (that the miners are paying for) that you use except in peak periods, where you turn off and effectively provide the grid with more power.

Here are 2 articles of a bitcoin mining company doing just this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bitcoin-m... https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2020/05/21/ho...

And in Brian had simply bought bitcoins with his $10.000 in 2012, when the price was $4-$12 per piece?

He could have bought 833-2500 bitcoins, with a current value of $5.2500.000 - $157.500.000.

He choose to do more than "HODL" and go through the hard work of building a product and a company, which in my book, makes him a true hero. Even though he went the casino/shitcoin rout later...

That's why we need centralized exchanges like coinbase to enable off chain transactions within their walled garden. Then we can have the worst of both worlds.

> 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 enough rate that you'll be able to increase your means of coin production

It seems to me like they're arguing that PoW is more egalitarian/decentralized, which may be a fair point. But using the same argument, attackers being forced to buy stake in the open market should make PoS even more secure against 51% attacks than PoW.

I think this is a good post explaining the tradeoffs: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html