301–310 of 461 posts
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Apparently, folks with offers received an email two weeks ago, when the hiring freeze was announced, saying no offers would be rescinded. Did management change their minds in just two weeks?
Management is often not privy to these details. I doubt more than two dozen people knew about the news internally before they publicly disclosed it.
Coinbase tried to recruit me last summer. I politely told the recruiter that I felt it was all bubble speculation mania. Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. I guess I was right? Not trying to brag or anything. Just a tip to everyone job hunting I guess. Watch what executives do (not what they say). Well, and human history of speculati…
> Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. As you note, since it was a direct listing and not an IPO, there isn't really an analog to many other companies. My opinion about why they did a direct listing is because institutional investors didn't want to touch it, and that memetail traders (a portmanteau of meme and retail) are undiscerning…
Let’s ask “Why are they doing this?” I will start by saying most indications are that the management is very rational. Sometimes companies use downturns to get rid of people that they haven’t managed properly. It’s lazy, but cutting the bottom 10% in a layoff can be less short term work than performance reviews. They avoid the PR issues by saying “everyone is doing it.” This isn’t what Coinbase did. If companies are…
Realistically, if they could actually predict the crypto market, they wouldn't need to worry about money period.
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> The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. Do you mean that you would have gotten the shares and would sell your shares at this point with a certain guarantee on the price, or something else?
In an IPO, the company sells a bunch of shares to banks, and this is a funding round for the company. The banks then immediately try to sell the shares at a slightly higher price to retail, and also collude and post a bunch of money on the buy side of the order books to give the illusion of demand. Psychologically this is commonly effective at getting retail to hop in front of these orders and purchase at higher pric…
The cruelest part of this: https://twitter.com/TeamBlind/status/1532769735393169410 2 weeks ago they sent out emails saying "we will not be rescinding the offers of any employees who have already signed or have received an offer from us". They then proceeded to rescind offers from people who received this assurance. 2 weeks is long enough that people signed leases, resigned from jobs, moved cities. And yet it's also…
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I think the Ponzi claims stem from the fact that so many people are in the market for speculative profit (and not to revolutionize finance or whatever), and the fact that earlier investors can only capitalize on their investments by proselytizing, recruiting, and ultimately selling their bags to new investors. Framed that way, it’s quite Ponzi-ish.
This is true of any value storage vehicle. You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. Art, baseball cards, stamps, stocks, gold etc. all work this way.
Do they though?
Unlike cryptos, gold and stocks have real material value behind them, not just community buy-in.
You can make the art/baseball cards/stamps argument, but then you’d be conceding that the value of cryptos — something pitched as a revolutionary technology with limitless profit potential — is, in reality, determined by the same irrational valuation process as niche collectible markets.
There’s a reason we don’t pay for groceries and mortgages with baseball cards and stamps.
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The only reason you cannot say Coinbase is isn't a scam is because it is impossible to prove that the people involved were lying in regards to the viability of crypto not being effectively a Ponzi scheme.
There is value in a global blockchain with the level of participation of crypto. And sure there are scams, there are scams in the real economy too. Ponzi is not an acronym for “I don’t understand its value therefore it’s a Ponzi scheme”.
The non-blockchain part is the scam part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the Ponzi claims stem from the fact that so many people are in the market for speculative profit (and not to revolutionize finance or whatever), and the fact that earlier investors can only capitalize on their investments by proselytizing, recruiting, and ultimately selling their bags to new investors. Framed that way, it’s quite Ponzi-ish.
This is true of any value storage vehicle. You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. Art, baseball cards, stamps, stocks, gold etc. all work this way.
I only air this out publicly since, it seems by design that they want to delay or prevent withdrawal of your funds. And there is no other recourse.
Explicitly caution everyone to move your holdings to a hardware wallet, and never stake anything on Coinbase. Not your keys, not your coins.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the Ponzi claims stem from the fact that so many people are in the market for speculative profit (and not to revolutionize finance or whatever), and the fact that earlier investors can only capitalize on their investments by proselytizing, recruiting, and ultimately selling their bags to new investors. Framed that way, it’s quite Ponzi-ish.
This is true of any value storage vehicle. You only make money - or get your money back out - by passing it on to the next person. Art, baseball cards, stamps, stocks, gold etc. all work this way.
Speculation on that asset can make the price go up far above the underlying value. But that comes at a high risk of the price falling down to the underlying value. For crypto this underlying value is basically zero.