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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

news.earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#101

Post by wtvanhest »

charlesdm wrote: post #91
philip1209 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to this - I've heard that many VC funds were going through their legal paperwork with a fine-tooth comb to see if they were allowed to invest LP money directly into crypto or ICOs. Some were not permitted, and it definitely demonstrated how some of these funds lack the flexibility to pursue opportunities that do not pattern-match classic VC investments of the last few decades.

As per their LP agreement, the fund itself might only have been allowed to invest in equities / companies, such as this one. The company itself could then perhaps invest directly into cryptocurrencies without restrictions.

While that may or may not be lucrative, it wouldnt help them in future rounds when they are showing their track record bc the track record cant include non-fee paying accounts.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#102

Post by CryptoPunk »

wpietri wrote: post #88
modeless wrote: post #41

I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money. I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.

Looking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain." Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary. And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful…

>>Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.

By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where a payment system can operate.

Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users of the winning paid-email service would be locked into using the same financial intermediary, which would then have significant power over its users owing to its network effect.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#103

Post by wdewind »

asymmetric wrote: post #98
wdewind wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying the technology is derivative of the economics and politics of our culture, and it is unlikely that this relationship will invert itself. Tons of political science and economic thought has gone into designing systems where behaviors that are beneficial to the network are also economically rewarding, you're basically describing market economics. Nothing about cryptocurrency is novel from a political or econo…

It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often). Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet. Which leads…

> It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains

We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff. Take banking: in fact by a lot of measures it's the most highly regulated industry, and most of the fundamentals (like the interest rates) are not set via markets, but via elected (or sometimes not) officials. We don't actually want market economics to run the vast majority of our systems, which is why we've never built frameworks for it before, not because it's particularly complicated.

> Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

Why wont specialization of labor take over again, and make it so crypto just turns into a different set of centralized players running the infrastructure with a ton of consumers? What happens when it turns out the vast majority of people don't actually want to be involved in running their own banking infrastructure?

> (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Totally agree, upvoted :)

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#104

Post by jMyles »

wpietri wrote: post #92
jMyles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you be so kind as to show a few of those technologies in some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses? > But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech. Really? For me it's the almost-a-decade of hype but seeing very little in practical utility beyond speculation, ransomware, and some lig…

I'm head-down in writing NuCypher as we speak, but it's obvious to me how to do what we're doing without a distributed consensus mechanism, and I do think that the real world use cases will be pretty rad.

Our system allows an actor (Alice) to select any number of recipients (Bob) in a Policy. Alice can disappear from the network forever, and subsequently, any DataSource can encrypt data, using Alice's public key, which can then be decrypted by all of the Bobs.

That's pretty cool to me. I do think that medical devices / IoT are an obvious use case. I also hope that our tech is used to build selected consortiums of journalists, whom whistle-blowers can then encrypt for only by knowing the policy key.

Another interesting use case is for distributed ops: if you have a number of streams of operational data that you want to share only with a certain number of watchers, presently you need to trust a centralized service to do that.

I'll admit: I'm not really the use case guy. But I am waist-deep in the python over here, and I can tell you we have a good thing going.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#105

Post by skybrian »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #102
wpietri wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain." Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary. And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful…

>>Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary. By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where a payment system can operate. Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users of the winning paid-email serv…

I guess calling it "email" instead of a task makes it sound new, but they do have competitors, Mechanical Turk probably being the most prominent.

Mechanical Turk pays out using Amazon payments or Amazon gift cards.

Google Opinion Awards pays out as either Google Play credit on Android. It looks like you can convert this to a gift card, at least in the U.S. They use Paypal on iOS.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#106

Post by [deleted] »

wtvanhest wrote: post #101
charlesdm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per their LP agreement, the fund itself might only have been allowed to invest in equities / companies, such as this one. The company itself could then perhaps invest directly into cryptocurrencies without restrictions.

While that may or may not be lucrative, it wouldnt help them in future rounds when they are showing their track record bc the track record cant include non-fee paying accounts.

[deleted]

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#107

Post by mikeyouse »

loourr wrote: post #31
manuelflara wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insider trading only applies to publicly traded companies.

I said insider dealing. I just meant that it's an indication of sketchiness. And I'm not actually sure that's true (though I did before googling it just now): https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e24dc4ab-2a77... https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersinsiderhtm.html

It's not technically insider trading but the managers of the companies (by way of the Board of Directors) have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Undertaking a bad merger to bail out a different company from one of your investors could be construed as a breach of that duty. Of course, it would take a long court case to determine fault / damages, so it's unlikely to happen, but there are some safeguards to prevent stuff like this (if that is what happened.. which who knows... ).

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#108

Post by morogop »

jonnydubowsky wrote: post #93
jMyles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently. Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind. If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place. Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has ot…

Jmyles, your reasoned and compassionate tone and plea to consider the benefits of blockchain which might effect those less fortunate is right on. How about the thousands of people who have already sent millions of dollars back home to developing nations where they previously had to rely on western union and their exorbitant commission fees. For the unbanked, blockchain provides significant savings in remittance costs…

FYI, remittance payments are via bitcoin are substantially more costly than best-in-class transfer services, and they have more risk.

This use case is constantly put forth by people who don't have to send money anywhere, because those people have no clue what they're talking about.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#109

Post by SirLJ »

mikeyouse wrote: post #107
loourr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said insider dealing. I just meant that it's an indication of sketchiness. And I'm not actually sure that's true (though I did before googling it just now): https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e24dc4ab-2a77... https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersinsiderhtm.html

It's not technically insider trading but the managers of the companies (by way of the Board of Directors) have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Undertaking a bad merger to bail out a different company from one of your investors could be construed as a breach of that duty. Of course, it would take a long court case to determine fault / damages, so it's unlikely to happen, but there are some safeguards to prevent…

It is called soft landing/ aqui-hire in the VC world... that’s why you need to be part of incubators, etc...

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#110

Post by nikanj »

jMyles wrote: post #51
nikanj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs read pitch decks, not whitepapers

This strikes me as needlessly mean. Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO. As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.

You're right, I was more curt and that came across pretty asshol-ish.

In general, whitepapers mention the blockchain in all the places that matter. Contrast websites and pitch decks mentioning it in all the places it can possibly be mentioned - as it's perceived to increase the odds of getting attention.

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