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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#141

Post by CryptoPunk »

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)?

Fiat means giving the payment processor significant leverage over the paid email service.

Fiat also means the email service couldn't be global, because Trusted-Third-Party-based payment processors can't operate globally owing to the global regulatory patchwork.

Contrast that with Bitcoin(Cash)-based international remittance, or Ethereum-based token sales, which are accessible to people in every country in the world.

Email is an open and global protocol, so cryptocurrency is a good fit for it.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#142

Post by asymmetric »

wdewind wrote: post #103
asymmetric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff

I agree with you on this point and it's what scares me the most about the whole blockchain "revolution".

If you look at the people who actually started it though, it was mostly anarcho-capitalists/rightwing libertarians, so that isn't surprising.

> Why wont specialization of labor take over again

That could happen. But what could also happen is that people start relying less exclusively on one relatively massive source of income, and instead start relying on several, parallel smaller ones.

I think that's already the case in non-Western parts of the world, and one of the reasons why it hasn't taken place (at least in Europe) is regulation - think of how you can't just sell food on the side of the road in Paris, which you can do in, e.g. Bangkok.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#143

Post by jreyes333 »

Earn.com has become a glorified airdrop platform, but even so they've got a good team there that are good additions to Coinbase. Maybe the most expensive acqui-hire?

Either way it's a huge nod towards tokenized attention economy projects by one of the biggest players in the space.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#144

Post by jreyes333 »

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…

Yeah disappointing but not the attempt at using tokens / blockchain to eliminate spam. We're going to be experimenting with a few spam elimination models at Sendy: https://www.sendy.network/

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#145

Post by ojr »

The coolest part about Earn.com is you could send a message for $100 to VCs like Marc Andreessen, when I finally finish my app I will be using Earn.com to find testers that have blogs that can spread the word

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#146

Post by rsynnott »

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.

> 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.

What lead you to expect that people would want to pay to email you? The business model makes no sense; it's obvious that that wasn't going to happen.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#147

Post by notahacker »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> 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.

Email is already open and international and doesn't need bank accounts. This is paid for email solicitation, and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks, unless perhaps they wish to conceal their true identity because they're spear-phishing.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#148

Post by wpietri »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic

The important word here being "seems". Seeming is a thing that happens in someone's head. So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".

It does not seem like that to me. Or to 99.9% of companies, who start out tying their companies to the reach of a specific national or regional financial system and then move happily beyond it.

In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their economic activity through that financial system than those in developed nations do.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#149

Post by notahacker »

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)?

They were a blockchain startup, so it'd have been embarrassing for them to base their service around the sort of money the average person actually uses. Also gave them a natural audience for targeted ICO spam.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#150

Post by vasilipupkin »

jjallen wrote: post #56
tristanj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we can run through the math. In March of 2015, 21.co/Earn.com raised $115m from a16z. In June of 2015, the price of BTC was about $240 each. If we assume half the investment went into bitcoin, it means they acquired $115m/2/($240/BTC) = ~240,000 BTC At today's price of $8000/BTC, assuming they never sold, those coins would be worth $1.9B. So it is plausible they hold more than $1B in bitcoin.

It seems like this would have leaked if Earn.com had earned this much, or if A16Z had earned a large distribution in one year (like last), it would have had to have been reported to their LPs in the net asset value update. And perhaps it did leak, because we're talking about it. But then I would still guess there would be more discussion about this if an LP leaked it. There would be ample documentation of this.

also, why would a company that holds a billion dollars in capital sell for 100 mln ?
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