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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

441–450 of 883 posts

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#441

It will be interesting to see how Coinbase performs compared to a weighted average of the top 3 cryptos directly. Anyway, Coinbase is a good case study on how UX/UI makes all the difference. I'll definitely study them in the future.

I believe Karri Saarinen was the founding designer at Coinbase, and here's a relevant blog entry from them: https://karrisaarinen.com/posts/designing-coinbase/

See also: Metalab's showcase of their collab with the Coinbase design team: https://projects.metalab.com/coinbase

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#442
post #7
post #5

I still prefer Binance who are exposed to users via actual crypto (BNB) than Coinbase who are trying to eat the trad investors exposure and banking on their preferential treatment from US regulators. Not to mention that Binance has 9x the volume, much much more crypto and is pro-competition and lists Coin on day 1 while CB wouldn't even consider listing BNB or anything by competitors.

CB abides by regulators and doesn't list every crappy project that comes along. They're trying to bring legitimacy to crypto. Binance is the wild wild west still and BNB is a centralized useless ETH sidechain.

Users are moving to Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and using BNB because Ethereum transaction fees are too expensive for people that aren't rich.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#443

For reference, BP the number five global oil behemoth with 200B in revenues in 2020, has a market cap of 85B. Coinbase that sells pumped speculation for a fee has a market cap of 100B. Markets are efficient.

Literally compare COIN to any other market maker or financial institution. I would love to hear some justification here.

Worth $1B tops.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#444
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far easier to break a PoS chain -- you simply knock the coin-holding nodes offline. Knock enough offline, and you can no longer reach quorum. If offline nodes' coins get slashed in order to reach quorum and restart block production, and the system permits forking, then why would offline nodes rejoin the original fork? They're incentivized to only consider forks where they're not slashed. If the system does not p…

This isn't really an attack unique to Proof of Stake. If a node goes offline they can lose rewards or even in rare cases have their coins slashed to some extent but that isn't inherent to a Proof of Stake overall. A decent number of Proof of Stake systems instead place reward penalties on pools/nodes that go offline. The idea being that it is a penalty for not maintaining sufficient infrastructure while also not bein…

Okay, so instead of knocking your nodes offline, the attacker only has to commandeer them for just long enough to commit a slashable offense. That's usually easier anyway.

This is fundamentally a double-edged sword -- the harsher your penalties are for bad behavior, the easier it is for someone to use a zero-day and kill your staking coins. But the laxer your penalties are, the more damage a buggy or malicious node can do with impunity.

Either way, the resilience of PoS comes down to the resilience of the majority of its staking nodes, because once you lose that, the system is dead. Once you control majority stake, it doesn't matter how many other offline coins exist -- you, as the majority staker, simply never mine their transactions.

This isn't true for PoW systems. A PoW system can always be brought back to life, even after an arbitrarily long amount of inactivity, and even if all the previous miners cease mining. All you need is one miner, somewhere, that has a copy of the chainstate, and the system makes forward progress.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#445
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of really smart software people who avoided crypto because it didnt and still doesnt “make sense”. But we all didnt invest on the merit of the technology. We forgot the whole “how will people behave” part and lost out on millions.

It still makes no sense to me. It makes sense in the sense that if people believe in it it becomes real. But I don't get why people believe in it. And frankly I'm still pretty skeptical that it's being floated by more than money laundering.

One thing is, crypto is at the intersection of many disciplines at once, tech/finance/economy/psychology/game theory, etc.

I'd if you try to start with a clean slate and no biases against it from the get go, spend some time researching and understanding it alonside what money is and it's history, etc. You'll probably start to see some usefulness to it.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#446

For reference, BP the number five global oil behemoth with 200B in revenues in 2020, has a market cap of 85B. Coinbase that sells pumped speculation for a fee has a market cap of 100B. Markets are efficient.

So if their business model is raking it in by selling pumped-up speculation, and the pumped-up speculation market is a growing sector, then that's what is called an efficient business model which has nothing to do with the fact that markets are 'efficient'.

Also, since when does anyone care if casino's business is based on pumped up gambling. As long as there are millions of transactions going on, the business model will stay 'efficient'.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#447
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of really smart software people who avoided crypto because it didnt and still doesnt “make sense”. But we all didnt invest on the merit of the technology. We forgot the whole “how will people behave” part and lost out on millions.

I feel myself as value investor. That is why cryptos or Tesla and many other tech companies never made sense to me... I might be right one day, but currently it seems that market is what market is.

To me, value investing is when you already have a good idea of what something is worth, but it's trading below that value. That's great strategy if you know and understand a certain sector.

It's very difficult to value futuristic things, it might succeed beyond our wildest dreams or completely flop.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#448

For reference, BP the number five global oil behemoth with 200B in revenues in 2020, has a market cap of 85B. Coinbase that sells pumped speculation for a fee has a market cap of 100B. Markets are efficient.

>> Markets are efficient.

They are certainly great at turning air into gold. Maybe that was always their true purpose.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#449
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>intentionally looking the other way to people opening multiple accounts to avoid KYC That's blatantly false. Many have been caught trying to circumvent via VPN or similar, it's just impossible to catch quite everyone no matter how hard you try. >which country they're domiciled. Malta?

https://coingeek.com/binance-not-licensed-to-operate-in-malt... Binance has never been in Malta, in fact they are not located anywhere. I would be very cautious in dealing with them because to me that kind of approach to regulation doesnt sound healthy.

It's on the Binance wikipedia page.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#450

For reference, BP the number five global oil behemoth with 200B in revenues in 2020, has a market cap of 85B. Coinbase that sells pumped speculation for a fee has a market cap of 100B. Markets are efficient.

Would you rather own crude or DOGE, the official currency of Mars?
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