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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

521–530 of 883 posts

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#521

And down bitcoin goes. $3k off the highs. If given a choice between 1 million to invest in in a large cap growth stock portfolio vs. Bitcoin, I would choose the stock portfolio every time. Crypto too volatile relative to upside. Airbnb and other big tech growth stocks have much smoother returns which can be magnified with some leverage strategies.

As Powell announced cryptocurrencies ‘vehicles for speculation’. It is mind blowing the cryptocurrencies are making bets and are valued without any sound reasoning behind them. How many companies actually use them at regular place? How hard is the barrier of entry?

I'm not sure what you mean by "cryptos making bets."

Valid points on use, but paypal adoption might cause a jump and a few others in that direction, but still small.

Barrier to entry, paypal or not, is fairly small actually. Good wallet and transaction ecosystem that works via QR code. Depending on what way CB and places like BlockFi go, links to dollar economy get a lot stronger too.

What sound reasoning is behind all this: bitcoin's massive breakthrough is a protocol that can send verifiably discrete entities across a network, without a central party needing to verify the discrete-ness. This is a huge breakthrough in a lot of ways, but basically consider if you network could send payments as exactly as easily as it does HTTP packets. HTTP changed the world, and that's the idea behind bitcoin's value. If you could somehow buy a slice of HTTP in 1997, or TCP/UDP, now knowing how important and valuable those became (valued by the size of the internet economy), would you?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#522
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then profit figures should be your headline, not revenues, which are more weakly correlated to enterprise value.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#523
post #461

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?

AUM is the absolute wrong metric to measure for an exchange. This is why I tell everyone to never pretend they understand a subject the moment you read the first Wikipedia page you come across.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#525
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would reply to you and describe the burgeoning ecosystem of economic activity and the speed at which the entire sector is growing, but I have a feeling that convo will not go anywhere. Crypto is eating finance. It's going to eat everything else too. The longer you fight that, the harder the 21st century is going to be for you.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#526

Since this is a direct listing, imagine making the first trade. There's no price for it. You might be an institutional investor who negotiated a price beforehand with large shareholders. Or maybe it's a bunch of people yoloing it with limit orders.

Stock exchange liquidity is dominated by market makers who will do their own assessment, or simply wait for price discovery

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#527
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At its bare bones crypto is a perimissionless payments system, you dont see any value here?

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#528

Inspired by Coinbase, I wrote an essay on decentralization just now. A remarkable day today! https://notonlyluck.com/2021/04/12/the-compelling-vision-of-...

Really is! From Charlie Shrem going to prison to a IPO in ~7 years. Space has come so far and has such a history.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#529
post #466

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 st…

>This is all feeling very dotcom bubble 2.0. How many dotcom era companies had net income of $800mil in a single quarter?

I don't know exactly. Yahoo was one, adjusted for inflation.

Man, almost forgot how it's spelled it's been so long.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#530
post #507
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To Predict the Future: Think of the dorkiest idea you can. In the 2000s this was:

* Completely made up digital money with no government backing that you have to convince some sucker to take so they give you two free pizzas.

In the 90s this would be:

* Keeping track of your friends on your computer!

* Carrying a computer around that you use to take pictures of yourself and send them to friends!

In the 80s this was

* Electronic music without words.

* Reading books on your computer

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