311–320 of 883 posts
Is there any way of knowing how much YC made on the IPO? Ballpark/order of magnitude? Always curious to see what a win looks like from the accelerator side.
Not sure about YC, but Andreessen-Horowitz seems to have made about $14B from their $2M investment? Assuming I'm reading this SEC filing correctly. And Union Square Ventures appears to have turned $13M into about $7B? https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679788/000162828021...
Coinbase is definitely a success story in how to appeal to the masses. There were always alternatives, but coinbase always came out on top despite the high fees and poor customer service. I think Coinbase as a publicly traded company will be very interesting to follow. Not only is it a massively cyclical industry, but the supposed point of crypto is to reducing the reliance on, and grifting from, companies like Coinb…
In the past, Bitcoin exchanges IMO felt shady. They frequently were run from foreign countries and got away with avoiding Know-Your-Customer banking laws. Coinbase brought a true sense of legitimacy and trustworthiness to Bitcoin exchanging.
Coinbase was the first company that made the whole process feel pretty safe and reliable.
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They did give 0.1 btc in the early days. Which if you did hold into them would be roughly $6500 by today's rate (you'd also have BCH, BCHN, BSV and BTG).
They also seem to have quietly closed early users' accounts and taken the holdings.
So the ratio between the value of the exchange is about 1/10 - 1/15 of the total value of the market it trades. (For comparison take say Interactive Broker's market value to the market value of the total stock market.)
And Coinbase far from the only exchange out there. With this valuation I bet the value of the exchanges is higher than the value of the total cryptocurrency market.
Right now Coinbase is trading around 350 making it worth about 100B, the total value of bitcoin is about 1.000B and all cryptocurrencies that are tradeable on Coinbase is maybe 1.500B. So the ratio between the value of the exchange is about 1/10 - 1/15 of the total value of the market it trades. (For comparison take say Interactive Broker's market value to the market value of the total stock market.) And Coinbase far…
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PoW is open-membership, because the means of coin production are not tied to owning coins already. All you need to contribute is computing power, and you can start earning coins at a profit. PoS is closed-membership with a veneer of open-membership, because the means of coin production are tied to owning a coin already. What this means in practice is that no rational coin-owner is going to sell you coins at a fast en…
It seems like your contention is that PoS coins are priced based on discounted cash flow, correct? I think that's a reasonable model, but it's hardly unique to PoS coins, and it doesn't really seem problematic. > the system is only as resilient as the nodes run by the people who bought in initially This point applies to any assets that generate cash flow, like stocks, yet they seem to have plenty of trading volume. A…
It's very problematic if the system's liveness is tied to owning a coin. If I can knock PoS nodes offline, I can not only cause a quorum failure, but also I can cause the offline nodes's coins to get slashed (which is usually how PoS chains deal with this problem). Moreover, there's no recovery from this -- the temporarily-offline nodes are forever slashed, even if they come online later. (EDIT: I'm not limited to knocking nodes offline -- if I can commandeer them through a zero-day, the effect is the same: I make your nodes commit a slashable offense).
Contrast this to PoW, where even if you manage to knock a majority of miners offline, you ultimately have to keep them offline in order to prevent them from later generating and broadcasting a better chain than the one you want to exist. Even if you can physically destroy the majority of miners, the chain still lives on, and new miners can be built and brought online elsewhere.
> This point applies to any assets that generate cash flow, like stocks, yet they seem to have plenty of trading volume
Trading volume is easily faked in crypto-land -- a whale just sends coins to themselves. I'd like to see some hard evidence that the volumes are not from wash-trading. Also, this isn't relevant at all to the system's resilience.
> In practice there are other reasons for selling, like wanting to offset gains/losses for tax purposes, or wanting to buy food.
I didn't say you don't sell coins. I said you don't sell enough of them that the buyer can use them to increase their rate of coin production.
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I mean, how can what's on the book be be fake if my trades are executed faster, the spread is smaller and I can take advantage of the higher liquidity?? Those things aren't just arbitrary numbers with no effect, if you are trading it's pretty noticable where the volume is higher even if you don't look at the order book.
Sorry? They most certainly can be arbitrary numbers. [1] You know 99% of all LTC trading on Coinbase was one account trading back and forth with itself a couple years ago. Spoof trading involves putting up a big order, then yanking it at the last second before it gets executed. If you're the house, you can do literally anything if only the fox is watching the henhouse. As the peer response states, if you're the house…
It's especially obvious when trading higher amounts or trading a smaller liquidity token in the first place. Maybe I can't verify the actual numbers but I can very much verify there's more liquidity etc. than when I do the same transactions on a smaller exchange (and I'm on ~5 exchanges).
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Like a lot of bubbles, there is FOMO and lack of understanding of the technology. It is easy to compare crypto to the internet. When the internet first started out a lot of people didn't invest in GOOG because it was not obvious where the revenue would come from. People are afraid of making the same mistake here as well. "I don't know how BTC will generate cashflow outside of being a Ponzi scheme, but I assume the te…
GOOG was a good investment because nobody invested in it. If everyone had invested in GOOG, it would not have been as good an investment since its success would already be priced in. If the number has already gone up, you are too late. If everyone is talking about it, you are too late.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-listing-is-crypto-s-...
I'm not sure what I'm more amazed at: The foresight of Coinbase's founder starting the company so early on, or my personal total lack of foresight having read with interest about Bitcoin from the beginning and yet not bothering to buy a single coin at any point over the past decade.
I know lots of really smart software people who avoided crypto because it didnt and still doesnt “make sense”. But we all didnt invest on the merit of the technology. We forgot the whole “how will people behave” part and lost out on millions.