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Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

coindesk.com

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#721
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in 2020 I inherit $16k and decide to buy 1 BTC for $16,082 on Nov 12, 2020. Later that day the wealth tax department is created and levies a 20% tax on all unrealized appreciated assets. Your reporting day is on the anniversary of the original asset purchase. So a year later (Nov 12, 21) Bitcoin is at $64,400. My accumulated unrealized appreciation is $48,318. I file my wealth tax return and have to borrow the $9,…

Sounds a lot like the AMT situation for stock options where people pay taxes on the paper value of the stock when exercised, even if they don't (or even can) sell it -- the IRS can provide a way to recover taxes paid on unrealized gain if you sell the asset at a loss from where it was taxed. But I'd recommend selling enough of your BTC to pay taxes so you're not underwater if it goes down in value.

howabout no silly wealth taxes? I don't get it.

why do we need to keep growing gov't and adding more and more rules/programs/etc.? Certainly we don't need to keep spending more and more, cut it off and some point and stop growing it for some period..

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#723
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires are highly correlated with millionaires, which don't seem to be beyond the pale for critics of wealth inequality. Countries with billionaires rank much higher on quality of life than those without. It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts but the side effect of their wealth is companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society in terms of products and employment.

I'm not as wealthy as them but I have never, ever had this feeling: "It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts" Why does that hurt anyone? Doesn't it just help the people that make yachts and work on them?

My father worked for 35 years as a carpenter on mega yachts for insanely rich people. Yes it put food on our table in a rural area otherwise devoid of job opportunities.

Rich people spending their money isn’t really the problem. It helped put me through college.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#724
post #581

Wasn't this guy one of Paul Graham's darlings? Weren't the "geniuses" at YCombinator invested in this pile of trash? I would really like one of those "insightful" posts from pg telling us how to pick winners right about now.

You confuse personal opinions about crypto with business success. Coinbase is a massive success. It has a 100 million users and is the best known crypto exchange for retail. They did pick the winner. This layoff creates a lot of emotional attention but doesn't mean that much in business terms. They were overhiring anyway and all of tech is massively down. It's a small undoing of growing too fast.

Coinbase operates under the protectionist policy of the US and still only has 1/10th of the volume that Binance has (with the same amount of employees). I never got what the fuss is about Coinbase compared to all exchanges, except for the "silicon valley bro" angle

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#725

How can they even have 1100 employees? That's more than the East India Company needed to run a whole subcontinent, probably.

East India Company employed 260,000 soldiers alone, not even counting the entire rest of the company. That took 20 seconds to find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think a wealth tax would limit a companies abilities to make "mad profits"?

Because why would anyone, corporate or not, invest substantial time & resources into chasing mad profits if they won't get to keep almost any of it?

Because I don't believe that most people are really aiming to be multi-billionaires, I think most of the effort comes from people trying to reach financial independence at various levels of cost of living.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#727
post #591
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDC. They see something really bad on their books that's separate from their core business. Just like how Lehman Brothers was a profitable bank that got shredded by one risky trading strategy. These stablecoins have been devoured one by one, and each time they fall more people start trying to get their money out. USDC will experience a run and it might not be survivable without liquidating user account holdings, whi…

If Coinbase is operating USDC as full reserve, as they have claimed, is there any risk from it? Seems like there would only be risk if they lied about how they are running it.

Even if that's so, saying it's plausible they lied would be putting it kindly

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#728
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

I'm a big fan of 100% taxation on anything above 999M, but my continuation here is that anyone that earns more than that gets a trophy for every additional 1B they earn put on display in a big museum in a city of their choice (Museums selectively scattered around the US).

Why 999M? And is that yearly annual income or does it include all assets? In any case, surely nobody _needs_ one billion dollars. Why not 100% taxation on anything over 1M? Actually even that is outlandish, people can go their whole lives without ever earning that much. Just cap it at 100k.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#729
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm okay with a poor, powerful person. That means they have their power through some means other than wealth accumulation; popular election or something. People who are powerful because of money usually didn't even get the money themselves. It's the new hereditary monarchy. Get rid of all the money, and you get rid of the undue power as well.

> Get rid of all the money, and you get rid of the undue power as well. That's philosophically, historically and biologically incorrect. Not to mention that it is incredibly naive. Fights for power happen everywhere in nature. Occasional imbalances are not the problem. The problem is when a certain group or individual manages to concentrate so much power that they get control over groups. > That means they have their…

Truman

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because why would anyone, corporate or not, invest substantial time & resources into chasing mad profits if they won't get to keep almost any of it?

Because I don't believe that most people are really aiming to be multi-billionaires, I think most of the effort comes from people trying to reach financial independence at various levels of cost of living.

A wealth tax doesn't just affect multi-billionaires, it guts all accumulations of wealth. If anything, billionaires are most able to shrug off a wealth tax. Your average Financial Independence strategy (pursue a high income to accumulate a sizeable warchest of assets quickly, then passively live off the illiquid assets slowly) is severely gutted by a substantial wealth tax that aggressively drains saved assets.
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