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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#381

Post by Hnrobert42 »

dang wrote: post #290
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #274

“Additionally, it’s worth celebrating that Coinbase was always a good business, i.e. it always made money.” Why is that worth celebrating? A company made money. That is what companies are created to do. I suppose if you invested in Coinbase, you could celebrate it. Otherwise, who cares?

It's a big internet cliché to boo companies that don't (yet) make money. The flip side would be to yay companies that do. Not that many humans are consistent in that way, but someone out there must be!

I also don’t care about companies that don’t make money.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#382

Post by abalone »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #296
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

If this were actually true, Coinbase would not need to exist with a market cap of $100B.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#384

Post by rodiger »

New_California wrote: post #365
rodiger wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually has this "magic" property of being very, very hard to change. It is derived from community extremism against changes and from the huge number of players who would need to agree and then huge number of existing deployments that are very slow to upgrade. Bitcoin is hard to change the similar way TCP/IP protocol stack is hard to change.

It's easier than you think. Just five organizations command >50% of hashpower[0]. I don't think it's likely to change soon but it's not out of the realm of possibility, and it's not even the most decentralized cryptocurrency in terms of difficulty to enforce new network rules.

[0] https://news.bitcoin.com/5-mining-50-btc-hashrate/ (I fully understand this is a pro-BCH site but their sources are accurate)

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#385

Post by rgifford »

The NYSEs parent company Intercontinental Exchange Inc (ICE) is worth 66.40B. Today's IPO puts Coinbase at 100B+. The NYSE has been in operation since 1817. Coinbase has been in operation since 2012. The value of all crypto is Trading fees in the crypto-world are getting more competitive as more established players support crypto. I don't see a defensible market position here, let alone established track record or strong potential for growth in future earnings.

This is all feeling very dotcom bubble 2.0.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#386

Post by seriousquestion »

bherms wrote: post #367
smeej wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn't accurate. All employees, regardless of tenure, got 7 years to exercise their shares that had vested up until that point.

That's surprisingly generous. Startups in Silicon Valley usually have a 30-90 day exercise window.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#387

Post by Scoundreller »

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.

Doesn't the Coinbase treasury create/hold un-issued Coinbase shares? Do we know they didn't sell any of those?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#388

Post by baq »

literallycancer wrote: post #163
arcticbull wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Binance is, somehow, dramatically more of a fly-by-night bucket shop intentionally looking the other way to people opening multiple accounts to avoid KYC -- and they won't event tell you in which country they're domiciled. They're one of Team Tether's top partners in crime. How on earth can you believe their volume numbers haha.

That's a feature. Willingness to avoid onerous regulation or even break the law to benefit users is a good thing.

that's assuming non-users aren't getting hurt.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#389

Post by smolder »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #351
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It does remove any question of who you are for coinbase, but bitcoin was only ever pseudonymous transactions, not fully anonymous. We can all see how each wallet behaves.
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