The one thing that surprises me in all this is that the BTC price has stayed at a stable 16k since mid October.
It's possible that it's whales selling to themselves or each other to dominate volume and create the illusion of a price
Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
311–320 of 533 posts
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#312Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I write software used to operate power stations, so that people can power their homes etc. You seem to confuse nobility with utility. Crypto is a solution looking for a problem. The ponzi seems to struggle to maintain the volume required for 'growth'. Thanks for the 'whataboutism' though.
You'll be familiar with generators then. A technology that also had next to no utility in the 1830s when it was invented, reaching commercial success in the 1870s. During this 40 year period, millions of dollars were spent promoting the field of commercial electricity at a time when the steam engine ruled. > Crypto is a solution looking for a problem I think this is short sighted and time will prove you wrong.
This comment completely fails to take into account the societal and technological changes that occurred during the period, including population growth and all that goes with it, suggesting that money spent promoting a better solution than was presently available is responsible for it's uptake. Do you have any evidence for anything you're saying?
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think we're past believing that our top .1% is bringing value that's worth billions of times more than the rest of the population. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on our beliefs here, we have an objective measure, which we call "money". If someone starts a company in their garage, and a decade later that company is worth few billions of dollars then that's the value this person brought to society - because pe…
By that only measure Nobels are thousand of time less valuable than Sam Bankman Fried
Nobel prize winners are bad example, because their work is usually theoretical, hard to put to use. If someone writes a paper tomorrow proving that faster-than-light travel is possible then the only immediate value it brings is that you now have a nice lecture to read in bed. There are still thousands man-years of work required before an actual spaceship will be available for sale in your local dealership.
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#315It 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 t…
> They haven't even adopted bech32
What? They’ve been supporting segwit addresses for years
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
CME isn't just "corn commodities"; they're CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX, and they're a clearinghouse, they operate an electronic trading system, they're a colo provider, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures and SOFR. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other things. They probably have much more code than Coinbase. It's not all code you'd want to work on, but, from passing experience, there is a lot of i…
>CME isn't just "corn commodities";
Yes, I understand that and I wasn't dismissing CME as a simple platform. I used to work across the street from the CME and saw the traders walking around in their yellow jackets every day. The "corn" was only one example to tie it to a bank services scenario.
>, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures
I think Coinbase recently offered something similar: https://www.google.com/search?q=Coinbase+launches+Derivative...
Somehow, the wordsmithing in my comment got misconstrued as being dismissive of CME as being too simple and praising Coinbase as being complex.
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#317[flagged]
Well when I lived in a Third World country with no access to international payment methods, Bitcoin was the only way I could pay for books and servers. So yeah, I am sorry my struggle to learn and better myself as an engineer was through something you deem stupid.
I don’t believe you. Will you post a time stamped picture of the front of your passport?
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#318“ 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 em…
The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#319It 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?
LN can be used privately if you send to your own wallet, and Coinbase likes to track what people do after their coins leave Coinbase. Brian said they can't list privacy friendly coins like XMR due to regulations.
LN is also unreliable to this day and i frequently get routing issues about 15% of the time using the most popular custodial LN wallets and sending to popular LN payment gateways. I'm guessing it would be even worse if i was transacting with small shops or self-hosted LN users. This would be a massive customer support burden.
Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%
#320Despite numerous wrong turns and silly mistakes, Coinbase is looking more and more as the lonely survivor positioned to dominate crypto trading in the West. The company has lots of cash on hand in excess of corporate debt, almost no short-term corporate debt, customer assets backing all customer deposits, and as far as I can tell from a quick read of the latest quarterly report, a clean balance sheet with no red flag…
They've already survived two crypto winters as well before this one, so they've already had experience and gotten to see what works and what doesn't, and have structured their company accordingly. I think if any crypto company deserves to survive this crypto winter, they're probably the most deserving.