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Coinbase Billionaire Brian Armstrong’s Plan to Make Crypto Safe for All

58 points by prostoalex 7y ago

artsyca 7y ago
As usual it involves making questionable fashion choices
- artsyca 7y ago
  i.e. the 'hey I'm a billionaire / bond supervillain' look
Seenso 7y ago
The title is misleading. This doesn't sound like it will do anything to help make crypto safe for those people who need protection from government backdoors and key escrow.
kick 7y ago
I question what these people value about cryptocurrency: with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience present in initial pitches and offerings in the space, it seems like it's mostly valueless. Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy for these people, isn't there?
- admiral33 7y ago
  It's a cash grab for many people. On the other hand it feels like a kodak moment. Digital currency just feels like a natural progression for the world. It doesn't have a military backing it though. This makes me think that the most "revolutionary" crypto currency will be tied to a social media where people pressure elections in it's favor... sort of like reddit karma where there is no buying power but there is a lot of social power.
  - puranjay 7y ago
    Maybe this is an American perspective (the American financial system is horribly outdated) but in the developing world, "digital currency" is mostly a solved problem. Your bank account integrates so seamlessly with digital payment systems that creating a separate currency seems entirely superfluous. Here in India, we have a system called UPI. Connect it to your bank account once and you get a username like 'YourName@OkAxis'. Anyone can send money to this username and it goes straight to your bank account. You can pay establishments - online as well as offline - by simply verifying a one time password on your mobile. It's so seamless and cheap (essentially free) that I can't ever imagine needing a digital currency.
    - omosubi 7y ago
      Interesting to hear this perspective as one of the main arguments people used to make was that people in rural India or wherever could now access banking products that traditional banks refused to give due to cost. I'm assuming that's no longer the case?
      - puranjay 7y ago
        The current government had a massive banking drive where it almost forced the rural poor to open bank accounts. This was followed by demonetization of currency notes, which, as harmful as it was to the economy, "normalized" the idea of transacting digitally. A bulk of transactions still happen via cash but digital payments, especially UPI, are seeing increasingly wider adoption. There has been a lot of innovation in this space just to make customer-merchant transactions easier. For example, this product from PayTM basically acts as a confirmation box for UPI transactions. https://business.paytm.com/blog/introducing-paytm-sound-box-turn-your-business-into-a-smart-business/ https://business.paytm.com/blog/introducing-paytm-sound-box-... Something like this reduces the trust deficit in rural areas about digital banking products. It's going to take a long while, but technologically, it's a solved problem. I can't see any utility that crypto brings to the table except for decentralization which most consumers don't care about anyway.
    - apta 7y ago
- Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
  >with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous. Monero and ZCash are anonymous. Not sure what you mean by resilience. >Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies.
  - kick 7y ago
    Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous. Not when you're using Coinbase. Monero [is] anonymous. Sure. ZCash [is] anonymous. lol Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies. I didn't claim it was. You completely misinterpreted my comment.
optimiz3 7y ago
Corporate fluff article on Forbes. Should just be renamed Big-Brotherbase, or Banned-for-Life-and-Won't-Tell-You-Whybase. Coinbase is famous for suddenly disabling accounts and refusing to give an explanation. At least a traditional bank will normally explain the circumstances. Got one of their arbitrary sucks-for-you letters last year. No way would I ever recommend them to anyone. In my case I'm a mining developer, so I have a huge digital currency profile. Coinbase is horrifically opaque and impossible to deal with if they flag you unlike most other organizations. E: I'll just lump some more examples of their corporate ineptitude. 1. Recently I asked them for a dump of trades and fees executed on their exchange for audit and record keeping purposes. All they had were records of deposits and withdrawls but none of the actual trades. So no cost-basis data and now a huge accounting headache. 2. When my personal account got locked, we separately had an application out for an institutional account. 4 months go by and suddenly I get emails saying "we're ready to proceed with your institutional account". Excuse me? Told them to fix my personal account first. Never heard back.
- oblongx 7y ago
  What did they do with your crypto, sell it and pay you out?
  - optimiz3 7y ago
    Coinbase closed the account; they did allow all funds to be withdrawn. Fortunately there are tons of digital currency exchanges. Kraken, Gemini, Bittrex are all very viable alternatives that also comply with various regulations in the US.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  Am I having Déjà vu? Does anyone else remember seeing a thread about Coinbase trying something ambitious/sanctimonious and then comments calling it fluff or handwaving it away, just like this, a year or more ago?
  - c0nducktr 7y ago
    Coinbase didn't just start ripping people off within the last year. I ran into the same thing in 2015(ish).
ljm 7y ago
The sooner that billionaire becomes a greater pejorative, the better. The whole of society suffers from the accumulation of wealth to these few people. On that basis, I don’t give a fuck what this person says because they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there. And he does not command respect by having so much money. This is the aristocracy by a different measure. Back then they used agricultural output. Now it is measured in assets.
- allovernow 7y ago
  >they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there Do the corporations that evil billionaires own not pay their employees? You realize that this wealth is just a result of a couple percent of markup per transaction on a massive scale, right? Yeah, Armstrong may be a scummy person, and his exchanges are trash, but he made his billions by offering a service that no one else did. There was no other way that I'm aware of to easily buy BTC or ETC with cash before coinbase popped up. It's possible to make a billion honestly.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I really wish people would stop using the title “billionaire”. Is “billionaire” the new aristocracy or priesthood?
- huangc10 7y ago
  What, you never heard of the tres comas club?
- CPLX 7y ago
  Yes
- dajohnson89 7y ago
  Agreed. I don't really see the point in the use of that adjective here.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> That success comes from acting like a bank. Coinbase draws in customer funds via bank wires. It stores its assets—numerical keys that unlock coins—in vaults. It boasts of insurance coverage from Lloyd’s of London. It has a security staff of 41, including an Iraq War veteran assessing perimeter risks and a Ph.D. cryptographer doing the same for mathematical assaults. It is a bank, that instead of storing cash, stores keys. It is centralized. It complies with regulators. It does allow you to withdraw your keys into your own wallet, but a bank also allows you to withdraw your cash to your physical wallet. It walks like a bank, and it quacks like a bank. It is a bank.
meagher 7y ago
> “It’s like if Google made Gmail for bitcoin,” says Chris Dixon, an Andreessen partner who serves on the Coinbase board. “And that’s literally the way they described it.” One of the most painful startup analogies I've heard.
- pavlov 7y ago
  Every startup should adopt this formula for their decks. “Juicero: it’s like if Google made Gmail for juice”
fossuser 7y ago
I've been checking in on cryptocurrencies and blockchain things every couple of years and I tend to come away with a weird mixture of confusion and admiration each time. Confusion because I don't understand how all of this has such an immense amount of time and capital invested in it when its actual use case for anything is extremely vague (mostly about future potential) and some that have moved away from proof of work (Stellar) seem a lot less safe? Admiration because all of the different approaches, goals, and designs are really technically interesting (Dai using market incentives to stay pegged to one dollar, Tezos proof of stake and ability to get consensus on its own updates/formal verification, Zcash using zero knowledge proofs to keep transaction history optionally private, etc.) I can't help shake that while the ability to hold decentralized consensus is neat, most of the current value seems to come entirely from speculation on future token price from people on reddit that have no idea what they're buying. Why do these things have any real value? I've tried to follow the reasoning of people like Balaji S. Srinivasan from what I can find, but I have a hard time modeling a future where the current value of these things makes sense. The value of Coinbase in all this makes sense though, if you build reliable infrastructure in a market you should make money - it doesn't matter if the underlying assets are worth anything or not.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Digital scarcity is why Bitcoin is so valuable (and why other cryptocurrencies not so much). Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Plan B's article if you honestly want to understand why Bitcoin is so crucial in the current financial climate.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    Thanks - I’ll check them out. Plan B: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w... Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...
    - 7y ago
ASalazarMX 7y ago
How kind of him to give us us all be same opportunity to be fleeced.
habosa 7y ago
Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account? I have used Coinbase for lack of alternatives. It's awful. Every time I sign in (a few times a year) there's some new problem with my account. Either they need more ID verification (done it 10x) or they decided my purchases are going to be delayed 3 days or blah blah blah. I just got an email from them today saying my account is suspended if I don't take some action. This is not the decentralized future crypto people want. It's a half-assed bank that doesn't need its customers.
- optimiz3 7y ago
  Gemini (based in NY), Bittrex (based in WA), and Kraken (based in CA, some US states not supported).
- Seenso 7y ago
  > Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account? You can buy it here: https://www.axcrypt.net/ https://www.axcrypt.net/ and http://www.cryptoexpert.com/ http://www.cryptoexpert.com/. However there's really no need to buy it anymore, as there are very good open-source implementations, like https://gnupg.org/ https://gnupg.org/ and https://www.veracrypt.fr/ https://www.veracrypt.fr/.

58 points by prostoalex 7y ago

artsyca 7y ago

As usual it involves making questionable fashion choices

artsyca 7y ago
i.e. the 'hey I'm a billionaire / bond supervillain' look

Seenso 7y ago

The title is misleading. This doesn't sound like it will do anything to help make crypto safe for those people who need protection from government backdoors and key escrow.

kick 7y ago

I question what these people value about cryptocurrency: with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience present in initial pitches and offerings in the space, it seems like it's mostly valueless. Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy for these people, isn't there?

admiral33 7y ago
It's a cash grab for many people. On the other hand it feels like a kodak moment. Digital currency just feels like a natural progression for the world. It doesn't have a military backing it though. This makes me think that the most "revolutionary" crypto currency will be tied to a social media where people pressure elections in it's favor... sort of like reddit karma where there is no buying power but there is a lot of social power.
- puranjay 7y ago
  Maybe this is an American perspective (the American financial system is horribly outdated) but in the developing world, "digital currency" is mostly a solved problem. Your bank account integrates so seamlessly with digital payment systems that creating a separate currency seems entirely superfluous. Here in India, we have a system called UPI. Connect it to your bank account once and you get a username like 'YourName@OkAxis'. Anyone can send money to this username and it goes straight to your bank account. You can pay establishments - online as well as offline - by simply verifying a one time password on your mobile. It's so seamless and cheap (essentially free) that I can't ever imagine needing a digital currency.
  - omosubi 7y ago
    Interesting to hear this perspective as one of the main arguments people used to make was that people in rural India or wherever could now access banking products that traditional banks refused to give due to cost. I'm assuming that's no longer the case?
    - puranjay 7y ago
      The current government had a massive banking drive where it almost forced the rural poor to open bank accounts. This was followed by demonetization of currency notes, which, as harmful as it was to the economy, "normalized" the idea of transacting digitally. A bulk of transactions still happen via cash but digital payments, especially UPI, are seeing increasingly wider adoption. There has been a lot of innovation in this space just to make customer-merchant transactions easier. For example, this product from PayTM basically acts as a confirmation box for UPI transactions. https://business.paytm.com/blog/introducing-paytm-sound-box-turn-your-business-into-a-smart-business/ https://business.paytm.com/blog/introducing-paytm-sound-box-... Something like this reduces the trust deficit in rural areas about digital banking products. It's going to take a long while, but technologically, it's a solved problem. I can't see any utility that crypto brings to the table except for decentralization which most consumers don't care about anyway.
  - apta 7y ago
Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
>with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous. Monero and ZCash are anonymous. Not sure what you mean by resilience. >Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies.
- kick 7y ago
  Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous. Not when you're using Coinbase. Monero [is] anonymous. Sure. ZCash [is] anonymous. lol Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies. I didn't claim it was. You completely misinterpreted my comment.

optimiz3 7y ago

Corporate fluff article on Forbes. Should just be renamed Big-Brotherbase, or Banned-for-Life-and-Won't-Tell-You-Whybase. Coinbase is famous for suddenly disabling accounts and refusing to give an explanation. At least a traditional bank will normally explain the circumstances. Got one of their arbitrary sucks-for-you letters last year. No way would I ever recommend them to anyone. In my case I'm a mining developer, so I have a huge digital currency profile. Coinbase is horrifically opaque and impossible to deal with if they flag you unlike most other organizations. E: I'll just lump some more examples of their corporate ineptitude. 1. Recently I asked them for a dump of trades and fees executed on their exchange for audit and record keeping purposes. All they had were records of deposits and withdrawls but none of the actual trades. So no cost-basis data and now a huge accounting headache. 2. When my personal account got locked, we separately had an application out for an institutional account. 4 months go by and suddenly I get emails saying "we're ready to proceed with your institutional account". Excuse me? Told them to fix my personal account first. Never heard back.

oblongx 7y ago
What did they do with your crypto, sell it and pay you out?
- optimiz3 7y ago
  Coinbase closed the account; they did allow all funds to be withdrawn. Fortunately there are tons of digital currency exchanges. Kraken, Gemini, Bittrex are all very viable alternatives that also comply with various regulations in the US.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
Am I having Déjà vu? Does anyone else remember seeing a thread about Coinbase trying something ambitious/sanctimonious and then comments calling it fluff or handwaving it away, just like this, a year or more ago?
- c0nducktr 7y ago
  Coinbase didn't just start ripping people off within the last year. I ran into the same thing in 2015(ish).

ljm 7y ago

The sooner that billionaire becomes a greater pejorative, the better. The whole of society suffers from the accumulation of wealth to these few people. On that basis, I don’t give a fuck what this person says because they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there. And he does not command respect by having so much money. This is the aristocracy by a different measure. Back then they used agricultural output. Now it is measured in assets.

allovernow 7y ago
>they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there Do the corporations that evil billionaires own not pay their employees? You realize that this wealth is just a result of a couple percent of markup per transaction on a massive scale, right? Yeah, Armstrong may be a scummy person, and his exchanges are trash, but he made his billions by offering a service that no one else did. There was no other way that I'm aware of to easily buy BTC or ETC with cash before coinbase popped up. It's possible to make a billion honestly.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I really wish people would stop using the title “billionaire”. Is “billionaire” the new aristocracy or priesthood?

huangc10 7y ago
What, you never heard of the tres comas club?
CPLX 7y ago
Yes
dajohnson89 7y ago
Agreed. I don't really see the point in the use of that adjective here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> That success comes from acting like a bank. Coinbase draws in customer funds via bank wires. It stores its assets—numerical keys that unlock coins—in vaults. It boasts of insurance coverage from Lloyd’s of London. It has a security staff of 41, including an Iraq War veteran assessing perimeter risks and a Ph.D. cryptographer doing the same for mathematical assaults. It is a bank, that instead of storing cash, stores keys. It is centralized. It complies with regulators. It does allow you to withdraw your keys into your own wallet, but a bank also allows you to withdraw your cash to your physical wallet. It walks like a bank, and it quacks like a bank. It is a bank.

meagher 7y ago

> “It’s like if Google made Gmail for bitcoin,” says Chris Dixon, an Andreessen partner who serves on the Coinbase board. “And that’s literally the way they described it.” One of the most painful startup analogies I've heard.

pavlov 7y ago
Every startup should adopt this formula for their decks. “Juicero: it’s like if Google made Gmail for juice”

fossuser 7y ago

I've been checking in on cryptocurrencies and blockchain things every couple of years and I tend to come away with a weird mixture of confusion and admiration each time. Confusion because I don't understand how all of this has such an immense amount of time and capital invested in it when its actual use case for anything is extremely vague (mostly about future potential) and some that have moved away from proof of work (Stellar) seem a lot less safe? Admiration because all of the different approaches, goals, and designs are really technically interesting (Dai using market incentives to stay pegged to one dollar, Tezos proof of stake and ability to get consensus on its own updates/formal verification, Zcash using zero knowledge proofs to keep transaction history optionally private, etc.) I can't help shake that while the ability to hold decentralized consensus is neat, most of the current value seems to come entirely from speculation on future token price from people on reddit that have no idea what they're buying. Why do these things have any real value? I've tried to follow the reasoning of people like Balaji S. Srinivasan from what I can find, but I have a hard time modeling a future where the current value of these things makes sense. The value of Coinbase in all this makes sense though, if you build reliable infrastructure in a market you should make money - it doesn't matter if the underlying assets are worth anything or not.

xiphias2 7y ago
Digital scarcity is why Bitcoin is so valuable (and why other cryptocurrencies not so much). Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Plan B's article if you honestly want to understand why Bitcoin is so crucial in the current financial climate.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Thanks - I’ll check them out. Plan B: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w... Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...
  - 7y ago

ASalazarMX 7y ago

How kind of him to give us us all be same opportunity to be fleeced.

habosa 7y ago

Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account? I have used Coinbase for lack of alternatives. It's awful. Every time I sign in (a few times a year) there's some new problem with my account. Either they need more ID verification (done it 10x) or they decided my purchases are going to be delayed 3 days or blah blah blah. I just got an email from them today saying my account is suspended if I don't take some action. This is not the decentralized future crypto people want. It's a half-assed bank that doesn't need its customers.

optimiz3 7y ago
Gemini (based in NY), Bittrex (based in WA), and Kraken (based in CA, some US states not supported).
Seenso 7y ago
> Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account? You can buy it here: https://www.axcrypt.net/ https://www.axcrypt.net/ and http://www.cryptoexpert.com/ http://www.cryptoexpert.com/. However there's really no need to buy it anymore, as there are very good open-source implementations, like https://gnupg.org/ https://gnupg.org/ and https://www.veracrypt.fr/ https://www.veracrypt.fr/.