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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

news.earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#11

Post by jMyles »

shp0ngle wrote: post #6
wyldfire wrote: post #5

I thought earn.com (formerly 21.co) was a clever idea and I signed up. Once or twice a quarter I would get an item incoming and I'd usually read and/or fill out a survey. Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).

There is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO spam

How did this become religion on HN?

Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today:

* Origin

* NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team)

* Loki

* New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature

* Trustless Quorums

* Distributed validation

I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#12

Post by crabasa »

This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1].

One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.

[1] https://www.fizbuz.com

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#13

Post by amasad »

jMyles wrote: post #11
shp0ngle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO spam

How did this become religion on HN? Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today: * Origin * NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team) * Loki * New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature * Trustless Quorums * Distributed validation I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

I would frame it as lots of interesting theoritcal and PoC things but very little applications that provides value for end-users.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#14

Post by tdb7893 »

jMyles wrote: post #11
shp0ngle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO spam

How did this become religion on HN? Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today: * Origin * NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team) * Loki * New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature * Trustless Quorums * Distributed validation I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

Cryptocurrencies right now are at the point where there has been lots of hype for years now but very little actual use (it's mostly just for speculation right now). I'm just burned out of the hype around it without it really delivering on a large scale.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#15

Post by ttul »

LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

I guess as a private fund, that’s between them and their LPs...

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#16

Post by vinniejames »

LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

This explainantion doesn't make sense. You're alledging a16z funded 21.co with $100M, then took it all back to buy Bitcoin?

If that's the case earn.com would own the BTC, which would mean Coinbase acquired all the BTC held by earn.com

Unless there is something I'm missing, this almost certainly did NOT happen

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#17

Post by harryh »

vinniejames wrote: post #16
LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

This explainantion doesn't make sense. You're alledging a16z funded 21.co with $100M, then took it all back to buy Bitcoin? If that's the case earn.com would own the BTC, which would mean Coinbase acquired all the BTC held by earn.com Unless there is something I'm missing, this almost certainly did NOT happen

"21.co had been started as 21E6, a bitcoin mining company with a sizable data center footprint and a monthly bill to match. The company was set up to return mined bitcoin to its shareholders"

https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#18

Post by btctemp97 »

crabasa wrote: post #12

This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1]. One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just…

Actually, the one-to-one emails were only a small part of their business model. Earn has become popular among crypto companies for doing paid mass email campaigns.

If you are on the site as a user it's obvious. You get a lot of paid messages if you sign up for the right lists. Not sure if it will scale, but interesting use of crypto.

This is kind of a silly site, but it's one of the few articles I can find on the topic. https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advert...

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#19

Post by jjallen »

LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

So you're saying that 21.co/Earn.com bought BTC with some of the invested capital, held it as BTC rose, and then distributed it to its shareholders? One of which is A16Z.

This seems possible, because, as we know, the price of BTC has fallen recently from ~$16k to ~$7k. So the gains could be large if they did indeed buy BTC with some of the capital they raised, but probably not $1 billion, or at least I would guess against that. The timing and distributions would have to have been quite right.

But, I will say that at 11-50 employees[0] there should have been quite a bit of capital left over from the ~$150 million they raised, even after a few years of burn.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/21e6

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#20

Post by kristianc »

> Over the last several years, the primary way most people have obtained cryptocurrency is through buying it, with many of these transactions facilitated by Coinbase. With this acquisition, we allow users to also earn crypto by doing things they already know how to do — like replying to emails and filling out surveys.

Ick. Who'd have thought the future of technology would look like shitty direct marketing scams?

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