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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

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251–260 of 533 posts

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown

I don't agree. People were aware of all of the same problems in early 2021. Is it a surprise that the momentum behind the ecosystem eventually fled once people couldn't sell to the next bagholder as easily? No. Is it a surprise that it happened in 2022? Yes. Nothing about the industry fundamentally changed between 2020/2021 (massive explosion of interest) and 2022 (collapse). In Dec 2021 there wasn't a particularly g…

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#252

“ All Coinbase personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.”

The prophetic scene in question: https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=1

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#253
post #184

It is strange, that so far Coinbase has not took any steps towards supporting the Lightning Network. If the Coinbase app supported it, that would allow all of the Coinbase users to do real decentralized micropayments. Any theories, why they don't do that?

Coinbase is technologically kind of a joke. Their matching engine is crap. They haven't even adopted bech32. They just do the bare minimum to keep things working for 99% of users, and for the unlucky 1% they follow the same customer support strategy as Google (aka automated emails but no actual humans). Unfortunately Coinbase is YC and they do a lot of marketing, so people who are just getting started tend to think they're a frontrunner.

If you want an exchange that keeps up with the ecosystem you should use someone else. Kraken qualifies: https://blog.kraken.com/post/13502/kraken-now-supports-insta...

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Bitcoin has "exploded" in the past, crashing 70%+ several times, yet each time it had a higher and higher floor. How do you explain this?

It could be that people are just holding on. The question is: why is it worth anything at all?

There's a fundamental floor of value where "in the bad old days" I once bought a specialty swiss army knife (a very custom gift; details utterly irrelevant) and I wanted the knife enough to pay middlemen about 20% overall to turn by USD into ... whatever the swiss were using at the time. It used to cost twice as much money to move money around the world than to move a small consumer good around the world. That's just how the world was. Weird to think it would have been half the cost to mail the swiss a gold coin than to transfer money all legally.

Clearly, I didn't think the middlemen provided 20% of value, but I was willing to cough up the cash to perform the overall transaction. If a cheaper money transfer option existed I'd never have used the middlemen, whom provided nothing of value to me for their 20% charge. Cheaper options do exist now...

There's a lot of hand waving, but if you trust paypal, which you probably should not, the cost of moving money internationally has dropped to about 5% and the cost of currency conversions has dropped to 4%. I would assume they double dip and converting USD in USA to swiss whatevers in Switzerland would cost about 9%. Then of course there are withdrawal fees and so forth stacked on top.

Anyway, lets say you can turn and burn bitcoin in "somewhat less than an hour" so simply divide total international daily transaction volume by twenty five or so and that seems a reasonable starting point for a store of value. If the price gets too high making it cost more to use BTC than paypal, then the BTC transaction volume would seem to drop until prices drop and people start using BTC again.

Obviously for various UI and enduser reasons I would not expect all international trade to flow over either BTC or paypal or the legacy banking system, but "enough" should be there to support the BTC price at some level.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely . It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.

Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown

This is silly hyperbole. I was paying honest attention to crypto and I was continually surprised that it didn’t crash. Eventually I gave up and stopped guessing it was going to crash. Then it did :shrug:

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#256

[flagged]

> We're building the mobile-native web3 marketplace, starting with NFTs. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ Feels like more technology looking for a problem, fortunately for humanity the wide interest in such things seems to be waning.

And what do you do that's so noble?

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay Mr Reddit, no need for profanity. Parent comment is literally BSing. This isn't even happening on either of the mobile apps.

That is what I’m seeing.

Can you post a screenshot? The charts for me go back to "all time".

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#258

Coinbase is a weird company, because it's got such an obvious comparable: CME Group. CME Group has about 3500 employees, did 1.2bn in revenue last quarter with 680m net income. Then you have coinbase now trimmming to about the same number 3500, 590m revenue and a net income loss of 550m. That's right, as far as I can see, Coinbase loses $1 for every $1 of revenue. Firstly, I don't see how Coinbase needs as many peopl…

Is there something in market-making technology (or otherwise) that sets them apart from any other modern exchange? Could they pivot into trading pork bellies (or tokens thereof)?

Yes- what Coinbase doesn't have is trust. They can pay all the marketing dollars they want but without any regulation or oversight they'll never have it from me.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely . It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.

Absolutely nobody paying even a drop of honest attention was surprised by any part of the crypto drawdown

Absolutely everyone was surprised by the pace of the tech meltdown. It's not everyday that "blue chip" companies like Netflix and Meta and Tesla drop 60-70% within months.

Meta crashed 73%. Tesla crashed 70%. Netflix crashed 72%.

Everyone knew it was always going to come down, but if I were to tell you in September 2021 that Meta was going to trade 70% down within a year, you wouldn't have believed me

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#260
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That little experience makes it hard to judge applicant quality well and means they probably aren’t answering questions accurately. It’s a dead tell of a company which has a shortage of experienced staff and is growing too quickly — very strongly reminiscent of the dotcom bubble where people had the same “number go up!” mentality & some would openly say they were just looking busy until the IPO.

Plenty of wildly successful companies (Google, FB, etc.) have all had junior engineers interviewing people.

No wonder tech interviews these days are so bad.
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