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Coinbase acquires Earn.com

news.earn.com

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Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#71

Post by crsv »

exolymph wrote: post #64

Here is Balaji's own writeup of the company's trajectory: https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814

This is an incredibly well spun tale of reducing cost and restructuring a revenue producing, albeit a super cash burning, business into a more efficient one.

This post is a glorified PR humblebrag, and the truth of the matter is that if they really did complete a turn-around, it would be stand alone business worthy of the incredible cash infusion that the VC community injected in to it. Ultimately it's likely a loss (perhaps a very large one) on the books for the investors involved, and pieces like this are just lipstick on the pig.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#72

Post by orliesaurus »

I been following 21.co since the early days, when they pivoted into Earn.com I lost trust in the whole company. Then they started spamming me about someone trying to pay me to read some message, which I never did lol. Honestly this has been one of the shadiest investment of the a16z group, to my knowledge, as a "spectator". Not sure exactly how they went from 21.co's mission to Coinbase, I must be living in a dream-world.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#73

Post by jjallen »

deft wrote: post #23
LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

21.co / earn.com is a serial flop, pivoting markets and functionality multiple times. I wouldn't be surprised if the funding was simply a way to secretly do something. Nefarious or not.

I admire them for pivoting.

I didn't like their $400 CPU Bitcoin miner though.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#74

Post by jjallen »

loourr wrote: post #22
LAMike wrote: post #7

21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise. Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started. Anyone else hear about this rumor?

I can believe it. I think A16Z is also an investor in Coinbase. Definitely seems like some insider dealing. Especially considering Earn.com seems like a very immature (bordering on useless) product. Also another example of a startup having more money then they know what to do with and not returning it to shareholders.

We don't know how much they're paying at all though. If they're paying $10 million is that too much?

The domain is worth a chunk itself.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#75

Post by aianus »

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"…

> Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs

There are plenty of legal things that are difficult to purchase with conventional reversible electronic payments. Off the top of my head:

Gambling deposits (yes, these are legal in most of the world but plagued by chargebacks from losing punters)

porn/sex toys (legal, but people don't want it showing up on their CC statements and don't trust these sites with their CC number)

"Suspicious" purchases with too much chargeback risk (eg. someone wants to buy a Macbook online with a US credit card and a Nigerian shipping address)

"Cash-like purchases" like buying a gold bar or some foreign cash online and having it shipped to your house. The margins on these types of purchases are too small to cover the credit card fees and the chargeback risk is too high because it attracts carders.

I could probably go on, but if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#76

Post by hudon »

aianus wrote: post #75
hudon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> Once we all agree that you can't do anything useful with the blockchain except buy drugs There are plenty of legal things that are difficult to purchase with conventional reversible electronic payments. Off the top of my head: Gambling deposits (yes, these are legal in most of the world but plagued by chargebacks from losing punters) porn/sex toys (legal, but people don't want it showing up on their CC statements a…

> if you don't think irreversible electronic cash has any legitimate applications, you're not thinking hard enough

I actually don't think blockchain-based ledgers are irreversible. The most exhaustive account for how these ledgers are reversible is captured in the Blockchain Folk Theorem paper [0]. We can brainstorm all kinds of fun use cases for irreversible digital cash, but given the growing evidence, I don't believe such digital cash exists.

[0] https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#77

Post by manigandham »

kristianc wrote: post #20

> Over the last several years, the primary way most people have obtained cryptocurrency is through buying it, with many of these transactions facilitated by Coinbase. With this acquisition, we allow users to also earn crypto by doing things they already know how to do — like replying to emails and filling out surveys. Ick. Who'd have thought the future of technology would look like shitty direct marketing scams?

Everyone in adtech. Especially those that understand blockchain.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#78

Post by loourr »

jjallen wrote: post #74
loourr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can believe it. I think A16Z is also an investor in Coinbase. Definitely seems like some insider dealing. Especially considering Earn.com seems like a very immature (bordering on useless) product. Also another example of a startup having more money then they know what to do with and not returning it to shareholders.

We don't know how much they're paying at all though. If they're paying $10 million is that too much? The domain is worth a chunk itself.

That's a good point. I'm assuming it's "too much" since 21 raised 100M previously but they're likely having a "down round".

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#79

Post by lallysingh »

crabasa wrote: post #12

This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1]. One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just…

I don't know why they just didn't go into email-based cryptocurrency payments. If they can really change currencies easily using it, it seems the simplest and highest-impact business they can do.

Re: Coinbase acquires Earn.com

#80

Post by paulie_a »

tuxxy wrote: post #67
john_moscow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized. We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0]. Several large applications are wi…

I honestly think those are the two worst possible examples.

I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain. And for medical records? That is laughable at best with severe HIPPA compliance issues.

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