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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

news.earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#51

Post by jMyles »

nikanj wrote: post #30
hk__2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve checked NuCypher’s homepage and I find a bit strange to have that much emphasis on the blockchain on your homepage and at the same time only 5 occurrences of the word "blockchain" in your 21-pages whitepaper. Am I missing something?

VCs read pitch decks, not whitepapers

This strikes me as needlessly mean.

Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO.

As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#52

Post by jMyles »

hudon wrote: post #50
woah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what's known as a mid-brow dismissal. The average HN commenter feels a gratifying sensation of intelligence when they point out that "a blockchain is just a database". They can feel that they are debunking a con with their razor-like intelligence, like Neo, escaping from the matrix.

How is your comment not a mid-brow dismissal? There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it." It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a l…

> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation

I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#53

Post by john_moscow »

hk__2 wrote: post #25
jMyles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did this become religion on HN? Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today: * Origin * NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team) * Loki * New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature * Trustless Quorums * Distributed validation I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

I’ve checked NuCypher’s homepage and I find a bit strange to have that much emphasis on the blockchain on your homepage and at the same time only 5 occurrences of the word "blockchain" in your 21-pages whitepaper. Am I missing something?

It basically looks like a smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service, but the impression I got from their main page is that there isn't a specific end user or market for this yet, although that didn't stop the VCs from funding it.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#54

Post by hudon »

jMyles wrote: post #52
hudon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your comment not a mid-brow dismissal? There are so many projects that promised the world and did not deliver, as well as so many projects that ended up being outright scams, that it's not surprising that when someone says "but what about Blockchain X, Blockchain Y and Blockchain Z projects?", we all roll our eyes and think "I'll believe it when I see it." It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a l…

> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?

Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs, there will be little resistance when a bill gets proposed that bans the purchase and/or mining of bitcoin, "the payment currency for illegal drugs that uses more electricity than Ireland". And then that final use case is also gone, hence why I said "no long lasting use case".

And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines". The way to get legitimate medicinal drugs legalized is through careful analysis and discussions, and then you use democracy to make it happen. See California. What you DON'T do is invent some tech that wastes our planet's resources and invent some story about a decentralized future to fool regulators and then enable all kinds of illegal transactions, from human trafficking to terrorism, just so you can smoke a joint effortlessly.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#55

Post by notyourwork »

tdb7893 wrote: post #14
jMyles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did this become religion on HN? Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today: * Origin * NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team) * Loki * New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature * Trustless Quorums * Distributed validation I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.

Cryptocurrencies right now are at the point where there has been lots of hype for years now but very little actual use (it's mostly just for speculation right now). I'm just burned out of the hype around it without it really delivering on a large scale.

Especially when you have things like this https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/

Buzz buzz.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#56

Post by jjallen »

tristanj wrote: post #29
jjallen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that 21.co/Earn.com bought BTC with some of the invested capital, held it as BTC rose, and then distributed it to its shareholders? One of which is A16Z. This seems possible, because, as we know, the price of BTC has fallen recently from ~$16k to ~$7k. So the gains could be large if they did indeed buy BTC with some of the capital they raised, but probably not $1 billion, or at least I would guess ag…

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.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#58

Post by harryh »

beaner wrote: post #46
harryh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story behind this theory (which is quite plausible imho) would be much more interesting than the public remarks from earn and coinbase. The actual products released by the company have always seemed pretty trifling considering the massive amount of funding. Things never really added up.

Originally 21 produced hardware, which I imagine is a much more expensive industry to be in. That may have something to do with it.

Their hardware device was stupid though. A headless linux server combined with some shitty bitcoin mining hardware and software. It served no purpose.

It was 100% obvious that it was DOA. I can't even believe that the people at the company thought it was a good idea.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#59

Post by always_good »

loceng wrote: post #37

So I'm copying and pasting part of someone's comment I saw on mobile - which has since been flagged and removed for including their referral URL - because I wanted to reply to it. They said: "I've earned around 0.0060 BTC so far (~$50), mostly through airdrop offers -- without taking into account the airdropped crypto itself." What I wanted to reply was, no, you earned ~$50 if you sold it off immediately, however oth…

Your reply was not as clever as you thought it was. Especially not enough to resurrect a flagged comment.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#60

Post by jMyles »

hudon wrote: post #54
jMyles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not as if any blockchain project has provided a long lasting use case beyond speculation I don't understand this assessment either. How do you square this with, for example, people who have been able to obtain psychoactive compounds and other medicines that were previously unavailable to them?

Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs, there will be little resistance when a bill gets proposed that bans the purchase and/or mining of bitcoin, "the payment currency for illegal drugs that uses more electricity than Ireland". And then that final use case is also gone, hence why I said "no long lasting use case". And nice try with calling this contraband "medicines"…

Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently.

Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind.

If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place.

Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has other, less controversial use-cases as well.

The current state of development in this field suggests that I'm right - again, see the technologies above; it's not obvious how they're possible without a distributed consensus mechanism.

I also think that the remark "smoke a joint effortlessly" is both a silly ad-hominen and a red herring. I have been effortlessly smoking joints in all sorts of jurisdictions for the past decade; the change in law really didn't do much to enable that any more than it was already trivial.

However, if I were a member of a less privileged class and wanted to retain some anonymity, or if I wanted access to a more esoteric plant or compound and didn't have the social connectivity to obtain it, then I think that I'd find a mechanism to subvert these prohibitions very helpful.

Not everyone has the same opportunities and protections as you. Your implicit suggestion that everyone simply live in California is very insensitive. Technologies that tend to smooth this disparity are reasonable to celebrate.

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