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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#601

Post by knowaveragejoe »

kirbypineapple wrote: post #589
rgifford wrote: post #385

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…

Bitcoin alone is worth over 1T, so your statement that all of crypto is worth less than 1T is a bit silly. The goal posts keep moving for crypto...next year it'll be that crypto is worth less than 5T, etc. I looked at the NYSE daily volumes...unless I'm reading them wrong, they did $800m USD worth of trades today. Coinbase did $5b USD worth of trades today. So if you compare a company that's almost 200 years olds vol…

FWIW, I think that total of $800m is purely stock trades and not the sum total of money moving through NYSE. According to wikipedia they were moving $130bn in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#602

Post by eloff »

llamataboot wrote: post #515

Compare Coinbase to say a major exchange like the NYSE. Realize that crypto is a space that could be damaged by gov intervention at any time. Realize that there is very little lock in effect on these markets, and fees are becoming less and less over time. How does Coinbase ever manage to justify a valuation this high? 100B.... Ping me when the stock price is under $100.

Agreed.

I'm doing a little side project with my brokerage account where I pick 20 good socks and 20 bad stocks. Sell the bad ones short and double down on the good ones.

That's how hedge funds work. It's interesting because as long as your picks are mostly right you can make money regardless of of the market is going up or down. Plus it'll be fun to say I started a hedge fund at parties.

Coinbase is my number 1 bad pick.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#604

Post by koolba »

josu wrote: post #569
llamataboot wrote: post #515

Compare Coinbase to say a major exchange like the NYSE. Realize that crypto is a space that could be damaged by gov intervention at any time. Realize that there is very little lock in effect on these markets, and fees are becoming less and less over time. How does Coinbase ever manage to justify a valuation this high? 100B.... Ping me when the stock price is under $100.

A few arguments to justify the valuation: - Government intervention tends to benefit incumbents. - Coinbase employs a lot of lawyers [1]. - Coinbase invests a lot in lobbying [2]. - While fees are lowering for international exchanges, those who serve US customers are still able to get away with very high fees. - People are less sensitive to fees when the assets they are buying are very volatile. - NYSE serves brokers…

There is no way that Coinbase has a stronger lobbying base than the established financial players. They can get into this game, block it with tighter regs, and dig into their deep base of clients to offer similar products. I don’t see a moat here.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#605

Post by abecedarius »

jsiepkes wrote: post #463
abecedarius wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> way ... that doesn't either have horrendous externalities The CO2 emission externality need have nothing to do with Bitcoin or any other proof-of-work chain. Tax carbon at whatever level makes sense and Bitcoin will adjust. (As I understand it, even currently Bitcoin mining mainly uses renewable energy, because it's cheaper; and it's trending cheaper still.) The externality is at the power plant , not the use. Bann…

> Tax carbon at whatever level makes sense and Bitcoin will adjust. > The externality is at the power plant, not the use. Banning a use is like basing your server's security on client-side Javascript. How would that work? Applying the same carbon tax on farming as on bitcoin? You always need to differentiate on use. Otherwise we could also just have a single income tax and be done with it. However taxing food as much…

The whole purpose of taxing carbon is to reduce carbon emission to the efficient level and shift energy consumers away from uses that are not worth the cost in carbon emission.

Say you're a bitcoin miner powered by a coal plant. A carbon tax is imposed. The price of your power goes up. Your competitors, powered by solar, are unaffected. Maybe you keep going at the higher price; more likely, if the tax was set at anything like the genuine externality, you shut down. Possibly you keep going for a while, winding down your ops at this location but moving any new ones to find affordable power. Sucks to be you if you didn't anticipate the tax (which seems implausible, they won't announce it effective next Monday), but Bitcoin itself will hardly notice.

Say you're a farmer also in coal-plant-land. Aren't farmers powered more by internal-combustion engines than grid power? That should be carbon-taxed too in this world, and that's good: you want farming, where it's climatically most expensive, to shift to less-CO2-costly methods and crops. Farming spends energy on a much wider set of tasks, some of them more essential to the output than others, and some outputs more inelastically demanded than others. For some of them you adjust, for some you continue and pay the higher price. The ones you adjust were not worth the carbon cost; the ones you don't were. You have to charge your customers some amount more, depending on how essential the coal turns out to be in your case. Maybe, like the bitcoin miner, you stop farming, or shift to some sort of less-intensive organic farming; maybe you don't. Either way, it's more likely the right decision for the planet! We stopped pretending that dumping carbon is side-effect free.

You don't "differentiate on use" by politicians and bureaucrats deciding what's naughty or nice. They don't even know! It's an incredibly complicated problem! They further have no real incentive to do it even vaguely right, rather the opposite: any competent politician can look to the public like they're public-spirited while favoring concentrated interests. Was the FDA just stupid for banning the J&J vaccine the other day? No, they're fundamentally misaligned with the public interest.

Re painting cryptocurrency as a nobody-needs-it Ferrari, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654767

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#607

Post by Consultant32452 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #493
Consultant32452 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the total energy cost, including human capital, of keeping the petrodollar afloat via global wars/hegemony?

Even if it is greater than 0.6% (it's plausible) - dollar denominated wealth accounts for 25% or global wealth. Which is 52.5x the amount of wealth as all of crypto. The US doesn't even use 20% of the world's energy. So you would need to think that 125% of the energy the US produces and consumes goes directly into fighting wars and "supporting the petro dollar" - which is absurd. Almost 50% of energy is spent on tran…

Well the US has killed over a million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria in the current wars. How are you calculating the cost of that million lives to prop up the dollar?

This is one of the biggest selling points of crypto, it’s not tied to a government that may decide to commit mass murder for its sake.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#608

Post by beervirus »

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…

> So to store 0.5% of the world's wealth, we are using 0.6% of the world's energy.

It's even worse in terms of energy per transaction.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#609

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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?

Bitcoin CAN be used anonymously if you never use an online exchange to convert fiat to Bitcoin or vice versa.

But yeah, otherwise I agree with you. Once you've bought your Bitcoin from Coinbase, your name is attached to a Bitcoin address. Law enforcement might not know where the coins go once you spend them, but they could subpoena you or otherwise make some sort of legal demand to know who you sent them to if they suspected you of buying illegal things.

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