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Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#771

Post by narrator »

Johnny555 wrote: post #45
sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…

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…

After $100 million dollars it becomes very hard to spend money on consumption. Having that much money is so you can do things that Blackrock and Vanguard don't want you to do, because they would own your company when you had to sell to pay wealth taxes.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#772

Post by 3np »

__pache__ wrote: post #720
karpierz wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anyone who thinks this wealth shouldn't appear, let me ask this: if someone could discover a cure for all cancers — how much should they be allowed to earn for it? Say 50 million? > I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers? 100 billion? You've asked two separate questions there, but you're implying that the answer to one is the same as the other. Just because you are capable of extracting a cer…

So if I make a pill that cures cancer, _it_ is worth 100bn, but I am only worth 50m? how does that make any sense?

It can makes sense if you take the position that medicine patents should be heavily reformed.

Shoulders and giants - there's no way you actually fully independently discover a cancer-curing pill. And even if you did, its existence would not and should not belong fully to you.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#773

Post by dereg »

boc wrote: post #588
sytelus wrote: post #503

I don't understand why Coinbase is feeling such a crunch. They are just middleman in buying and selling. Their advantage is supposed to be that they make money whether crypto goes up or down. How can they screw this up?

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…

Can we start citing our sources for this? I've seen myriad comments on HN lately about stablecoins here citing zero sources and invoking arguments that may have been relevant in 2017, but not in 2022. This is really an injustice to any sort of quality discussion.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#774

Post by e-clinton »

Johnny555 wrote: post #45
sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…

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…

The issue with that thinking is that not having billionaires isn’t going to automatically redistribute that wealth onto others. The most likely scenario is that that wealth would’ve never been created… and neither will the jobs that came with it.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#775

Post by mjr00 »

koolba wrote: post #751
mjr00 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an asset class, but I'd draw parallels to Texas Hold 'Em. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker wins $2.5 million at the WSOP as an amateur who qualified through the internet; within a year, everyone is talking about hold 'em, their bankroll strategy, having poker nights with their buddies, how they're playing 12 tables at once online, etc. Culminates in massive mainstream acceptance, ads for Pokerstars running on major netw…

The main factor in the drop of online poker was the USA crackdown on poker sites. It remains wildly popular in jurisdictions where it is still legal and is making a comeback in some US states that have since re-opened it.

I'm in a region where online poker is legal (Canada) and can assure you it's not wildly popular, at least for my own definition of wildly. I've had a lot more conversations with people about crypto than poker in the past 2 years. Worldwide Google Trends matches the US trend of interest in Hold Em being down ~98% since 2004.

People may be underestimating how popular hold em was in the mid-2000s. As another comment in this thread said, it was even more popular than crypto is now, and that's without the extensive use of social media that we have today.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#777

Post by UncleMeat »

Stupulous wrote: post #607
alx__ wrote: 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.

100M in net worth would motivate me, but one of the differences between me and a talented CEO is that I don't already have 100M in net worth. Gates had well over 100M when Microsoft went public in 1986, Bezos had more than a billion when Amazon went public in 1998, Musk made 150M on Ebay's Paypal acquisition in 2002. We may disagree on whether we're better off that they continued working, but I don't think they would…

Zuckerberg has more money than God at this point, yet he still shows up every day. Is he really motivated by tacking on another bunch of billions? I suspect not.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#778

Post by UncleMeat »

tigerBL00D wrote: post #761
alx__ wrote: 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.

Most of wealth is in stock, which also represents control. If you tax heavily that would lead to loss or control. That's not necessarily a good thing for anyone. Besides, you can only buy a okay superyacht for 100M, definitely not the best /s

If people are worried about this then we can simply permit founders who pay taxes via ownership to retain magnified voting rights. We've already invented the idea of non-voting shares. Why is this some sort of thing that could never be solved?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#779

Post by rvz »

pgodzin wrote: post #439
freyr wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds of a CEO’s tweet yesterday that software engineers making $400k+ are the real problem, and it got lots of likes. Today we day a billion is too much. Where do you draw the line (obviously, start with the billionaires and not with the workers), and who gets to decide?

I don't think engineering salaries are "the real problem" but, they certainly are "a" problem for many companies whose business models don't print cash the same way FAANG companies do but try to compete on comp, and that's what the tweet was getting at.

You mean MAGMA (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon) companies?

It seems Netflix doesn't have a sustainable business model as they have too many direct competitors in the field, price increases in their own plans and little to no diversification in other sectors. Unlink the others MAGMA companies, Netflix is not in multiple sectors to get in more cash and are stuck in a single niche.

Hence, why out of the FAANG companies, stock compensation at Netflix crashed and they had no choice but to announce layoffs.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#780

Post by UncleMeat »

imdsm wrote: post #665
Aeolun wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a firm believer in a maximum of like 50% tax on income. Anything more just feels like a punishment for working.

Absolutely. Let's say I earn over the threshold, and I can now either choose to continue to try and innovate and add value to society, or retire to a private island and just become a carbon contributor, I mean, why work myself into the ground if I can no longer benefit? Most people have assets not liquidity too, so it's like saying, if you own too much, you have to stop. Well, what if Elon stopped and we reverted bac…

I'm not convinced that "make a lot of money" and "add value to society" are incredibly well correlated.
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