Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#101

Post by RockyMcNuts » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:27 AM UTC

adrianwaj wrote: post #73

seiji wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

walked across the border with a thumbdrive of bitcoins/litecoins/??coins. What about walking across the border with the account credentials of a WoW character with a lot of gold? intranet of cryptocoins for budgeting and spending. Is there a way to make a "trusted bitcoin" for internal use only where you don't have to do all the computation? I guess at that point it could just be a centralized Excel spreadsheet for a…

You're not thinking too deeply. I think a company could use an intra-blockchain to run a micro-economy within it. Transactions take place that enable it to function. Also, there is an interface between intra and public blockchains. If your department wants pens, it must buy it internally from the Supplies department. At some point Supplies converts its intracoins to public cash or coins (with management approval^) to…

if you're going to have an intra-company economy with micro-transactions, it's not clear why those transactions are more beneficial than market transactions with trusted external suppliers.

an important and possibly the principal reason for forming companies is to avoid the transaction costs of coordinating numerous independent agents through a market economy.

so, when transaction costs decline, firms don't set up intra-company micro-economies, the supply chain gets vertically disintegrated.

for instance, where before you have a service that could only be supplied by a big company with a data center, now you get a small team providing the service by integrating software and services from a variety of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS suppliers.

basically, either you have a free market, or top-down central planning... if you build a market within the company, there's no point in top-down coordination, and if there's still top-down coordination, no point pretending decisions are made based on an internal free market economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#102

Post by sillysaurus2 » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 3:35 AM UTC

venus wrote: post #100

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so goddamn pissed off that the phone rep, who could barely speak English, had typo'd my number, which I had been very, very careful to say slowly, and to repeat back to him twice, and then be asked to prove myself by faxing a physical piece of paper in order to get my money back, after a total time investment of > 3 hours, after taking into account driving to the store, waiting on hold, etc, that my mindset was…

Fair enough. That does sound pretty annoying, I'd probably be pissed off myself! Anyway, your later comments put your original comment into better perspective, so thanks for replying.

Ah, sorry I wasn't very clear. =)

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#103

Post by pg » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 4:01 AM UTC

markkat wrote: post #89

pg wrote: post #57

Incidentally, Coinbase's graph has an almost misleadingly modest aspect ratio. If you want to compare their growth to other growth graphs you've seen, compress it by at least half horizontally.

pg, if a reasonably intelligent person asked you to describe bitcoin, how would you do it? -if you'd humor me I ask, because IMO much of the debate about bitcoin consists of people conflating and abusing definitions and talking past each other. As you are obviously interested in it, I wonder what you see, and perhaps what interests you most about it.

I would not be the one to ask. I don't understand the details of the protocol. All I could describe is the general idea of a cryptocurrency.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#104

Post by markkat » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 4:34 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #103

markkat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, if a reasonably intelligent person asked you to describe bitcoin, how would you do it? -if you'd humor me I ask, because IMO much of the debate about bitcoin consists of people conflating and abusing definitions and talking past each other. As you are obviously interested in it, I wonder what you see, and perhaps what interests you most about it.

I would not be the one to ask. I don't understand the details of the protocol. All I could describe is the general idea of a cryptocurrency.

Ok. Thanks for the response.

In some sense I suppose that actually answers my question.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#105

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 5:03 AM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #28

sanderjd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that paper money has value, I'm just not sure that it is intrinsic. I'm also not sure a currency necessarily should have intrinsic value.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#106

Post by politician » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 6:01 AM UTC

dubfan wrote: post #87

WoodenChair wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's medicine if it makes you better. It's a currency if you can exchange it for goods and services.

What kind of currency fluctuates in value by +/- 20% in one day? What kind of currency is inherently deflationary?

I don't have a particular answer to your rhetorical questions, but I do have some thoughts on inflation and deflation, specifically with regard to their relationship to hoarding and the money supply.

First, deflation encourages hoarding when the holder can afford to spend at some infinite later date, but some spending happens earlier than the heat death of the universe by necessity (e.g. food and shelter, grandma needs assistance, execution of wills).

Second, when a currency is printed (inflated) by its host country, the effects of the increased money supply aren't experienced proportionally or immediately everywhere. Instead, the first pallet of new money retains most, if not all, of the buying power represented at the previous level of supply. This represents an asymmetrical information advantage for the producer of the currency, and represents a disadvantage for the currency consumer who probably isn't in a position to know whether they are selling goods for "cheaper" currency. For example, if you were playing poker, and had the ability to print Aces on demand and legally inject them into the game, the other players might not like that (esp. if the new cards are injected after they've already calculated their odds and placed a bet).

Various economic philosophies consider it best to have some level of inflation to lubricate the flow of goods and services between buyers and sellers, and in these cases it would be useful for everyone if the size of the money supply was widely known. Unfortunately, there are many different definitions for money supply such that it's actually pretty much impossible to know how much the value of one unit of the currency has changed between two points in time without comparing them to a third, also variable, commodity or currency (e.g. gold, foreign currencies)

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a deterministic money supply where any individual can determine the upper bound of the amount of supply at any time. In our poker analogy, the deck might be short a few cards, but no one has an extra stack of Aces in their shirt sleeve, and everyone can calculate their odds independently. Advanced investors can even enumerate the public ledger and determine the level of lost or otherwise illiquid coins to determine a tighter bound.

The ability to have a good understanding of the supply of the currency is one reason that Bitcoin is so exciting for long-distance transfers.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#107

Post by winthrowe » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 6:20 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #17

chollida1 wrote: post #5

Note the title is a bit misleading. They say 650,000 users but the next sentence they state > "we crossed more than 650,000 consumer Bitcoin wallets" I'm not familiar with their service but I have 20 or so wallets that I've accumulated over the past 20 months, so I'm guessing its entirely possible for a single user to have multiple wallets, infact its so common that I'd label it the norm. I wonder what percentage of…

You probably mean you have 1 wallet, containing 20 Bitcoin addresses. Not sure why Coinbase uses the terminology "consumer Bitcoin wallet", but it is pretty clear they mean "user accounts", where each account is associated to 1 wallet, each containing possibly multiple addresses.

Presumably to differentiate them from "business Bitcoin wallets".

https://coinbase.com/merchants

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#108

Post by laumars » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 7:36 AM UTC

smtddr wrote: post #88

laumars wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's still not a currency, kind of like how "alternative medicine" isn't really medicine. All you're proving there is how educated people like ourselves don't take alternative medicines seriously (and for good reason too). However technically that example is actually countering your point since the "alternative" prefix just signifies another style of; such as "alternative music" is still music.

>>All you're proving there is how educated people like ourselves don't take alternative medicines seriously (and for good reason too). So I'm not going to argue one way or the other, I just want to be clear. You think the stuff listed in this link[1] is nonsense? Or what is your definition of alternative medicine? Anything that doesn't come from a first-world scientific study? 1. http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health…

Herbalism is one of the few exceptions. But most of the good stuff from that has been synthesized into modern medicine anyway.

But to answer your question, yes I do think Homoeopathy is complete nonsense.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#109

Post by adrianwaj » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 9:00 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #99

adrianwaj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking too deeply. I think a company could use an intra-blockchain to run a micro-economy within it. Transactions take place that enable it to function. Also, there is an interface between intra and public blockchains. If your department wants pens, it must buy it internally from the Supplies department. At some point Supplies converts its intracoins to public cash or coins (with management approval^) to…

It would be insane for employees to accept payment in scrip without a promise of a fixed exchange rate. Even with such a promise it would not be especially sensible (because if the company implodes you lose your job and some of your savings...). (I mean sure, you could trust that management with their total control of the scrip would not manipulate it to the advantage of management, but good luck with that)

I don't want to get into a full debate over the intricacies of the idea, (problems can be ironed out) ...but you could have part employee payment in fiat, part in public cryptocoin, part intracoin... it's up to the employee. But if we want to see public cryptocoins widely used, having it interface with private chains seems like a prerequisite, or at least a good start.

It's really an information systems topic: technical/business/social. Could be the next big thing.. if implemented right.

Re: Coinbase Crosses 650,000 Users

#110

Post by adrianwaj » Thu, Dec 19, 2013, 9:19 AM UTC

seiji wrote: post #78

adrianwaj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking too deeply. I think a company could use an intra-blockchain to run a micro-economy within it. Transactions take place that enable it to function. Also, there is an interface between intra and public blockchains. If your department wants pens, it must buy it internally from the Supplies department. At some point Supplies converts its intracoins to public cash or coins (with management approval^) to…

mining all coins instantly, Ah, that's the part I was unsure about. Setting up a new block chain and instantly collecting all coin issuance sets up a lot of nice use cases. Yes, that's amazing. If bitcoin ever does become widely accepted, it'll be because a new chain of coins is used that have been 100% mined by a private party (or government) handing them out. When I was at IBM, each manager had fake "Blue Bucks" th…

If mining all instantly, the key with intracoins is getting the equations right in terms of issuance and supply. There'd have to be some way of issuing them properly. Even if it just equated to the amount of cash reserves and/or cryptocoins the company had, because the idea is that anyone can cash out their intracoins if they need to. Staff need the confidence that they can do that at any time (provided management approves of it (perhaps only some staff have cashout approval privileges)) but the ability has to be there, even if management's willingness is not. For example, an automotive company needs to buy new tires, and it's the tire department that only has intracoins by having sold tires to production line, so that department cashes them out on the company exchange and buys tires from Dunlop. The production line needs some way of getting reimbursed by management or a Sales department who recycles coins back into it (once cars have been sold), so it can then buy new tires and other factors of production to keep making cars. Perhaps Sales would make an order for xx cars from Production and pay with the intracoins it has converted from the cash/cryptocoins it has gained at the edge of the organization.

And this also leads to interesting use cases with company conglomerates -- sort of like frequent flyer points that can be used interchangeably across certain groups of airlines... but in this case intracoins across certain allianced firms.