So we missed Dropbox, Airbnb and coinbase. What idea do we all think is bad? ISAs?
Bitcoin, Palantir. Between your examples and Bitcoin, would betting against the HN hivemind a winning strategy?
Maybe? I discounted Roblox too.
Coinbase from YC to DPO
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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coinbase is directly and indirectly threatened by regulations. The direct threat is that the SEC, China, European regulators, etc. impose much stricter regulations on cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, raising compliance costs until the business fails; indirectly, if the regulations are applied "downstream" to payment processors dealing in cryptocurrencies or to businesses accepting cryptocurrency payments. Anot…
Generally speaking, regulation is most easily dealt with by the market leader. They have capital that can be used to meet requirements, and can engage with regulators to make sure the regulation can be achieved by them. That actually improves the situation for them. (Similar to how GPDR improved Google and Facebook's position in the ad market against competitors)
Did you read what you were replying to? Regulations elsewhere in the market could threaten Coinbase, regardless of their ability to handle compliance costs in their own niche. In their own filing Coinbase admitted that the value of their company is highly correlated with the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency -- so any regulation that impacts Bitcoin will likely impact Coinbase, even if the impact is indirect.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Established financial players like AXA who invested in Blockstream which controls the development of BTC?
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
Airbnb doesn't provide "shelter", it's for travellers.
Agree, AirBnB is essentially serving a luxury travel market.
I don't think that's really true as a blanket statement. I stayed in what turned out to be a depressing, small, rental apartment in Denver for a weekend via airbnb, because it was something like $20/night. The place smelled like trash and there was no laundry on-site.
You might say that any type of travel is a luxury. Ok, I guess. This trip was for a funeral. The flight was under $100. While I'm fortunate to be able to afford such a thing, no part of the trip was "luxury travel".
Airbnb serves a wide variety of customers, via a large range of temporary housing options.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I still have yet to understand why should the rest of society who hasn't bought into Bitcoin shoulder higher energy costs because Bitcoin are driving up demand?
This could be said about any commodity. Like because of gold hoarding banks/individuals driving up the demand rest of the society has to pay high price of gold for jewelry.
You're right, that's a moot point: it all boils down to unnecessarily, unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier supporters (left holding the bag) in what amounts to very unsophisticated "investing" - whereby buying a stock of a company or say gold is buying for something very specific, contextualized, with annual reports and laws in place to attempt to lead to integrity within those organizations; not an apple to apple comparison that people consistently try to make.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Assuming he put in just $10,000 (and I imagine it was probably more than that), 6000x return would be 60 million dollars. Any early companies out there right now seem like it could potentially offer even a 10th of that in ~5-10 years?
Well I bought BTC at $1 and so did many others, now it trades at $60k...
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Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#837Earlier quoted context omitted.
i dunno how people say VCs have a return of only 9% year when Ycombinator is absolutely crushing that even with a high failure rate. AirBNB, box, dropbox, coinbase, etc. Paul stumbled on an absolute goldmine by just giving a bunch of promising companies with good founders 10k in exchange for a decent portion of equity and then some of these companies being worth billions. NOw you know what those homes and are so expe…
There are a lot of VCs out there. Some do well, some don't. But remember that unlike the stock market, investing in a VC means locking up your money for 10 years. Slightly beating the market is not worth the liquidity loss, you have to do a good bit better.
Yeah I get it, assuming I did it (which is a big, big if, I don't really trust my judgement to pick winning companies or there being some legal jiggery pokery or bad luck that makes me get nothing or almost nothing back), it would be something I do in addition to buying crypto/gold/silver and putting money into a 401k.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually at one point Bitcoin had an equal fork, so that number should be double for Bitcoin.
Not quite equal. At its peak Bitcoin Cash was about 25% of Bitcoin, and at a much lower price too. If you reinvested it at exactly the right time, you could multiply total yield by 1.25, but that's a big if.
Yeah, Bitcoin Cash is nowhere near its peak ~4 years ago, when it was like $2500 (it's $824 a coin this morning). It has not kept up with Bitcoin at all this bull run (although it has gone up, just nowhere near at the same rate). So yeah it'd be nowhere near double today's Bitcoin value.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#839Earlier 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…
At least on Cardano, slashing is extraordinarily unlikely and only occurs during recovery from a successful attack. The idea being that the community forks from the moment before the attack and slashes the funds from the attacker. In the case of a zero-day or other attack where the stake pools are forced into being unwilling attackers due to circumstances excluding negligence, KES keys are invalidated/regenerated and the pools don't have their funds slashed. Additionally, delegators either end up taking a leap of faith with their existing pool or more likely move to uncompromised pools.
Recovery is an inherently manual process as either stake pools or miners must actively choose to switch to the new fork (at least initially). This doesn't return to an automated process until the ball actually starts rolling again. I say this is inherently manual as all 51% attacks violate the proof (of work, stake, or any other resource) that allows untrusted collaboration. Instead the community is required to cooperate momentarily based on the collective investment and trust that has been built parallel to the operation of the network.
The difference with PoS compared to PoW during this recovery process is that in a pure attack (i.e. one not due to a software bug/zero day), the resource is permanently burned (slashed) and the recovery can occur. With PoW however the resource doesn't disappear and can always either come back or come from another ecosystem for a second attack.
Outside of the bootstrap and the recovery phase, PoS and PoW are effectively equivalent in security. PoS is slightly weaker in the bootstrap phase and PoW is slightly weaker in the recovery phase. This isn't inherently bad for either system, it's just a matter of trade-offs. Arguably I'd say this is why transitions from PoW to PoS will be much safer than a clean bootstrap. The existing network strength from the PoW era is able to protect the PoS segment while it works through the bootstrap phase.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#840Hello,nice