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Coinbase acquires Earn.com
- srj85 8y agoSo begins the conglomerate
- nickwanninger 8y ago"Joins" isn't in the thesaurus for "was bought by"
- ghayes 8y agoSeparate but related events?
- mparramon 8y agoFWIW, here's my referral link: https://earn.com/mparramon/referral/?a=hh0mawk3ieu17brs https://earn.com/mparramon/referral/?a=hh0mawk3ieu17brs I've earned around 0.0060 BTC so far (~$50), mostly through airdrop offers —without taking into account the airdropped crypto itself.
- wyldfire 8y agoI thought earn.com (formerly 21.co) was a clever idea and I signed up. Once or twice a quarter I would get an item incoming and I'd usually read and/or fill out a survey. Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).
- shp0ngle 8y agoThere is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO spam
- jMyles 8y agoHow 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.
- amasad 8y agoI would frame it as lots of interesting theoritcal and PoC things but very little applications that provides value for end-users.
- tdb7893 8y agoCryptocurrencies 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.
- notyourwork 8y agoEspecially when you have things like this https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ Buzz buzz.
- bduerst 8y agoOr this: https://www.kodak.com/US/en/kodakone/default.htm https://www.kodak.com/US/en/kodakone/default.htm
- degenerate 8y agoThe video on the IBM blockchain site is one of the most generic, non-descriptive product videos I think I ever saw! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRgWvJ6eTiY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRgWvJ6eTiY
- hk__2 8y agoI’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?
- leppr 8y agoNo, there is a lot of original research on decentralized systems and consensus happening thanks to cryptocurrencies. It's just surprisingly hidden compared to ML research and other popular buzzword areas. Maybe the noise from scammy ICOs drowns it, I don't know, but if you're a researcher or developer interested in decentralized systems then you definitely can't complain about lack of innovation.
- LAMike 8y ago21.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?
- harryh 8y agoThe 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.
- beaner 8y agoOriginally 21 produced hardware, which I imagine is a much more expensive industry to be in. That may have something to do with it.
- harryh 8y agoTheir 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.
- bflesch 8y ago
- crabasa 8y agoThis 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 seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice. [1] https://www.fizbuz.com https://www.fizbuz.com
- btctemp97 8y agoActually, the one-to-one emails were only a small part of their business model. Earn has become popular among crypto companies for doing paid mass email campaigns. If you are on the site as a user it's obvious. You get a lot of paid messages if you sign up for the right lists. Not sure if it will scale, but interesting use of crypto. This is kind of a silly site, but it's one of the few articles I can find on the topic. https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advertising-platform/ https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advert...
- fudged71 8y agoBy coinbase now owning these lists, there have got to be some privacy concerns...
- crabasa 8y agoYou're completely right, but what a waste. Instead of solving the spam problem and giving marketing/sales/recruiting people better tools, they just incentivized people to sign-up for mailing lists that they probably didn't care about.
- arisAlexis 8y agoCheck out veropost.com too :)
- thelegendxp 8y ago
- kristianc 8y ago> 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?
- manigandham 8y agoEveryone in adtech. Especially those that understand blockchain.
- lavezzi 8y agoThey started spamming me three days ago but I have no idea where they got my email from...
- perseusprime11 8y agoI am now seriously worried about Coinbase after this baseless acquisition.
- loceng 8y agoIt's not baseless -- they want to help perpetuate the ecosystem and use cases for people to get utility in acquiring any incentivized crypto-assets. The same utility described on Earn.com however is possible by paying people fiat currency, instead of paying someone something then making them have vested interest in it maintaining a certain value or increasing its value (at the cost of society).
- dzink 8y agoAt first they were 21.co and they invited developers, startup CEOS and investors under the premise of much larger per-response rewards ($100 for investors, $20 for CEOs, etc). Since then, they've been sending mostly $1-$2 spam from Tokens and ICOs. The payment is in Bitcoin, so cashing out also takes a big chunk of the earnings. Coinbase sounds like a nice landing spot for a team that likely dreamt bigger than that.
- arisAlexis 8y agoI launched veropost.com a while before earn.com pivoted. Didn't get much love, I hope now people can see the value proposition.
- arisAlexis 8y agoyes that was the problem SV trolls downvoting
- loceng 8y agoSo 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 otherwise you earned "~$50" MINUS whatever "profit" earlier adopters earned, the wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted toward the earlier adopters; e.g. that could be $50 minus $30 because you're paying for/legitimizing/realizing/covering the difference of their purchase price and their sale price. They know of course they can't dump it, however they don't care if the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme takes 10-20+ years to allow them to realize $100s of billions, or even potentially trillions of dollars, worth of "profit."
- wakeywakeywakey 8y agoBy this logic, it would be fair to say: 'When I get my paycheck, I earn my salary MINUS whatever "profit" my employer made from my work.' This is disingenuous by ignoring risk and presupposing that (in this case) I have the same reach/clout/contacts/sales and marketing channels as my employer.
- loceng 8y agoI don't think that's a fair comparison at all. The profit your employer makes from your work isn't coming from an increase in demand [in the use of a transactional layer] causing the perceived value of a crypto-asset [USD] to go up, and therefore they also are profiting from that increased value -- that'd be "double-dipping" profit in a sense if that's the case, if they're also making money on the increase in demand of the currency. Profit from what someone is willing to pay above actual cost vs. "profit" derived simply from an increase in perceived value because of demand are two different things; this is why I put profit in quotes to differentiate. If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this. It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however If you held onto your paycheck and didn't cash it for 5 years (assuming the check is still valid then), and the USD went up by 400% -- once you cashed it, that 300% difference in your buying power that you're depositing is getting covered by everyone else now (for no more work done by you). At the surface of it, does that sound fair? And that cash they were paid, it wasn't an investment. If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this, they decide how much the other currencies are worth in comparison (the exchange rates). It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however not through reallocating wealth weighted to the earliest adopters -- you're taking advantage of the majority of society then. The issue is whether reallocating resources/wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily is acceptable or not. I argue it's not. The incentivized structure is one way to get people working together, collaborating - at least to begin with - however at a certain "tipping point", let's say it's 50% -- everyone who adopts or must adopt the incentivized crypto-asset then is covering/realizing the cost of everyone who bought before. E.g. Their buying power is shifted weighted towards the earlier adopters, and if this is allowed then there will be a point where they will be forced to adopt it (and early bad actors are heavily incentivized to reach this goal). One problem with incentivized crypto-assets is that USD isn't destroyed, instead it's being exchanged - given to someone in return for a digital crypto-asset. If USD was actually destroyed or rather transferred into a crypto-asset blockchain, that would be solving part of the problem. If you see problems with what I'm writing, I would greatly appreciate hearing more of your thoughts - rarely do people engage with this line of thought on here, I seem to get enough downvotes though (to counter the upvotes I initially get).
- modeless 8y agoI signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money. I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.
- babaganoosh89 8y agoIs it possible that spammers could spam their registration servers checking which emails had been already used? E.g. get a list of all the public emails off of github commits, then cross reference them with Earn.com registrations.
- wpietri 8y agoLooking at their home page, they say, "Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain." Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary. And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful to them?
- 45h34jh53k4j 8y agoahh, thats the trick isnt it -- blockchain provides universal currency. No need for local currency handing, banks, cc processors, forex transfer providers, and all the things associated with local payment processors. While i dont think this is the first or is it truely useful, but yes, blockchain (specifically bitcoin) is providing a decentralized universal currency for use in decentralized systems like email. Its a valid point.
- wpietri 8y agoIn theory, perhaps. In practice, it provides a universally inconvenient currency. If somebody wants to send me money to read an email, then I want to be able to spend that money. If they send me bitcoin, I can't spend it directly: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-living-on-bitcoin.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l... Ergo, I am right back in need some way to convert it into my local currency. Except far less conveniently than just letting my bank take care of the exchange, as they would with an international wire transfer. Also, as I explain elsewhere, the forex thing is a solution looking for a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16854526 The reason I'd pay somebody to read an email is so that I can do business with them, and for a fair bit more money than I pay for the email. That involves one of us paying the other. Which in practice will mean a real currency, not cryptotulips.
- crsv 8y agoI signed up for this platform early on but never felt like it was anything more than a convoluted engine for getting me to transact with spurious ICOs.
- avip 8y agoAnd an aggressive spam producer.
- roy100 8y agoThis sounds like a acqui-hire, highly doubt that Coinbase would have paid 200-300M (representing a 2-3x investment multiplier) - BTC or otherwise?
- exolymph 8y agoHere is Balaji's own writeup of the company's trajectory: https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814 https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814
- crsv 8y agoThis 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.
- jamestimmins 8y agoLooks like Balaji (Earn CEO) is joining Coinbase as the CTO. So this is potentially a straight acqui-hire.
- orliesaurus 8y agoI 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.
- donttrack 8y agoI get spammed by ICO offers every day almost from these people. Stopped logging in to claim my dollars since it is too much hassle to complete that captcha every time. Endless pictures of road signs and busses and roads...
- iblaine 8y agoWow, that was fast.
- mychael 8y agoNothing to see here. Just another highly connected businessman making a ton of money on a startup exit.
- m3kw9 8y agoThere is probably a non-block chain way to replicate this
- aiCeivi9 8y ago> Earn.com allows senders to pay users for replying to emails and completing tasks There was quite few sites with same idea 15 years ago. Back then it took me some time to understand that no serious business wants to show ads to people paid for watching them, since only people without significant income sign up for such programs and the incentive for fraud is high.
- wollw 8y agoAs someone with an formal education in Art despite a background in Tech, I'm growing more and more disillusioned with currencies beyond actual Legal Tender... I almost agree with the 1792 Mint Act's attachment of a death sentence to the devaluing of our coins (silver and gold in particular). Money is at best Artwork and even then it's only by devaluing it that it gets passed around like it's nothing. What is Bitcoin's value other than a secure means of Bank transfer again? It just seems like a means of reinforcing what from a religious context would be called Simony. Show me the Money.
- wiradikusuma 8y agoJust curious about Earn and the use of Bitcoin (questions are not related to Coinbase nor the announcement): What's the downside of just using fiat money? Why need to use Bitcoin (or any crypto)?
- nicky0 8y agoOff the top of head, one reason is that there is no need to support multiple currencies for international users, or to worry about currency conversion. Secondly it cuts out the need for middlemen (banks/payment processors).
- CryptoPunk 8y agoFiat means giving the payment processor significant leverage over the paid email service. Fiat also means the email service couldn't be global, because Trusted-Third-Party-based payment processors can't operate globally owing to the global regulatory patchwork. Contrast that with Bitcoin(Cash)-based international remittance, or Ethereum-based token sales, which are accessible to people in every country in the world. Email is an open and global protocol, so cryptocurrency is a good fit for it.
- notahacker 8y agoThey were a blockchain startup, so it'd have been embarrassing for them to base their service around the sort of money the average person actually uses. Also gave them a natural audience for targeted ICO spam.
- jreyes333 8y agoEarn.com has become a glorified airdrop platform, but even so they've got a good team there that are good additions to Coinbase. Maybe the most expensive acqui-hire? Either way it's a huge nod towards tokenized attention economy projects by one of the biggest players in the space.
- ojr 8y agoThe coolest part about Earn.com is you could send a message for $100 to VCs like Marc Andreessen, when I finally finish my app I will be using Earn.com to find testers that have blogs that can spread the word
- hulton 8y agoInteresting how there is no keywords for 'security' and 'privacy'. Seems like a good acquisition to implement tracking of people's financial activity.
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