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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#271

Post by sebzim4500 »

serioussecurity wrote: post #130
SunlightEdge wrote: post #46

I lost a little bit of money investing in crypto on Coinbase (I put about £500 in which shrank to £200 - over the course of past 2 years and for past year I mostly have just had money in sterling - the market looked terrible) I finally decided yesterday to cash out of coinbase yesterday - they charged me £3 to withdraw my money!! In the scheme of things I didn't lose that much money - not really. But personally I can…

Your surprise over a £3 fee strikes me as a perfect illustration of crypto: profoundly naive, inexperienced investors getting a hard lesson in how unregulated markets work. I hope, some years down the line, you take the broader life lesson that anyone promising you money for nothing does not have your best interests at heart.

In my experience crypto exchanges have far fewer hidden fees than conventional banks do.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#272

Post by guntherhermann »

tirpen wrote: post #79
guntherhermann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems needlessly ideological. If the engineer can do what you want of them what does it matter what their employment history is?

To a degree yes it does, since they will almost certainly have to work in a team with other people. Being involved in crypto related things is a huge red flag that the person is most likely deeply immoral, greedy and opportunistic, which are traits that will most likely make the person hard to work with for the other team members. I think throwing them out entirely might be a bit extreme, but stamping them with a big…

> Being involved in crypto related things is a huge red flag that the person is most likely deeply immoral, greedy and opportunistic ...

This is a huge assumption to make about someone's character when all you know is that they were employed in $CRYPTO_COMPANY_X FROM $START_DATE TO $END_DATE.

You are forever tarring someone you don't even know.

If you are involved in recruitment it might be worth taking a look at those guesses you are making.

Godwin's Law: Let me put it to you this way, would you immediately dismiss or red-flag someone who previously worked at IBM?

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#273

Post by spaceman_2020 »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #255
kingkawn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Bitcoin has dropped about the same amount as Netflix, Meta and Tesla (~70-74%)

It has significantly outperformed VC darlings like Peloton (-93%) and WeWork (-90%).

You can't tell me that WeWork stock wasn't working on the greater fool theory any more than Bitcoin's price works on finding more bagholders. It's all a grift, some worse than others.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#275

Post by teratron27 »

mclightning wrote: post #170
owenmarshall wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the boat on that by a year. What we should all be asking ourselves is “am I on payroll at my current job to act as ballast?”

What does it mean to act as a ballast? What are some signs? Is there a general terminology for this? Are you talking about "meat-shield headcounts"

Do you work in a cost centre or a profit centre for the business?

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#276

Post by waylandsmithers »

danrocks wrote: post #235

“ 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.”

..."and as a result I have decided to step down and hand the company over to someone more capable of navigating today's challenges"

/s

I think we'd all like to imagine a world where company's are run like sea faring ships- the captain gets paid the most to be accountable for the whole operation, and when things go wrong must be the last one off the ship. To the point where any selfish behavior by the captain in an emergency can be criminal. (This is just an analogy, not saying the CEO should actually risk life and limb.)

But in reality they are run a lot more like Project Runway. The contestants pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their garments and over the course of the season, and eventually the best of them receives a spread in Vogue and something like a $500,000 contract and some other goodies. The real winner though is always Heidi, who collects her $20M fee regardless of who gets the show's nominal prizes and is awarded an Emmy for executive producing.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#277

Post by pjc50 »

nextstep wrote: post #225
TekMol wrote: 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?

Because the lightning network is garbage?

It doesn't actually let you settle payments quicker. What it does is set up a "channel" between two participants which can quickly adjust its balance at any time (but only up to the value originally locked in it!), and then ultimately settle out if you want to close the channel.

You can't use it to make a payment to an unrelated person without opening a channel. So there's a "routing layer" where you find a channel in common, like trying to send a UUCP email. e.g. if you wanted to send to another coinbase user, you'd send over your channel to coinbase and they'd send it out again over their channel.

But then .. you could just both use a coinbase payment account?

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#278

Post by vgatherps »

jasode wrote: post #221
SilverBirch wrote: post #87

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…

>Coinbase is a weird company, because it's got such an obvious comparable: CME Group. CME Group has about 3500 employees, [...] Firstly, I don't see how Coinbase needs as many people as CME. Coinbase isn't a direct comparable to CME because CME only does the exchange function. Coinbase combines several different types of financial institutions in the crypto space: + exchange : order matching engine of buy & sell -- a…

On the other hand, the regulatory requirements on CME are FAR greater and the requirements on their exchange technology are drastically greater as well.

CME also has to build risk and margining technology since its customers are generally managing complex derivatives portfolios and CME has to understand what risk those portfolios have under all sorts of tail market events.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#279

Post by ssharp »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #255
kingkawn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:

Obviously hindsight, but the combination of 0% interest rates and the rise of retail investing post-March 2020 was fuel that had to run out eventually.

Predicting tops/bottoms is a fools errand, however. If you thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $15,000 and see it rise to almost $70,000, only to see if fall, but not past the point where you initially thought it was overpriced -- well, hopefully you at least didn't bet on it being overpriced at $15k.

I remember thinking how crazy Tesla's price seemed to me in June/July 2020. It then proceeded to go up more than 4x that price over the next 1.5 years before falling, but TSLA is still trading ~30% higher than those June/July 2020 prices.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#280

Post by Alex3917 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #188
jesuscript wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My best guess is that raising funding helps raise the valuation, especially as they approach IPO. So raise money for the sake of raising the valuation. You don’t really need the money, but you got it. What are you going to do with it to appease the investors? Well you gotta act like you are doing something with it, especially something that shows growth. Hire more. Hire more because we imagine more. Keep imagining un…

I interviewed with them last year and while I didn't get the job, looking back now I'm kind of thankful it turned out how it did. From my limited perspective interviewing there, it seems like they started branching out into all things crypto. One manager I interviewed with explained that they wanted to become the "Amazon of Crypto" where any service related to crypto such as wallets, NFT's, etc are all on Coinbase. I…

> You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out.

Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.

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