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Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

blog.coinbase.com

121–130 of 203 posts

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#121

Industries that rely heavily on business travel are basically fucked. Airlines (first and business class), hotels, ridesharings, car rentals and etc.

I expect plenty of offsite meetings once it's safe. Maybe it will all be offsites, much like academia has its conferences?

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#122

Should probably qualify this as "geographically decentralized". As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.

Sure. I think this is more a matter of Conway's law, or the old observation that when a company moves its headquarters, it usually makes the CEO's commute shorter.

They say that nobody on the executive team lives in San Francisco anymore, so that much seems likely to stick.

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees don't realize that taxes are the reason companies generally don't allow for remote positions. It's not just payroll taxes at stake. In a nutshell, having an employee in a tax jurisdiction creates a taxable nexus for the company, meaning that they can be subject to income taxes, commercial taxes, sales taxes/VAT, etc., in that jurisdiction. (And note: this has been part of domestic and international tax law…

Does it work the other way around, too? E.g., if live in New Hampshire and work remotely for a New York company, do I have to pay the NY income tax?

If you earn money from a "New York Source", you have to pay NY State income tax even if you live in another state.

https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/nonresident-faqs.htm#nystax

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees don't realize that taxes are the reason companies generally don't allow for remote positions. It's not just payroll taxes at stake. In a nutshell, having an employee in a tax jurisdiction creates a taxable nexus for the company, meaning that they can be subject to income taxes, commercial taxes, sales taxes/VAT, etc., in that jurisdiction. (And note: this has been part of domestic and international tax law…

Does it work the other way around, too? E.g., if live in New Hampshire and work remotely for a New York company, do I have to pay the NY income tax?

Can confirm. Have lived in NH for years, working remotely for companies headquartered in other states. Haven't had to pay their state income taxes.

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#125
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which addresses?

OFAC which manages US sanctions maintains a list of addresses that any entity complying with US regulations needs to block e.g. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... Most exchanges also use a service like Chainalysis to help identify which addresses need to be blocked or are high risk and need additional due diligence.

Coinbase even does their chain analytics in-house (and also on a contract basis for the U.S. government).

They take compliance incredibly seriously.

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#126

Industries that rely heavily on business travel are basically fucked. Airlines (first and business class), hotels, ridesharings, car rentals and etc.

Or people start traveling all the time, and WFH starts meaning "Working From Hotels". It's hard to predict the post lockdown world is what I'm saying.

I don’t know about that. Most people won’t enjoy being on the road. Even I who has done a lot of long form travel for fun got sick of it once I had to constantly travel for work.

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#127
post #120
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they're replaced with a team in Jakarta or Dhaka making 10% of what they made.

Time zones still matter. Which is a huge deterrent for being productive more so than being in the same office.

They also help you have around the clock coverage without people waking up at 4am to see if the alert is serious or not

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#128
post #119

Do workers who are employees of a company but are working from home get to write off part of their home or apartment as a business expense, the way contractors and self-employed do?

It depends, it was always a bit of a red flag in the US, but freelancers did and do so anyway. Based on the 2017? tax changes, employees basically can't period. See e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/your-home-office-deductions-ch...

Anyway the standard deduction is huge now so you’d need to beat that with a monstrous rent and a huge part of the house for it to apply, right?

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#129
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is paperwork, but you don't need to establish a new entity in every state/country where you have an office or employee. You can simply register your existing company as a "foreign" business in all of the jurisdictions where it is not legally incorporated (and this is what most businesses do). Generally, you only have a location-specific business created if there are location-specific benefits acquired, or benef…

I don't have any personal experience but this is what Mitchell Hashimoto wrote a few years ago on the general topic of hiring remote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563

It would be infinitely easy to do this with Bitcoin, you could have and all anonymous all remote workforce. Wait, that's already how open source works for the most part.

Re: Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

#130
post #30

Too bad coinabase\s approach to crypto is centralized. They operate a blocklists to prevent people from sending funds to certain addresses . Even paypal does not do this.

Any regulated financial institution is required to do that. Where did you get the idea PayPal doesn‘t?

Anti money laundering laws definitely apply to Paypal
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