What's the mission?
Not being a reliable financial exchange, I hope, they already failed at that. (1)
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/coinbase-says-hacke...
1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
131–140 of 699 posts
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#132Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective. I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them. This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal…
> If you do have something political to say, a grave social justice error in the company's policy for example, you can still be reasonable about it. To mention it respectfully and proportional to the issue, rather than going nuclear.
> Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
This really sounds like you are blaming the black employees at Coinbase for standing up for themselves, and that if they just sat back down and took whatever hand they were being dealt that there would be "zero tensions"... which I guess hinges awkwardly on what you mean by "tensions"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...
I encourage you to read this article--which, FWIW, I'm sure is one of the articles Brian Armstrong here is calling a "hit piece" in his Twitter thread--as this wasn't merely some abstract issue of "politics": black employees at Coinbase felt they were being actively discriminated against.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you're labor . Capital can speak up about whatever it wants (so long as it doesn't start sympathizing with labor, of course)
I'm going to take a wild guess and say if you work at Coinbase—voluntarily—you're extremely well paid. You're the farthest thing from a victim. Just because you can't raise your fist and scream at your coworkers doesn't mean you're oppressed.
Capital vs. Labor is an attitude that can be completely divorced from the unit economics of how much people are paid. Capital is the owner class that calls the shots, Labor is the people who do the work.
"Shut up and do the work, or GTFO" is a statement that only Capital can make, and it's a statement that can only be directed at Labor.
When the topic being quelled is a conversation about fairness within the ranks of Labor, and between Capital and Labor, the picture is crystal clear: "Capital says no, and you (Labor) will comply."
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people think work is an appropriate place for political activism?
Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism, and it indoctrinates students with the belief that everything everywhere is politics, always. This mentality has infected "liberal" intellectualism outside the academy, to the point where it is, essentially, the "culture" of much of the Left in the U.S.
Have you considered that people have reached those beliefs after observing and reflecting on how they perceive the world to work? Why are you so sure it’s “indoctrination” when people come to a conclusion that doesn’t comport with your worldview?
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#135Brian Armstrong was on Tyler Cowen and Tyler asked him if bitcoin was a zero sum game, in a round about way: COWEN: I’ve seen estimates that about 20 percent of bitcoin has been lost, or people don’t have their passwords, or it’s somehow abandoned or whatever. Let’s say that 20 percent were found. Those people would be better off, right? They’d have more wealth. Who is then worse off? ARMSTRONG: Yes, I suppose you ha…
Very interesting. Similar theme to a point Tyler made awhile ago, that I think he touches on even explicitly in this interview, about how if BTC gets to $100K or $200K, you have a bunch of billionaires running around that have essentially done "nothing" to earn it. Seems like it would just exacerbate inequality. Anyone can participate, as long as you're reasonably tech-savvy, and have disposable income to invest (gamble) with.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’d rather folks bought BTC Why? Presumably because you're long BTC. With all due respect, you make a lot of handwavy comments about ERC-20 scams and I agree with you, but aside from a highly speculative investment, BTC is nothing. It failed as a currency. It failed as a unit of account. Now the narrative has shifted to "store of value" which only anyone without an understanding of what that means could say. What d…
It’s the energy. Energy usage means security. ArcticBull will argue it’s bad, I’ll argue it’s the best thing ever. Follow the energy. Why has it failed? Works fine for me and many others…
> Energy usage means security
Umm.. No.
"More energy = More security" is a slogan now being used to scam non-technical users to buy into the crypto ecosystem, but that does not make any sense if you are willing to think about for a second. Also very convenient that this slogan started getting popular when BTC started getting bad press for energy usage.
BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo." / "To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical." The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. The number of problems in the world are effectively infinite but our ability to take a meaningful position is finite and extremely limited. The defau…
> The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. That's not a challenge to this line of thinking, it's just another way of wording the exact same thing.
I suppose I could have said "The problem I have with..." instead.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#138Brian Armstrong was on Tyler Cowen and Tyler asked him if bitcoin was a zero sum game, in a round about way: COWEN: I’ve seen estimates that about 20 percent of bitcoin has been lost, or people don’t have their passwords, or it’s somehow abandoned or whatever. Let’s say that 20 percent were found. Those people would be better off, right? They’d have more wealth. Who is then worse off? ARMSTRONG: Yes, I suppose you ha…
It's hard to find a serious economist who doesn't see major flaws with bitcoin. It's because bitcoin was designed by engineers, not economists.
Bitcoin could only have been created by engineers - it misses a few fundamental tests of currency that any practicing economist would have "fixed" during the design phase. So we are left with bitcoin, which looks silly to most experts but is basically a religion to those who only see the technical merits of the project.
If we run the experiment all the way out, we end up with a ruling class based simply on time and fervor of adoption of a random piece of tech that appeared 10 years ago.
If we run it allll the way out we have a bunch of bitcoin billionaires constantly fearing for their lives because they are essentially walking piggybanks, ripe for kidnapping and torturing their wealth away via rubber hose cryptography.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#139Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective. I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them. This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal…
> Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective.
What is ridiculous? What Brian said? the response? I'm not following.
Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
#140Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective. I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them. This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal…
As a European living and working in the US: your comparison is very shortsighted. European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions (all of these things are, gasp, political! incidentally) By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you lea…
> Is it really any wonder that “politics” ends up being an issue in the workplace?
It's still a wonder for me, I don't follow your reasoning at all. How does this force people into being antagonistic and fighting over politics in the workplace? If anything, this should put a pressure on workers to not stand out and keep their mouth shut, so that they wouldn't risk loosing coveted employer-provided insurance.