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Understanding Coinbase

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Re: Understanding Coinbase

#131

Post by fastball »

smeej wrote: post #114
freeone3000 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably people who make less than $22,000 USD and have no capital gains, which definitionally cannot apply to anyone dealing with cryptocurrencies (as they're securities).

The long-term capital gains rate is 0% for single people whose income and short-term capital gains are under $40k per year, or married people under $80k.[0] "People who pay no income tax" absolutely can apply to people using cryptocurrencies. [0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/capital-gains-tax-r...

Thanks, was about to claw my hair out.

Every time I have a discussion about crypto on HN I want to go buy lots of crypto because there are clearly still some smart people that really don't get it, to the point of seeming deliberately obtuse.

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#132

Post by smeej »

imtringued wrote: post #128
smeej wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already an entire industry growing up around enabling cryptocurrencies to be spent using traditional payment rails too, though, for those who don't want to see their governments print away the value of their money. Coinbase itself has a debit card that deducts directly from your crypto balance and allows you to swipe the card anywhere that normally takes Visa. They're even a card issuer for Visa in their own…

>for those who don't want to see their governments print away the value of their money. The sad reality is that governments fail to do so. The irony behind your comment is that if they could, they would have stopped a long time ago.

I think we must be talking past each other or something. The purchasing power of every single fiat currency has trended down since the elimination of hard money standards, so as far as I can tell, every single government is printing away the value of its money.

I don't see how that's "failing to do so" if "so" refers to "printing away the value of their money"?

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#133

Post by smeej »

agumonkey wrote: post #125
smeej wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is your critique that the tech is just in its early stages of development and hard to use for non-techies right now? Or are you seeing some reason it can't eventually become as easy to use as the internet, even though that was also really complex and hard to use in its first decades?

No it's randomly chaotic and disguised as cute systems and their little world to play with finances.. there's a dissonance to me here. Also I don't think even the earliest of networking was as weird (but I could be wrong).

Different types of networking still appear "randomly chaotic" to lay people. To people who know how they work, they're no more complex than cryptocurrencies are to people who know how they work.

The fact that something requires specialist understanding at its most basic levels does not in any way prevent building upon it and simplifying it until it reaches such a level of abstraction that any layperson can use it even though they don't understand it.

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#134

Post by 177tcca »

imtringued wrote: post #127
lottin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be foolish for a business to enter into BTC-denominated contracts because that would expose them to a huge foreign exchange risk in return for nothing.

So you're saying these people don't want to use BTC? If they used BTC exclusively for everything this wouldn't be an issue. Dollar denominated contracts only matter if all you have is dollars. By that I mean that if you buy 0.01 BTC today and hold them until the contract is completed then you face zero foreign exchange risk. If you don't possess the BTC on the day you signed the contract then you basically created an…

People don't "want" to use credit cards or PayPal, either.

They do so because it gets the job done.

You'll get really tired from all of these gymnastics trying to convince everyone already using cryptocurrency that nobody's using cryptocurrency.

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#135

Post by brianvli »

smeej wrote: post #116
pta2002 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have the private keys. If coinbase loses them, you're out of money. Possibly. They're insured supposedly, but if you have your own private keys then the only entity you have to deal with in this case is yourself (this can be both a positive and a negative, depending on how careful you are)

There is a "Coinbase Wallet," though, which is somewhat confusingly a separate app where you actually do hold your own private keys.[0] You can seamlessly link your exchange account and your Wallet account so you can move the money right into your own Coinbase Wallet with your own private keys as soon as you're done with the exchange. I'm not sure the parent comment meant that wallet, but Coinbase does "give you a wa…

You need to transfer the funds from your Coinbase account to Coinbase wallet. You’ll never have access to the private keys on Coinbase.

At that point, Coinbase wallet is the equivalent of Metamask et al

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#136

Post by brianvli »

fastball wrote: post #25
brianvli wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase is more about turning non-crypto currencies into crypto currencies while UNI/SUSHI are more about turning crypto currencies into different crypto currencies. In my POV, there's only two ways to get into crypto: - Centralized exchanges with KYC - Mining Coinbase is a KYC centralized exchange and enables people to turn their bank account $$s into crypto. Uniswap and Sushiswap are only relevant once someone has…

As others mentioned you're forgetting an economy which just uses crypto as the means of exchange, which for many has always been the long term goal. But you're also forgetting P2P crypto marketplaces like LocalCryptos[1], which (for Ethereum) allows you to have smart contract escrow and therefore the middle-man is only really required in the case of disputes. I personally have transacted > $100k with LocalEthereum, n…

Ty for sharing!

I did totally forget to mention local exchange

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#137

Post by agumonkey »

smeej wrote: post #133
agumonkey wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's randomly chaotic and disguised as cute systems and their little world to play with finances.. there's a dissonance to me here. Also I don't think even the earliest of networking was as weird (but I could be wrong).

Different types of networking still appear "randomly chaotic" to lay people. To people who know how they work, they're no more complex than cryptocurrencies are to people who know how they work. The fact that something requires specialist understanding at its most basic levels does not in any way prevent building upon it and simplifying it until it reaches such a level of abstraction that any layperson can use it eve…

but uniswap is already presented as something for the people, it's not experts talking to experts or infrastructure

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#138

Post by lilactown »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #103
howdydoo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, don't link your bank account using Plaid. Use deposit verification (or old fashioned bank wire) instead.

Why?

I assume it's because plaid requires your bank login information in order to make transactions on your behalf.

Re: Understanding Coinbase

#139

Post by jacques_chester »

smeej wrote: post #114
freeone3000 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably people who make less than $22,000 USD and have no capital gains, which definitionally cannot apply to anyone dealing with cryptocurrencies (as they're securities).

The long-term capital gains rate is 0% for single people whose income and short-term capital gains are under $40k per year, or married people under $80k.[0] "People who pay no income tax" absolutely can apply to people using cryptocurrencies. [0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/capital-gains-tax-r...

I stand corrected. I can be absolutely fiat-free if I choose to beggar myself.
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