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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

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Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#361

Post by red-iron-pine »

lkbm wrote: post #358
radicalbyte wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.

I've seen hatred of crypto, constant insistence that it's 100% fraud, and claims that it's worthless and will collapse for many years now. In 2019, no one was saying it would crash in 2022; they were saying it would crash in 2019 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2020, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2020 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2021, they weren't sayin…

This house is garbage, it's gonna collapse. Didn't collapse last month.

Didn't collapse the next month.

Didn't collapse the next month.

Finally collapses the one after. Was it still a POS garbage house? Probably.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#362

Post by cs702 »

cableshaft wrote: post #320
cs702 wrote: post #291

Despite 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.

Yes. Everything suggests they are prioritizing long-term financial stability and staying power for what could be a really long crypto winter. Many poorly thought-out, poorly executed, and brazenly fraudulent schemes must be fully washed away before the market for this technology can find its footing.

Armstrong and his top execs deserve a lot of credit for staying rational over the past few years, while execs at most other firms in the industry seemingly lost their minds and willingly threw themselves into the flames of all sorts of stupid risky schemes destined to burn violently into ash.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#363

Post by nwatson »

_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…

Reminds me of when I worked at Altavista (the "original Google") for all of two months in late 1999. They had rolled up many companies and I was assigned to work in one of the recent acquisitions, and the manager and I met twice in that time. They asked me to get some insight into how the search operation worked. I played a lot of pool. Found out they hadn't successfully indexed the web for a while. Altavista was trying to be everything to everyone and was spending a ton on celebrity advertising (Pamela Anderson for example). I left.

I think CMGI rolled up the remnants of Altavista.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#364

Post by seeingfurther »

britneybitch wrote: post #253
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?

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…

Counterpoint. After cobbling together a bunch of Coinbase products, we successfully use Coinbase to receive and send payments for our online marketplace in much the same way you would use a PayPal type service. The user experience is great and technologically there is no match. We literally could not do what we do with any other service. If Coinbase focused on payments they could dethrone the kings of the international payment space in no time.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#365

Post by rattlesnakedave »

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…

> Firstly, I don't see how Coinbase needs as many people as CME.

For one, they do much more than CME.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#366

Post by lxgr »

lkbm wrote: post #358
radicalbyte wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.

I've seen hatred of crypto, constant insistence that it's 100% fraud, and claims that it's worthless and will collapse for many years now. In 2019, no one was saying it would crash in 2022; they were saying it would crash in 2019 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2020, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2020 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2021, they weren't sayin…

If it can prevent any buy-and-hold/long-term retail investors from putting their money into something vastly overvalued, I'd argue that "it will eventually crash" is an extremely meaningful prediction even without a precise time frame.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#367

Post by robswc »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #259
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

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

You know, I really like this comment because its pretty true. I think a lot of people will say they say the signs... and I initially wanted to say that too. It happened so "slow" though and its crazy to think about how "good" it was pre-covid. I mean, things generally were going up and IMO, life felt more "stable" so a tech crash 2-3 years out just wouldn't be on the radar.

I have always said (w/comments to back it up) the $600 checks were going to cause huge issues sooner than later. I don't think its that prophetic or controversial (its basic econ) but at the time it seemed if you even suggested the idea that printing so much money was a bad idea you were seen as "hating poor people" or some other flavor of "against the common man."

Still. I can't say I would have believed you. Otherwise, I would have shorted the whole tech sector.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#368

Post by dayvid »

Alex3917 wrote: post #280
_fat_santa wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The more people you have, the longer things take. Everyone has an opinion and you need to spend time to get people to agree on things. This compounds with XFN teams and people coming up with make work or competing for top spot for the sake of performance reviews.

Probably better to have a small team quickly ship a v1 and get everyone involved after.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#369

Post by rabite »

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?

There's been a lot of longstanding potential extra vectors for abuse in the LN protocol and it is not ready for operation at the specific junction where it is most vulnerable to abuses, which is financial exchanges. Exchanges might choose to opt for reasonable security, which is a confirmed on-blockchain transaction.

LN is definitely good for something where there's an in-person exchange of goods so at least potential abuse would leave someone at a physical location with surveillance footage, or where there is a subscription service that can be turned off if the payment turns out to be fraudulent. LN has a higher likelihood of assurance of funds delivery in a timely manner than a credit card -- but that there are entities developed that will insure traditional credit transactions.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#370

Post by jxm262 »

cs702 wrote: post #291

Despite 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…

I've always thought this to be the case. Coinbase and Kraken will be the dominant US players (imho).
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