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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

news.earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#131

Post by jMyles »

querulous wrote: post #130
jMyles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whi…

how is this better than pgp? what does it do that keybase can't already do?

With PGP (for that matter, PKE generally), you always need the original recipient to stay alive and use her private key to decrypt.

With proxy re-encryption, you don't. So any use cases that involve Alice disappearing while others continue to be able to encrypt for Bob (even without knowing who Bob is or what his public key is) are good ones for NuCypher.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#132

Post by CryptoPunk »

wpietri wrote: post #113
CryptoPunk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

This is a solution in search of a problem. Most people barely want to accept email from people they are likely to do business with. What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together? Also, you're just wrong about traditional financial intermediaries. It's easy enough to provide a few different ways to transfer funds. Or to do it over a relatively open netw…

>>What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels to rub together?

I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.

>>Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.

Making a wire transfer to use email? That'd be ridiculously expensive. You'd need a payment system built on top of the bank wire system, and it would need to be truly international in scope, and open, which no trusted third party based financial system is.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#133

Post by wollw »

As someone with an formal education in Art despite a background in Tech, I'm growing more and more disillusioned with currencies beyond actual Legal Tender... I almost agree with the 1792 Mint Act's attachment of a death sentence to the devaluing of our coins (silver and gold in particular). Money is at best Artwork and even then it's only by devaluing it that it gets passed around like it's nothing. What is Bitcoin's value other than a secure means of Bank transfer again? It just seems like a means of reinforcing what from a religious context would be called Simony. Show me the Money.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#136

Post by austenallred »

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?

No. 21.co was a company that built custom chips for bitcoin mining. The founders and A16Z have been pretty transparent about that throughout, as well as in the blog post.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#137

Post by nicky0 »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #135

Just curious about Earn and the use of Bitcoin (questions are not related to Coinbase nor the announcement): What's the downside of just using fiat money? Why need to use Bitcoin (or any crypto)?

Off the top of head, one reason is that there is no need to support multiple currencies for international users, or to worry about currency conversion.

Secondly it cuts out the need for middlemen (banks/payment processors).

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#138

Post by omarforgotpwd »

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?

Even if this was true, if there enough liquidity in the market to sell 100 million dollars worth of bitcoin without tanking the price?

According to blockchain.info the current daily transaction volume is around 870 million dollars.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#139

Post by free-trampolin »

wpietri wrote: post #114
45h34jh53k4j wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahh, thats the trick isnt it -- blockchain provides universal currency. No need for local currency handing, banks, cc processors, forex transfer providers, and all the things associated with local payment processors. While i dont think this is the first or is it truely useful, but yes, blockchain (specifically bitcoin) is providing a decentralized universal currency for use in decentralized systems like email. Its a…

In theory, perhaps. In practice, it provides a universally inconvenient currency. If somebody wants to send me money to read an email, then I want to be able to spend that money. If they send me bitcoin, I can't spend it directly: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l... Ergo, I am right back in need some way to convert it into my local currency. Except far less conveniently than just letting m…

I might add, that exchanging these BTC into fiat is a taxable event.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#140

Post by aiCeivi9 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #97

There is probably a non-block chain way to replicate this

> Earn.com allows senders to pay users for replying to emails and completing tasks

There was quite few sites with same idea 15 years ago. Back then it took me some time to understand that no serious business wants to show ads to people paid for watching them, since only people without significant income sign up for such programs and the incentive for fraud is high.

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