Coinbase from YC to DPO • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#501

Post by aeternum » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

tovej wrote: post #239

dd36 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cap-n-trade was a very successful program for reducing nox and sox emissions. If you create the right incentives, markets tend to find a way.

They still aren't decoupled from emissions. IIRC Emissions actually grow faster than GDP, so it's actually worse than a simple coupling: it's a feedback coupling. All studies that have looked at seeming decoupling of emissions from the economy have found that they decoupling was due to outsourcing the emissions to other countries. Markets cannot solve emissions as long as value is a function of production.

Countries that tax emissions should simply levy a proportional tariff on goods imported from countries that do not tax emissions.

Wouldn't this eliminate the incentive to outsource the emissions? You could even add some margin to the tariff such that it is more economical for countries to tax the emissions themselves rather than pay the tariff.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#502

Post by mtnGoat » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #429

nick0garvey wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can live in a house. I can't live in a Bitcoin.

Yes, but you also can't take your house with you stored in your brain if you have to flee the country. Bitcoin as chaos insurance (or schmuck insurance as Chamath calls it) is the use case that makes the most sense to me.

do you really think if the sh*t hit the fan? the entire BTC network and the internet at large would still be working for you to transfer these units around?

this to me is where the comparison to gold falls off. i can hold physical gold and silver and trade it at will even without power, pricing updates, etc. this does not apply to crypto. considering cutting internet access is now a normal thing during unrest, being able to pay with anything that is not physical, probably wont work out.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#503

Post by rgifford » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #461

rgifford wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://www.advratings.com/banking/worlds-top-banks-by-marke... : it's in the top 10-20. Does anyone know what the value of assets under management by Coinbase is?

All crypto is < 1T. I don't know what their market share is, probably high 100Bs.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#504

Post by RhodoGSA » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

marrone12 wrote: post #272

px43 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, maybe a month ago I found a Coinbase account from 2013 that I had forgotten about, and it still had everything in it. Your story makes no sense. Coinbase support has always been pretty good for every problem I've ever had. Why talk to someone on the phone when you can click a button and have a live chat with a support agent instantly? https://help.coinbase.com/en/contact-us

Is this a plant? coinbase support is notoriously horrible, even my friend who works at the company thinks it's bad.

I accidentally sent a wire from my business account instead of my personal account into coinbase. Since my account wasn't verified to be a business account they contacted me, sent the money back and reimbursed me the $30 wire fee. I found the customer service to be great.

I've been trading crypto for a while and exchanges are as sketchy as it gets. Sometimes, you have anecdotal experiences that bubble up on the internet but i truly believe coinbase is the most trust-worthy exchange.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#505

Post by jeremyjh » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

dylkil wrote: post #457

whatever1 wrote: post #433

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.

the salt on this board when it comes to crypto only gets worse as time goes on

Yes, perhaps this is correlated with the fact that the successive number of years that crypto has been hyped and failed to deliver anything of value only grows as time goes on.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#506

Post by Grustaf » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #130

dehrmann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinbase That was the pitch of crypto. In practice, people are buying it as a bet that it will go up. I suspect most people are only buying it because the value is going up. If bitcoin actually worked like a currency and traded between $8k and $12 for the past 5 years, no one would care.

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…

The energy is not spent on storing though, it's expended when verifying transaction, isn't it?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#507

Post by fosk » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

J5892 wrote: post #484

ROARosen wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked timeshares were a shrinking sector. My advice to you is: consider pivoting your biz model to crypto brokerage.

That's a saturated market. The real money is in crypto-timeshares. We have all the advantages of a timeshare business, and also blockchain.

I mean, re-read that 2-3 times.

With the emergence of a new group of people that have massive crypto reserves at their disposal, paying for a timeshare in crypto would make that asset accessible to them natively.

It’s not a bad idea. If crypto is a new paradigm, the world will need crypto-XYZ to appeal to that crowd. Cars (Tesla), and timeshares are among them.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#508

Post by whatever1 » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #469

whatever1 wrote: post #433

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.

BP, being an oil extractor, might have higher expenses and so a comparison purely by revenues might provide less insight than desired.

BP has been in business for decades making 20-80B/year in profit. If anything, their financials should be an indication of what a 100B company looks like.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#509

Post by nojs » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #161

dd36 wrote: post #158

I still don’t see what the upside is to their valuation? It’s all baked in AFAICT.

Very little. This is a result of the private equity market growing so large that companies can put off going public for very long (Coinbase raised $800 million and the last round was "Series E"). 10-15 years ago, it was much more difficult for companies to raise this much before going public, which forced companies to go public much earlier, before all upside was realized by private investors. The result is private e…

> Because if there were, they would be able to more easily raise the capital from private investors rather than the public market

Coinbase isn’t raising capital though because it’s a direct listing.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#510

Post by mandeepj » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #486

ROARosen wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately this is right. It doesn't matter whether it's rational or not, but it's definitely profitable. At the moment. Given we have financial crises in the global economy on roughly a decade basis, and the last one was 2008, there might be another one soon ..

Not really. We already had one - COVID + decade of economy reset cycle - combined rolled into one. Next one - will not happen (probably) until at least 2027\2028