Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or both. Bitcoin and Coinbase each have outrageous fees.
You can pay 1$ for a BTC transfer, so outrageous.
I recently paid $50 for a BTC transfer, and it took 16 hours to get into a block.
Coinbase from YC to DPO
871–880 of 883 posts
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
The coins stored on Coinbase (and other crypto exchanges for that matter) are at all time lows, people are self-custodying their coins and using them on decentralized protocols where they don't have to trust centralized 3rd parties. Coinbase is just one player in the whole space.
Coinbase is custodying 760k BTC or so... thats more than 5% of all BTC in existence.
They claimed that they were holding about 11% of crypto market cap on their exchange.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#873Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will be a trend for heavy VC funded companies that are not really profitable (not speaking about Coinbase specifically). DPO's allow VC to recoup investments at around the 10 year mark for company's that do not make financial sense on paper.
Why does that matter here? Profitability is not a prerequisite for an IPO, and any IPO let's investors recoup their money.
I don't think it matters. I think the main difference is an IPO is typically used to raise money to grow, where as a DPO is mainly used to shift risk from VC to the main street and allow VC to recoup money from a non profitable entity. A magic trick really. IPO's do that too, but with a DPO there isn't the expense and the risk dog and pony show. Similar but different.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? You would think the currency of the future would be liquid enough to provide capital for their growth no? Why resort to raising USD?
Coinbase did a direct listing and didn’t raise money from this event. They provided liquidity for their shareholders.
Again why not do it BTC if it is indeed the future?
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coinbase did a direct listing and didn’t raise money from this event. They provided liquidity for their shareholders.
Again why not do it BTC if it is indeed the future?
This is a direct listing. Sure they could open up a private market so their investors could sell for Bitcoin, but:
1. I bet most shareholders already have plenty of crypto and should diversify.
2. Opening up a private market for Bitcoin-only sales really doesn’t help liquidity much.
It’s important to remember - this wasn’t a move for Coinbase to raise money, it was to enable people who have shares in Coinbase to be able to more easily sell.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a company that makes money is a huge accomplishment.
But why celebrate it? So is graduating college or buying a house, but I am not celebrating those accomplishments of random strangers. Unless I am personally invested in Coinbase, why should I celebrate their “accomplishment”?
The article is written by an investor in Coinbase.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#877This is pretty amazing. Gary Tan made a YT video about his experience backing them very early and getting a 6000x return: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5YApjnTG10 It's remarkable that Brian Armstrong gave up what would have been very valuable options in Airbnb—the most valuable YC company at the time—to found a new company that surpassed it.
And in Brian had simply bought bitcoins with his $10.000 in 2012, when the price was $4-$12 per piece? He could have bought 833-2500 bitcoins, with a current value of $5.2500.000 - $157.500.000. He choose to do more than "HODL" and go through the hard work of building a product and a company, which in my book, makes him a true hero. Even though he went the casino/shitcoin rout later...
But could he have held the BTC through all the crazy volatility since 2011?
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#878Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a very strong incentive for Bitcoin proponents to push this narrative but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Proof of Stake is more secure than Proof of Work because it's not possible to use external resources to take control of the system. The cost of hijacking PoS is exponential, not linear. With PoW, someone who has no stake in the network could buy or rent mining hardware using fiat and take control of the…
This is interesting. I am curious, which PoS coin implementations do you like? If an attacker wanted to not raise the price of a coin, couldn't they use crypto OTC markets to buy large amounts while not raising the price (i've seen OTC at least marketed that way)? Aren't cryptocurrencies also only a scarce resource if they have a hard supply cap? Or do you figure in something like inflation vs coin burning to this as…
>> This is interesting. I am curious, which PoS coin implementations do you like?
I've been involved with Lisk (LSK) for several years. It's Delegated Proof of Stake though so you can use your LSK to vote for block forgers who offer a good % share of their block rewards and earn interest that way.
>> If an attacker wanted to not raise the price of a coin, couldn't they use crypto OTC markets to buy large amounts while not raising the price
Yes, that can happen in theory but in practice it's not feasible. In DPoS especially, whales would rarely agree to sell more than 50% of their own stake because if they did they could lose their forging delegate spot (which yields higher rewards than just voting). Because the blockchain is public, delegates all watch each other's on-chain activity and they can lose votes if they try to sell too many tokens (doesn't matter if it's OTC or exchange).
>> Aren't cryptocurrencies also only a scarce resource if they have a hard supply cap? Or do you figure in something like inflation vs coin burning to this as well?
If there is inflation, it doesn't affect the security of the blockchain because the attacker must acquire 50% of all tokens in any case. The more tokens there are in total, the more tokens the attacker needs to buy to get to 50%.
>> The only reason I could see the attack making financial sense at that point would be if it was a competitor who was trying to kill a competing PoS network and it was worth it to them to do so in order to promote their own network
Early days of any blockchain are always more risky. That said, the early days of most PoW blockchains are even more precarious than those of PoS. This is because with PoW, the community has no say over who can start forging blocks on its new blockchain (anyone who owns some crypto mining hardware can compete to produce blocks on potentially any PoW blockchain).
If just a tiny % of Bitcoin's miners were temporarily repurposed (e.g. minor software changes) to mine any new PoW blockchain, those miners could easily take over the new blockchain and create any transaction they want. With PoS, in the early days, the community gets to decide who will receive the initial tokens; so outsiders cannot highjack the network unless then find a way to buy more than 50% of the tokens from existing token holders.
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#879Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currencies definitely have total supplies which can be measured in USD. Let's not be finicky with definitions. https://fiatmarketcap.com/
Calling a country's M2 money stock "market cap" is exactly the kind of category error I expect in the crypto space.
You must be fun at parties
Re: Coinbase from YC to DPO
#880Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. See 2. 2. Bitcoin was always a dumb idea from the perspective of building a business or an economy on it. 3. Anyone who really looked at Bitcoin in 2012 could see it was not a realistic replacement for PayPal unless you were thinking about paying on a place like SilkRoad.
Fiat systems have such infernal UX, bitcoin can win on that metric alone. The FUD spread by the regulator is the only reason we're here.
By infernal you mean they comply with AML regulations like KYC?
Not following the law is not a "metric" legitimate businesses usually brag about.
Anybody who use FUD as an argument for something is pushing some kind of snake oil. FUD stands for "Fear, uncertainty, doubt." Why does FUD exist? Because historically when we did dumb things there were consequences. Is fearing consequences an irrational thing?