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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

#851

Post by wrycoder »

Aeolun wrote: post #643
sharkweek wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

These people don’t put the money in their mattresses, you know. They spend it or invest it, creating economic activity.

Your suggestion is to give it to the government, which will more wisely spend it?

I think not.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#852

Post by ineedasername »

zombiwoof wrote: post #822

the most ridiculous thing is: they tried to recruit me 8 months ago. it was all unicorn and rainbows and bullshit this is the future. so if just 8 months ago, the CEO who has a 110 MILLION DOLLARS house couldn't see 12 months into the future, and required 18% reduction in headcount because of some unforseen crypto winter, who really is at fault here? what a fool that CEO is, and glad I turned the job down and feel ba…

8 months ago inflation looked much more manageable, the Delta surge was ebbing & Omicron not yet casting it's shadow, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine hadn't upset Western geopolitics & kicked an already suffering economy in its commodity balls.

It appears they were hiring far too aggressively even at that time, but I think the CEO can be forgiven for not anticipating the current state of affairs.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#853

Post by ineedasername »

arnvald wrote: post #524
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?

Their expenses are based on predicted growth in the volume of transactions. They're making money no matter if crypto goes up or down, but they stop making money when people stop trading.

They make money on trading, sure, but it's a % not a flat fee. The same # of trades can occur for the same # of coins but if the market cap of those trades is 50% lower then they're making a lot less money.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#854

Post by [deleted] »

akira2501 wrote: post #787
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.

An odd way to attack the problem would be to demean the personal liberties of someone else based on nothing other than your own personal feelings. I don't see how either of these lines of argument achieve any useful or realistic end state. It's a topic almost perfectly designed for a useless shouting match. Meanwhile. In the 1950's, citizens in the US were expected to pay around 50% of the cost of running the governm…

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#855

Post by csomar »

jerry1979 wrote: post #278
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

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…

I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does tha…

You pass laws to tax Russia and China billionaires. Then there are no billionaires in the world. That's how the US did with Russia, it passed sanctions in response to the Ukraine war.

Wait... That didn't actually work.

source: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=RUB

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#856

Post by ineedasername »

ffggvv wrote: post #753
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?

youre right they make money off volume, not price. but volume surges when price goes up and dries up when prices go down. (aka crypto winter)

They make money on price too. They have a % fee, so their dollar-denominated revenue for a given trade with the same # of coins but 50% lower dollar-denominated exchange rate is still 50% lower.

They pay people in fiat currency, their expenses are denominated in fiat currency. It doesn't matter if they traded 1M bitcoins daily 6 month ago and still trade 1M daily today, their dollar-denominated fees on that trade has plummeted.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#857

Post by tastyfreeze »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #645
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? Is there an example of said gradual progression?

Just look at how the 17th Amendment was sold... https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-11-3-b...

Sorry, meant 16th Amendment. I've been talking about the 17th a lot lately.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#858

Post by FormerBandmate »

rapjr9 wrote: post #363
hardtke wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been chatting with some friends whose company shut down recently, basically with no warning. They are getting recruited like crazy. In my opinion that's much preferable than to being left go as part of the 20% lowest performing employees. This reads like a "culling of the herd because we can use the alleged upcoming recession as an excuse" event. I'm not sure the generous severance makes up for the "you are not…

It has the appearance of companies trying to cause a recession instead of waiting for one to occur. Coinbase admits it can't predict the future but are being precautionary in case there is a recession? If their plan is to take a worst case view then why not just cash out the whole company and shut it down on the precautionary principle? If this is an attempt to put a scare into workers to keep wages low it may backfi…

Bitcoin has crashed by 70%. The recession has come for Coinbase, they will probably lose money next quarter

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#859

Post by santiagogo »

theptip wrote: post #633
Stupulous wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think they would have done so as a public service after they capped out lifetime income. That is definitely the big question. Given that Gates is busy donating most of his cash to charity, there are counterexamples. But even biting the bullet and accepting the premise, it’s not immediately obvious that losing all of the work from current billionaires would be a bad trade in exchange for substantially reduce…

The fun and, the status and the power come from controlling wealth to build or do things. As soon as you limit control, it stops being fun and they stop generating value.

If you think 100 million dollar houses are egregious, you could try to make building them illegal. But then they'll just buy one in another country, or a yacht, or something similar.

A lot of this is why capitalism works.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#860

Post by chrismcb »

ceres wrote: post #819
credit_guy wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that Gates is busy donating most of his cash to charity, there are counterexamples. A charity of your choice vs being taxed more. If you had a few billion dollars to spare, which option would you choose?

Why should so few individuals have outsized social, political and economic power over the whole country? Why not tax them more and let elected officials representatives decide how best to spend the money?

Because elected officials have a had a bad track record on how to spend money. And governments are notoriously inefficient
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