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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#381

Post by jefftk »

danaris wrote: post #376
jefftk wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.

The amounts of money involved can absolutely spell life and death for people not lucky enough to have been born into the top 1%. "White collar crime" generally has vastly broader effects than what we normally think of when we talk about crime; it's just harder to see because the effects are not as immediate or obvious. Livelihoods destroyed by layoffs to juice the stock price; land, water, and air poisoned by polluta…

Are you saying this Coinbase layoff will likely kill people?

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#383

Post by janandonly »

drexlspivey wrote: post #315
britneybitch wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase is technologically kind of a joke. Their matching engine is crap. They haven't even adopted bech32. They just do the bare minimum to keep things working for 99% of users, and for the unlucky 1% they follow the same customer support strategy as Google (aka automated emails but no actual humans). Unfortunately Coinbase is YC and they do a lot of marketing, so people who are just getting started tend to think t…

> They haven't even adopted bech32 What? They’ve been supporting segwit addresses for years

You can do a Segwit transaction with an “old” Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) transaction. That is an address that starts with "3".

You only get the transaction size discount with “native” segwit transactions that are BECH32.

https://www.ledger.com/academy/difference-between-segwit-and...

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#384

Post by danaris »

jefftk wrote: post #381
danaris wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amounts of money involved can absolutely spell life and death for people not lucky enough to have been born into the top 1%. "White collar crime" generally has vastly broader effects than what we normally think of when we talk about crime; it's just harder to see because the effects are not as immediate or obvious. Livelihoods destroyed by layoffs to juice the stock price; land, water, and air poisoned by polluta…

Are you saying this Coinbase layoff will likely kill people?

I'm saying any large layoff has a decent chance of making some people homeless—either because they weren't making enough before to save money, or because they were riding an unrealistic expectation of growth (that the company and entire industry are often actively selling you) and bet too much on it (the latter being what I'd guess more likely in this case, based on my assumptions about the kind of money Coinbase would've been paying). And once you're homeless, you're at much higher risk for all kinds of problems, including dying in a variety of unpleasant ways.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#385

Post by yao420 »

TekMol wrote: post #228
danrocks wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the vast majority of crypto users only see it as a speculative vehicle and do not care about decentralized payments, I would guess.

But giving the tens of millions of Coinbase users a way to do cheap and fast microtransactions could change that. "Oh, you also have a lightning app? Cool, I'll send you the money this way."

I used to work at Coinbase. The thing is no one is actually using it for transactions of any type. The vast majority of users buy a token and let it sit until they can make a profit. The volume of transactions to other accounts was in the single percentage points.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#386

Post by pjc50 »

rahen wrote: post #378
hardwaresofton wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this discussed in enough HN threads. Everyone is quick to talk about FTX, Tether being a scam, etc but I rarely hear people discuss how the heck BTC is pegged at $16k this whole time, through it all.

You won't see this discussed on HN, there's an overall hostility toward Bitcoin. A few are interested or sometimes involved with it (whether with development or infrastructure) but don't bother enlightening the crowd since I think it's pretty hopeless here and they would be buried under downvotes. I wonder if that resentment would have been the same toward the Internet in 1997. You know, that useless thing for hacker…

Tech people were hugely enthusiastic about Internet-like things even before the internet existed. I know Arthur C Clarke predicted satellite TV in 1957; I'm sure one could find lots of examples of internet prediction, some positive, some negative (e.g. The Machine Stops, 1928).

But 97 was late for the internet. ARPANET dates back to the 1970s .. as a government project!

There was a great deal of value in the internet liberating people from monopolist telcos and their billing practices, as well as from borders, and there was nowhere near the same level of scamminess and crime. Why? Because there was no money changing hands.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#387

Post by ptero »

krisoft wrote: post #236
ptero wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of hype and an expectation (IMO wishful thinking) that NFTs would have a very broad penetration in the society, for example replace physical collectibles. If that did turn out to be true, most people would require a lot of handholding for taxes, complex global regulation, etc. which the Coinbase would provide, as well as collecting the exchange fees. Under this premise it is reasonable to hire up to b…

> for example replace physical collectibles But that is crazy. It is not that hard to understand the collectibles business is emotion based. You tickle the soul of the customers just the right way so they want to own a hoard of your crap. Then you create an artificial scarcity to profit from, and a thin veneer of "but-it-is-not-a-waste-of-money-because-i-can-sell-it-later" feeling to make your customers not instantly…

I am not arguing with this, just pointing a narrative I heard many times from otherwise sane people. While I had to work hard not to roll my eyes, the story must have enough converts to pull in some serious money.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#388

Post by anonymousab »

rahen wrote: post #378
hardwaresofton wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this discussed in enough HN threads. Everyone is quick to talk about FTX, Tether being a scam, etc but I rarely hear people discuss how the heck BTC is pegged at $16k this whole time, through it all.

You won't see this discussed on HN, there's an overall hostility toward Bitcoin. A few are interested or sometimes involved with it (whether with development or infrastructure) but don't bother enlightening the crowd since I think it's pretty hopeless here and they would be buried under downvotes. I wonder if that resentment would have been the same toward the Internet in 1997. You know, that useless thing for hacker…

You don't see it discussed because it's not news. "Thing has not changed in the past few months" doesn't get many news articles, and if there's no news articles being submitted, then a news article feed site like HN isn't going to have anything to post about that.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#389

Post by insanitybit »

lkbm wrote: post #358
radicalbyte wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.

I've seen hatred of crypto, constant insistence that it's 100% fraud, and claims that it's worthless and will collapse for many years now. In 2019, no one was saying it would crash in 2022; they were saying it would crash in 2019 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2020, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2020 or just "it will crash eventually" In 2021, they weren't sayin…

Note that they were all saying "it would crash"

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#390

Post by mikelovenotwar »

arbol wrote: post #346
mikelovenotwar wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment completely fails to take into account the societal and technological changes that occurred during the period, including population growth and all that goes with it, suggesting that money spent promoting a better solution than was presently available is responsible for it's uptake. Do you have any evidence for anything you're saying?

Perhaps you are failing to take into account the societal and technological changes that are occurring in the present day. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. > Do you have any evidence for anything you're saying? The following history of the generator: https://www.mygenerator.com.au/history-of-the-generator You might want to check out how web3 tech is used by energy companies to solve coordination problems within the gr…

It looks as though you personally are vested in delivering web3 based things as a business. We're listed as one of the partners on the energyweb page, though the results don't seem to match the hype.
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