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Coinbase S-1

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Re: Coinbase S-1

#661

Post by askmike »

gbillz wrote: post #654
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a prop firm that briefly did a foray into coin trading. Coinbase's trading fees are * outrageous** compared to what we're used to in the world of normal equity/option/future/fx trading. Literally 100x+ what we're used to paying. You have to do absolutely enormous volume before they'll give you anywhere near a sane rate. I'm not surprised they're printing money.

Or you could just go to Coinbase pro and log in with the same credentials and pay a tiny fraction of the usual fees. No setup or form to fill out. You can transact small amounts as well.

He might have been referring to the fees of coinbase pro, which also are pretty high fees (but orders of magnitude smaller than the coinbase retail app). Pretty high for crypto, insane for people coming from fx or other traditional markets.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#662

Post by goat_whisperer »

hntrader wrote: post #651
goat_whisperer wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but no one uses these things as a form of payment/currency. Those are non-monetary assets.

Rare coins that are now valued as artefacts were once monetary assets. So I'm not sure that this distinction is meaningful. BTC's value now could come from it acting as a store of value for example. Or its value could come from the novelty aspect. Or that it facilitates online gambling (leveraged bets on crypto exchanges) in countries where such activity is heavily restricted. BTC's value in the future could come fro…

Well the value of any asset depends on the value that people assign to it -- it's all subjective if you really get in it.

However, I wouldn't accept bitcoin as a method of payment because I'm not confident that people will agree to a completely different value in a very short time frame. Meaning will it be 50k next week? 5k? Who knows!

Re: Coinbase S-1

#663

Post by iexplainbtc »

iexplainbtc wrote: post #269
arnaudsm wrote: post #44

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.

You can't go to a bank, ask them to give you all your money in cash and hide it under a mattress (not in most countries at least). You can go to Coinbase and simply transfer all your funds to your own wallet in a matter of seconds.

What I meant is that it's not a hassle free process. You'll be reported to the IRS (or equivalent) and even be asked to bring an "approved intermediary" in some EU countries. I wish I was making this up.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#664

Post by bostonsre »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #459
carlineng wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From "Use of Proceeds" on p78: "To the extent any registered stockholder chooses to sell shares of our Class A common stock covered by this prospectus, we will not receive any proceeds from any such sales of our Class A common stock." This is a direct listing, so I think its primarily a liquidity event for investors and employees.

That's standard surely? They will be issuing new stock which they will receive sales?

It sounds like they don't need money.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#665

Post by dd36 »

kolinko wrote: post #510
dd36 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the internet made things easier. Trading stocks isn’t expensive or error prone. We’ll see. 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.

The problem is very much technological - traditional stock market is based on opacity and exclusivity. Blockchain is based on permissionlessness and transparency. Internet didn’t succeed because it allowed illegal stuff to be published. It succeeded because anyone could begin publishing, and if it was illegal then it was their responsibility. With blockchain it’s similar - you can create financial instruments without…

Disagree. The gatekeepers exist for a reason. You can make a pink sheet stock. There was a time when anyone could issue their own stock or currency. It was not better. It's why securities laws were made.

There is not a lack of lenders and loans for people to access.

These are still solutions in search of problems

Re: Coinbase S-1

#666

Post by rspeele »

jcims wrote: post #309
shawabawa3 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

selling $50B doesn't move the market from $1T to $950B $1T is the market cap when each bitcoin is trading at ~$52k, but if $50B were sold over a short period of time, it would likely drop the price to $25k or less as the buy orders would all get eaten up

That totally makes sense. But the comments I was replying to made it sound (to me) like it was going to be some long-term disruptor. $25k was the all time high just a couple of months ago. If it dipped to that because someone unloaded Satoshi's cache wouldn't everyone that already had a buy just double down? Seems like it would recover almost instantaneously.

It is impossible to know because there is no objective way to price Bitcoin. There's no way to say that all the bitcoin in the world should be worth exactly $x.

It all depends on what the market perception of that drop is: "this is the end, oh fuck, sell everything" or "ooh buying opportunity".

Re: Coinbase S-1

#667

Post by swiley »

simias wrote: post #356
swiley wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some services that are just easier to use crypto currency to pay for because the maintainers don't want to deal with payment providers. The paid version of cheogram is a good example. This really was the original idea behind bitcoin: dynamically selecting payment providers every ten minutes so they become a commodity.

Bitcoin is pretty nice for vendors: no need to integrate with third party services with complicated terms and regulations, no chargeback etc... But from the client's perspective it's pretty crappy for basically the same reasons. In general if you want to impose a new payment system it's really the buying side that needs convincing. If tomorrow a significant portion of the population wants to buy good and services pre…

>cash and visa

These just don't work well over the internet. Certainly not as well as bitcoin. In person you're right though.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#668

Post by ryebit »

rudderz wrote: post #656
frongpik wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin, imho, is a clever way to redirect excess energy production into a trustless payments system. The fact that individuals have used personal gpus is an abveration. It will be governments running btc network on excess energy from nuclear plants, they will sign treaties to use only so much energy on btc to prevent the race to the bottom (similar to icbm treaties) and they will use btc for massive gov-to-gov trans…

I predict eventually a chain that doesn't require PoW will gain popularity. Also, the chain won't have to be a store of value. Instead the value will be real assets represented as "tokens". The asset can be anything. Stock, royalty rights, water rights, futures, commodities, etc. The ledger would then act as an exchange/settlement layer that can match trades. Merchant denominates prices in shares of GOOG, customer pa…

That's pretty much describing Ethereum (once it finishes switching to PoS in the next year or so). Popularity wise it's already doing way more than others in txn or $ volume.

It's NFT market for asset ownership (mainly artwork right now) is huge, there was literally a Christie's auction for an NFT token (and the art it represents) this week.

There aren't official stocks/commodities yet (I think) but a bunch of sythetic derivatives already. A couple of banks have even done test runs of bond issuance.

ETH itself is does have "store of value" qualities in background, but a trick was developed of using it as collateral to back on-chain stablecoins like DAI. That allows on-chain token markets/contracts to rely on USD-valuations for liquidity and baseline reference, independent of general "crypto" speculative fluctuations.

There's also Earnst & Young's "Nightfall" project that trying to bring b2b accounting on-chain using Eth's zero knowledge tools to retain privacy.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#669

Post by whiskyant »

efitz wrote: post #341

Coinbase’ customer support is crap. You van only get someone on the phone if your account is compromised; anything else goes to email, and they respond when they get around to it. Also their email verification system for transfers fails frequently causing transfers to be canceled. Pretty convenient way for them to keep your money. I am biased but I’m pretty unhappy with coinbase right now.

Yup, it's been almost two months since I've originally messaged support about being unable to access my account. They said they would schedule a security interview, then never followed through.

I don't know how it's legal for a company to lock your account w/ funds with no explanation for this long.

Re: Coinbase S-1

#670

Post by whiskyant »

pmurt7 wrote: post #23

I have tried to use Coinbase this past month to buy some ETH. Worst customer support I have ever seen in my life. Have a look at Reddit to see what's going on with this company: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/new/ It's not ok to brag about your business when many of your customers are in deep emotional stress because you mess with their money.

They locked my account with no explanation for over 2 months now. Customer support has been extremely slow to respond, and they said they would hold a security interview in 1-2 business days to have my account unlocked... this was 5 weeks ago, with no response since.

Worst support I've ever experienced, I honestly don't know how this is legal.

If they weren't IPO'ing I would've assumed they were insolvent.

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