401–410 of 736 posts
So setting aside the merits of Coinbase as a business or the philosoeconomic significance of cryptocurrency, should I buy Coinbase stock? I want to make easy money by buying stock. Think it'll go up after it's listed?
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> They have a reasonable sized moat then no? Do they? I'd rather own a couple of major exchanges in today's financial system for the same price. ICE net income $2.1bn market cap $63bn NDAQ net income $0.5bn market cap $23bn CME net income $2.1bn market cap $72bn CBOE net income $0.4bn market cap $11bn
You've listed exchanges, but Coinbase is much more than just an exchange. They are also a broker, as well as bank (provision of loans), custody-provider, etc. here are some brokers... Charles Schwab (SCHW): $119.81bn Interactive Brokers (IBKR): $32.47bn
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Except Amazon had opportunity to move beyond books. Coinbase should be valued nearly as much as Wells Fargo because maybe it will become Wells Fargo?!? Coinbase is tied to crypto inflation. That bubble can keep going but it’s a fraction of the volumes of the large players and I don’t see any long-term competitive advantage if crypto actually becomes useful to daily commerce. EDIT: And fraction was less than 1/10th of…
1/10 or 1/4 doesn’t really matter if they manage to keep up 300% growth for a year or two. And there is still a lot of room for growth. As for where Coinbase can go - it can take the Wallstreet on in terms of trading securities (security tokens) and derivatives - the whole DeFi market which is what Internet was to publishing companies.
Is the premise that every mom and pop will list shares in their company somewhere? The problem with that isn’t technological. It’s regulatory. And the regulations were created for good reasons.
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This is such a trope. Do you pull your funds from interactive brokers after you're done trading? What about vanguard? 401k?
I don't know about your brokerage, but my fidelity cash management account sweeps money into a set of FDIC insured bank accounts, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for your coins. And anything that is parked in a security is protected by SIPC from the brokerage going insolvent. What will happen to your assets if coinbase's systems become inoperable or if customers try to withdraw more coins than coinbase…
Your crypto is _not_ yours unless it is "kept" on a hardware wallet. End of story.
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>All it takes Oh just that huh? The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin. This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actu…
Actually this isn’t the only way. If financial intermediaries like Coinbase start extending credit or engaging in fractional reserve banking, then yes, you can “create more Bitcoin.” Just like how in the gold standard, you could still create more gold backed dollars by making a mortgage loan... Kind of funny how all these new monetary wizards miss out on this simple fact.
EDIT: I was obviously not the first to say this but it is really interesting to watch the crypo space re-invent all of modern finance, one piece at a time.
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Don’t speak for everyone there, “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial syste…
> an unstable society or one facing high inflation What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?
Users of USD or EUR worried about inflation and getting into Bitcoin are really worrying about the wrong kind of tail risk. Users of other non-hard currencies have more of a point.
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At what point either in years or market cap or price per coin will you start to question your mental model of Bitcoin?
Not OP, but also a skeptic and here are my thoughts: - Market cap is sort of a misleading stat. Microsoft's market cap is ~1.75 trillion, but it's p/e ratio is 34. So if they stopped reinvesting in their business, I'd be making 3% yearly on that investment with a hedge against inflation since they can just raise prices. A lot more goes into their valuation than that, but my point is that even if you are a huge skepti…
equities markets cant be compared to a commodity. so that invalidates your entire first paragraph, the longest one. as a corollary to that, don't derive your confidence from equities investors opining about commodities for the first time in their lives. you have equities investors that never traded tech and never traded commodities talking about bitcoin, you cant call that insight. bitcoin is looked at in market cap terms because it has a more transparent supply than any other commodity. this is completely new to the universe of assets and the market likes that. it removes a risk with gold, oil, etc.
paragraph two and three: you want high price for a longer period of time, but are turned off by the exact and only mechanism in which it gets there - large % and large $ amount price increases. fascinating.
more tech equities comparisons. mmmmk
I’d like to leave you with an alternative tool for valuing, and its just scarcity. if thats not good enough for you, then just stay out of the market. retail investors en masse never got married to commodities markets for the exact reason that they are not buy and hold outside of some metals. volatility is not controversial in the commodities markets, its termed as seasonality, as supply and demand ends up having a frequency in some markets. A lot of the equites market style comparisons to bitcoin is because it started with retail (non-institutional) who never traded anything else. But don't be like them. Bitcoin’s not a company so dont use company comparisons.
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Jewelry is just an extension of speculating on the metal. You can make a necklace out of many materials and it will function the same. Cobalt is used more in electronics than gold. The MC is not close to the same. Almost 100% of golds value is from speculation.
> You can make a necklace out of many materials and it will function the same. How so? Jewelry's function is to look a certain way.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
Argentina is a great example. I am an American and have been there many times. They have extreme inflation and regressive policies against USD or foreign currency. Take a look at https://bluedollar.net . Official rates are buy at 89.98 and sell at 94.98 (ARS). Unofficial rates are buy at 138 and sell at 143. That's a massive spread saying that the people on the street are willing to spend 35% more because they know t…