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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#351

Post by MuffinFlavored »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #201
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…

In the past, Bitcoin exchanges IMO felt shady. They frequently were run from foreign countries and got away with avoiding Know-Your-Customer banking laws. Coinbase brought a true sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness to Bitcoin exchanging.

> Coinbase brought a true sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness to Bitcoin exchanging.

I could be wrong but to me this makes every shill for crypto that says "it's anonymous!" a joke.

I had to provide a driver's license and do checking account verification to be approved on Coinbase. Does that not remove the anonymity or am I missing something?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#352

Post by yokem55 »

yokem55 wrote: post #303
SkyMarshal wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 att…

I would add - by focusing on using the economic value of electricity and stacks of special semiconductors to secure your network, you actually are making the network vulnerable to folks that can effectively create arbitrage on those specific narrow resources. In contrast, proof of stake can leverage a much broader range of economic resources that have far fewer arbitrage opportunities.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#353

Post by kvothe_ »

throwaway4good wrote: post #314

Right now Coinbase is trading around 350 making it worth about 100B, the total value of bitcoin is about 1.000B and all cryptocurrencies that are tradeable on Coinbase is maybe 1.500B. So the ratio between the value of the exchange is about 1/10 - 1/15 of the total value of the market it trades. (For comparison take say Interactive Broker's market value to the market value of the total stock market.) And Coinbase far…

This is not an issue since they make money from per trade.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#354

Post by aqme28 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #314

Right now Coinbase is trading around 350 making it worth about 100B, the total value of bitcoin is about 1.000B and all cryptocurrencies that are tradeable on Coinbase is maybe 1.500B. So the ratio between the value of the exchange is about 1/10 - 1/15 of the total value of the market it trades. (For comparison take say Interactive Broker's market value to the market value of the total stock market.) And Coinbase far…

It's not even nearly the biggest exchange! Binance trades 10x the volume, so if Coinbase is worth 1/10 of the crypto market, is Binance worth 1x the crypto market?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#355

Post by janandonly »

urza wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion - Bitcoin would be better without Coinbase.

I used to buy my coins on MtGox, I am still waiting on the closure of that lawsuit in Japan.

Happy to have done business with Coinbase back in 2015..

Of course later on I looked for a better and cheaper exchange, but really, Coinbase helped Bitcoin grow as much as Bitcoin helped Coinbase grow...

Today Coinbase is just one of many faceless shitcoin casinos but they had their use, once upon a time...

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#356

Post by thesausageking »

nscalf wrote: post #137
urza wrote: post #24

Unpopular opinion - Bitcoin would be better without Coinbase.

Were you in the space before Coinbase became big? Because I've had crypto exchanges get hacked and run away with my money. There was zero trust (for good reason) in any of the sites that let you buy crypto. Without Coinbase, this likely would still be a sketchy ecosystem that wasn't taken seriously. Coinbase was the first slick, trustworthy exchange based in the US. I personally am not very comfortable buying from fo…

I was. Most Bitcoin OGs have a lot of animosity towards Coinbase. Some of it is the "eternal September"[0] effect that Coinbase had bringing a lot of new people who didn't embrace Bitcoin's values and just wanted to gamble on crypto.

But some of it is based on Coinbase's actions against Bitcoin over the years. They've promoted and helped pump up a lot of s*t coins, including forks of Bitcoin. And they've done little to support or further the values Bitcoin was built on or core development.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#357

Post by paulpauper »

cableshaft wrote: post #322
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #156

This is pretty amazing. Gary Tan made a YT video about his experience backing them very early and getting a 6000x return: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5YApjnTG10 It's remarkable that Brian Armstrong gave up what would have been very valuable options in Airbnb—the most valuable YC company at the time—to found a new company that surpassed it.

Wow. Assuming he put in just $10,000 (and I imagine it was probably more than that), 6000x return would be 60 million dollars. Any early companies out there right now seem like it could potentially offer even a 10th of that in ~5-10 years?

i dunno how people say VCs have a return of only 9% year when Ycombinator is absolutely crushing that even with a high failure rate. AirBNB, box, dropbox, coinbase, etc.

Paul stumbled on an absolute goldmine by just giving a bunch of promising companies with good founders 10k in exchange for a decent portion of equity and then some of these companies being worth billions.

NOw you know what those homes and are so expensive in Palo Also and elsehwre, You got of these guys making fortunes, and that money tricked down everywhere.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#358

Post by eloff »

bglusman wrote: post #278

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.

Its not pedantic at all, it's the most interesting part of this IPO, because this is a new way to do IPOs.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#359

Post by seanyesmunt »

rodiger wrote: post #309
New_California wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin's "magic property" is the faith that the miners have. It has been hardforked, but the majority of computing power has chosen to stay on Bitcoin.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#360

Post by rawtxapp »

lpapez wrote: post #347
janandonly wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he? If he simply bought bitcoins with his $300.000 in 2012 (average bitcoin price of $8) then his net worth now would be .... 37500 bitcoins or $2.362.500.000 ... 2 point 3 billion frigging dollars...

In theory yes. In practice, cashing out billions of dollars worth of stocks is easier than cashing out billions of dollars worth of crypto.

You wouldn't be selling those on the open market, institutions have been able to acquire billions of dollars worth of crypto OTC without moving markets.

Another option is, now that it's becoming clear to people that Bitcoin is here to stay, you can just borrow against it to spend (avoid taxes, hold on to the upside). Case in point, this person/group borrowed 300M$ with about 1B$ net worth[1].

1: https://defiexplore.com/cdp/8463

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