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Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

blog.coinbase.com

51–60 of 242 posts

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#51

I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…

It's useful for donating to WikiLeaks when the banks are blocking those.

https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#52

I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…

It's the same as exchange rates, constantly being recalculated. Though crypotcurrencies are orders of magnitude more volatile. A seller will set their price in USD (or other established fiat), and convert the price to bitcoin at the time of transaction.

As far as cryptocurrencies are concerned, I personally view BTC as a good store of value; it's slow and expensive to transfer compared to other coins.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a nitpick the proper term is "cryptocurrency", not "digital currency". A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally.

> A cryptocurrency does not necessarily have to be stored or generated digitally. How would a non-digital cryptocurrency work? While signal scramblers, an analog equivalent to digital cryptography, did exist, I have a hard time imagining an analog blockchain.

a block is just a header, a ref to the previous block, a set of tx's and a nonce to satisfy the work function.

It being digital is just its encoding. An analog cryptocurrency could be carved into trees or anything.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#54

I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…

>The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up.

Why? If someone sends me 1BTC I'll just instantly sell 1BTC, it is tremendously unlikely that I'm gonna get screwed even if there's a 1-2 second delay.

>if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I use it to buy anything?

Because you want things and not numbers on the internet.

>As someone looking to accept BTC for purchases, how do I do so with confidence that when I accepted $3400 today that by the time I cash out it's not worth $2700?

By being smart and not waiting to cash out. Your maximum loss will be the value of whatever buffer coins you hold, and I guess you could hedge around that too.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#55

I'm pretty naive on the subject of Bitcoin so I might be missing something here, but can someone explain to me how it's used right now? Aside from treating BTC like a stock that is. The value of it fluctuates so much that actually buying/accepting it seems incredibly risky. The price can go down just as fast as it goes up. As a someone looking make purchases with BTC; if the value of a BTC is going up, why would I us…

Bitcoin purists will say that, eventually, there is no "cash out" phase. 1 BTC = 1 BTC and who cares about what the dollar equivalent happens to be. Once everything is in BTC you will never exchange it for dollars.

Do you spend dollars today wondering if tomorrow the Euro will be worth more or less? No, so why would you care what the dollar equivalent to a BTC is when everything you buy is priced in BTC?

This is long term obviously. The reason the price is "high" now is because there is a finite amount. ~21 million BTC is the max that can ever exist at once. So, theoretically if you replaced the world's currencies with BTC, having a single BTC would make you incredibly wealthy.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#57

Somebody stole my identity and created a Coinbase account with it. I made a ticket on their system over two weeks ago and they haven't even bothered to respond. I'm baffled that such a shady company is able to raise funds like this. I mean, imagine if your bank just one day stopped answering the phone.

Im sorry this happened, but you might want to get on to their security team, rather than the regular customer support queue.

Imagine if your bank suddenly had millions of new clients join in a 2 month period. I think they would stop answering the phone too.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#58
Coinbase makes a killing with their fees. The spread between the buy and sell prices on coinbase are 1-1.2%. On top, their bank transfer charges are proportional to amount transferred instead of standard flat fee. I wonder why they need another $100M !

For people who want to buy, I would recommend Kraken - they have much higher volume and sane pricing. There are others too like Bitfinex, Poloneix, etc.

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#59
post #2

Why does Coinbase need another $100M when it's making tons of money with its fees?

I'm of the opposite mindset: why do so many people trust them, with so much money, when they've been so flaky about outages? One 30 minute outage per year would be bad, but they had 3-4 in a two week span, all coinciding with high volume.

Plus, numerous complaints about missing bitcoins. And the potential headache about not honoring BCH balances (which they may be legally sound on).

Re: Coinbase raises $100M Series D led by IVP

#60

Somebody stole my identity and created a Coinbase account with it. I made a ticket on their system over two weeks ago and they haven't even bothered to respond. I'm baffled that such a shady company is able to raise funds like this. I mean, imagine if your bank just one day stopped answering the phone.

Greed. It's just pure greed. And many people do work for banks despite them doing incredibly shady shit (worse than just not answering the phone).
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