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Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#21

Post by cjensen »

d23 wrote: post #19
cjensen wrote: post #18

Speaking as someone who knows a lot about economics, I think PT Barnum put it best...[1] Economics is very clear in predicting how this will end up. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value and therefore the long-term price will be precisely zero. Each generation has its tulips [2]; each generation claims that the persistence in tulip price means that there is permanent intrinsic value; each generation is disappointed [3]. T…

> Bitcoins have no intrinsic value Neither does gold, paper money, or diamonds. And yet they've remained valuable for a long time. What gives?

Gold and Diamonds have obvious intrinsic value. Paper money does too, but it's harder to demonstrate.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#22

Post by pdeuchler »

cjensen wrote: post #21
d23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoins have no intrinsic value Neither does gold, paper money, or diamonds. And yet they've remained valuable for a long time. What gives?

Gold and Diamonds have obvious intrinsic value. Paper money does too, but it's harder to demonstrate.

In all fairness the intrinsic value of Gold and Diamonds has only come about in the past 200-300 years... just about when, globally, we started seriously moving towards a purely fiat system.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#23

Post by sanderjd »

cjensen wrote: post #21
d23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoins have no intrinsic value Neither does gold, paper money, or diamonds. And yet they've remained valuable for a long time. What gives?

Gold and Diamonds have obvious intrinsic value. Paper money does too, but it's harder to demonstrate.

Are you referring to the relatively recent industrial uses of gold and diamonds, or are you counting ornamentation as intrinsic value? Don't see the argument for the intrinsic value of paper money at all, but would love to be enlightened.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#25

Post by yapcguy »

pdeuchler wrote: post #22
cjensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold and Diamonds have obvious intrinsic value. Paper money does too, but it's harder to demonstrate.

In all fairness the intrinsic value of Gold and Diamonds has only come about in the past 200-300 years... just about when, globally, we started seriously moving towards a purely fiat system.

Gold has been used as a store of value for thousands of years around the world.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#26

Post by driverdan »

cjensen wrote: post #18

Speaking as someone who knows a lot about economics, I think PT Barnum put it best...[1] Economics is very clear in predicting how this will end up. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value and therefore the long-term price will be precisely zero. Each generation has its tulips [2]; each generation claims that the persistence in tulip price means that there is permanent intrinsic value; each generation is disappointed [3]. T…

Just because the long-term price will reach zero doesn't mean you can't profit in the short-term. Defining "long-term" and "short-term" more precisely is key to finding profit though.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#27

Post by adrianwaj »

cjensen wrote: post #18

Speaking as someone who knows a lot about economics, I think PT Barnum put it best...[1] Economics is very clear in predicting how this will end up. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value and therefore the long-term price will be precisely zero. Each generation has its tulips [2]; each generation claims that the persistence in tulip price means that there is permanent intrinsic value; each generation is disappointed [3]. T…

Just no intrinsic value to you... yet.

But ask people in Cyprus who have had their money confiscated by their bank if they think bitcoins would've been valuable to them, or people in China who've walked across the border with a thumbdrive of bitcoins/litecoins/??coins. Ask anyone who has made an overseas funds transfer if doing so was quicker and more painless than at bank. Volatility is offset by the overall price rise. Saying it has no intrinsic value is a moronic statement.

The main lesson to learn is in the altchains... otherwise it's just replacing one set of paper elites with a crypto elite. That's where the real awakening comes in, anyone can be an early adopter. Also, bitcoin is not a private blockchain, but even central banks could use cryptocoin implementations to move funds around internally. It's a piece of open-source software, that's a very important part of the equation of bitcoin's value: there can be pump and dumps at times, but overall it's severly missing the point to only see it as such.

add: now that I think about it, it'd be interesting for corporations to add the equivalent of an intranet of cryptocoins for budgeting and spending. There are tons of information systems potentials in bitcoin it blows my mind... even without some official government endorsement.. just in the software itself. Some intra/outer mini-exchange interfacing into some b2b portal to then access the public blockchains.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#28

Post by Locke1689 »

sanderjd wrote: post #23
cjensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold and Diamonds have obvious intrinsic value. Paper money does too, but it's harder to demonstrate.

Are you referring to the relatively recent industrial uses of gold and diamonds, or are you counting ornamentation as intrinsic value? Don't see the argument for the intrinsic value of paper money at all, but would love to be enlightened.

> Don't see the argument for the intrinsic value of paper money at all, but would love to be enlightened.

You can pay your taxes in it.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#29

Post by erikpukinskis »

cjensen wrote: post #18

Speaking as someone who knows a lot about economics, I think PT Barnum put it best...[1] Economics is very clear in predicting how this will end up. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value and therefore the long-term price will be precisely zero. Each generation has its tulips [2]; each generation claims that the persistence in tulip price means that there is permanent intrinsic value; each generation is disappointed [3]. T…

I don't think "intrinsic value" is a term in economics. It's a term in investing.

Economics is far from clear about predicting how Bitcoin will end up. The professional economics world has yet to seriously weigh in about Bitcoin. I just searched the top 10 journals on this list: http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/whorrace/journals.htm and none of them appear to have anything published about Bitcoin.

That said, Bitcoin does have "intrinsic value" as a payment processor. Think about PayPal. There's two kinds of value in PayPal. First, they have their deposits, which are denominated in various different currencies, and which are backed by various governments and insured. Then there are the people, the servers, the contracts, the buildings, all the other stuff that's necessary for those deposits to actually move around the globe. Ebay didn't buy PayPal's deposits, which aren't really PayPal's, they belong to their customers, eBay bought PayPal's assets.

Think of Bitcoin like that stuff... a distributed payment processing company. It just as reliable as PayPal, except no one can ever freeze your account, and you can only transfer Bitcoins. PayPal was worth $1.5 billion to eBay, so that's a reference for your "intrinsic valuation" that you're working on.

You might be thinking "well PayPal wouldn't be useful if it could only transfer Bitcoins and the value of Bitcoin is $0 so there's a chicken and egg problem!" Except I don't see a scenario where Bitcoin goes to $0. Let's imagine Bitcoin crashes all the way down to $0.01. Bitcoin is still useful if you're trying to get money to your grandma in Cuba, or to pay your Latvian web development contractor. Maybe it's extremely volatile, but that's OK because you otherwise have no way to get your money where it needs to go, and you're only going to keep it in Bitcoins for a few days. You buy some Bitcoins, send where they're going, and the other side cashes them out.

Now why is this relevant? Well, if during those 4 days, there was $1,000,000 worth of money that people were trying to send this way, then there need to be at least $1m worth of Bitcoins to "float" those transactions. Essentially those people all show up on Monday being like "we don't care how much it costs because we're selling them again in three days, we just need $1m worth of Bitcoins to send to our grandma/contractor/etc". Therefore the "value" of Bitcoin goes up to at least $0.05 ($1m/21m).

This is just one of Bitcoin's many "intrinsic" values. It is the "payment processor of last resort" for everyone who falls through the cracks of Western Union/Paypal/etc. This creates a floor below which Bitcoin is unlikely to fall.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#30

Post by modeless »

OafTobark wrote: post #9
modeless wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have 20 Coinbase wallets? Unlike regular bitcoin wallets, there's no reason to have more than one Coinbase wallet. A Coinbase wallet can have an unlimited number of Bitcoin addresses and it is generally tied to a real name with a bank account and/or credit card for purchasing and selling bitcoins.

You don't really have a choice in some cases. Coinbase creates new wallets for referrals and maybe other transactions rather than use the existing wallet

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Coinbase does not create new wallets for any transaction. It creates new bitcoin addresses, but all addresses are contained in one wallet.
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