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Coinbase from YC to DPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#731

Post by dd36 »

sneak wrote: post #640
olalonde wrote: post #606

Fun trivia: Brian Armstrong was looking for a co-founder on HN back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

I spoke to him on the phone within a few hours of that post, as I had already prototyped an app to do what was described. I didn't launch mine, nor participate in his (obviously). I suggested that a business in that space, if successful, would result in a similar outcome as happened to other founders of international money transmission systems that weren't under direct government control: i.e. swatting. He was not di…

If the last few decades tell us anything, it’s once you’re large and have a lot employees, you’re above any regulation that would put you out of business. Slaps on the wrist are the worst you can expect.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#732

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#733

Post by sceew »

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.

I'm not bullish on Coinbase, but the upside case is the market cap of Visa, Mastercard, Ant Financial, Paypal, Square, Stripe, Payment Processors, Bank, Asset Managers, etc -- not just the NYSE.

Again, I don't think this will ever happen, ever. But NYSE isn't a great comparison.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#734

Post by nscalf »

ericlewis wrote: post #655
nscalf wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you in the space before Coinbase became big? Because I've had crypto exchanges get hacked and run away with my money. There was zero trust (for good reason) in any of the sites that let you buy crypto. Without Coinbase, this likely would still be a sketchy ecosystem that wasn't taken seriously. Coinbase was the first slick, trustworthy exchange based in the US. I personally am not very comfortable buying from fo…

If you don’t hold the private keys they aren’t your coins. That is crypto 101.

Unfortunately, there just weren’t other options at the time. And you don’t find out that you can’t withdraw until you tried and failed for a few days straight.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#735

Post by aazaa »

olalonde wrote: post #606

Fun trivia: Brian Armstrong was looking for a co-founder on HN back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

Some observations:

1. Armstrong was so concerned about privacy that he used a throwaway, but ended up giving his identity away anyway.

2. Those responses! The negativity on Bitcoin has been there from the start on HN especially for some reason.

3. That whole payment angle has not worked out the way most people thought. Most enthusiasts in 2012 saw Bitcoin as a PayPal replacement. Instead, Bitcoin has taking its own path, confounding the predictions of skeptics, professional economists, and enthusiasts alike.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#736

Post by randomopining »

hndamien wrote: post #712
randomopining wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you cash in and get filthy rich? Or sell too early and mad ragrets.

Rich with ragrets rather than filthy rich.

Damn, no ragrets. Yo but how does it feel to be moderately rich off of crypto? I wonder if anything would change besides not having to work.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#737

Post by pathseeker »

anonporridge wrote: post #534
mtnGoat wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It depends on the scale of shit hitting the fan. If the global internet goes down and stays down, then I think it's safe to say that global civilization is permanently collapsing, in which case billions of people are going to die in the resulting famine and the survivors probably won't be able to maintain enough technology to survive long term as climate change continues to snowball. In this scenario, yeah bitcoin is…

>If the global internet goes down and stays down

It doesn't take anything this drastic. All it takes is the country you are in deciding to cut off access. This has happened in various unstable countries many times over the last decade so it's not unprecedented.

The very time you would need something more stable than a currency is the time when the local telecom infrastructure would mean you can't transfer bitcoin.

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#738

Post by abriosi »

jude- wrote: post #444
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Thank you very much for this discussion

Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO

#739

Post by andxor »

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…

> This is all feeling very dotcom bubble 2.0.

Yeah, what a shame, that Internet thing never really took off.

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