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Coinbase valued above $100B, ahead of direct listing
- ketamine__ 6y agoWhat is the biggest crypto exchange? Binance?
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoICE who owns the NYSE had a net income of $3Bn last year and is worth $68Bn - for context.
- vmception 6y agoAbout to have a lot more once they start liquidating their Coinbase shareholdings How much do they own now?
- walexander 6y agoNot sure what the operating costs look like for Coinbase, but here's some napkin math based on just the Coinbase Pro exchange . They get roughly $200 per bitcoin trade. That's on both sides, so $400 per bitcoin transaction. Today was a slightly higher volume day but they did $1.6B in BTC-USD, so around ~30k bitcoin changed hands. 30k * 400 = $12Million Bitcoin is 1/3 of their volume (they have a lot of other crypto currency pairs), so let's take 3x of that = $36 Million in trading fees today. Bitcoin is a 24/7 market, so 365 days = $13.14 Billion per year. This does not even count what used to be (still is?) their main business of just buying and holding bitcoin for people through DCA buys or on their app. They also are starting to have a bunch of other revenue streams through loans, debit cards, etc and invest in a number of early crypto projects. I'm not sure what the multiple is going to be like since I don't know their expenses, but since most tech companies are valued from revenue and future growth expectations anyway, who knows.
- pushrax 6y ago"Coinbase generated $141 million of net income on $691 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2020, according to documents shared with investors." Though 2021 will be higher, will it be 20x higher?
- walexander 6y agoThe first nine months bitcoin was at a $10k and below level. They are making considerably more money since the boom took off after that. I don't know if it will be 20x higher either. Just saying, this makes more sense than say, Zoom, which trades at $120B mcap. I dont think the volumes will last, but if you look at volumes today and extrapolate further growth, then sure $100B makes sense.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThe same week SpaceX raises at $78B. Doesn't quite add up, but what do I know.
- ketamine__ 6y agoElon is promoting cryptocurrency. I would assume it makes him feel powerful when the price goes up.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI suspect launching cars into space makes him feel powerful, while pumping memecoins makes him feel somewhat entertained.
- moneywoes 6y agoLow interest rates and secular trends justify this I guess?
- ketamine__ 6y agoLow interest rates don't effect whether a stock goes up or down. That is determined by earnings growth. Edit: Peter Lynch agrees with me. Instead of being a passive aggressive downvoting asshole leave a comment. https://youtu.be/UNrMnFM3VvE https://youtu.be/UNrMnFM3VvE Edit: Lol, I can't respond to your comments because everyone downvoted my comment and HN rate-limited me. Later.
- taylorwc 6y agoThis seems a little myopic. Definitely earnings growth is a factor, but it can’t really explain what just happened with GameStop and WSB, nor most of Amazon’s rise over the past decades. Future expected cash flows, market size, interest rates (and therefore capital seeking yield via equity markets) are all factors. Alongside human tastes, cultural perception, and pockets of irrationality.
- ketamine__ 6y agoYou cherry picked examples. I'm talking 99% of cases.
- eloff 6y agoLow interest rates definitely increase the amount of money chasing equities. There's no where else to get a good return. This pushes up the price of equities and decreases their return too. Also Peter Lynch is no fool, so I'd like a source for you saying he thinks there is no connection before I believe he said that.
- ketamine__ 6y agohttps://youtu.be/UNrMnFM3VvE https://youtu.be/UNrMnFM3VvE
- awat 6y agoI will preface with I don’t have much domain knowledge in crypto. Is there a good faith expectation that this can even go higher?
- ketamine__ 6y agoGood faith is the most overused phrase here.
- uyt 6y agoYes, because there's enough people like you who would blindly throw money at it just because of FOMO then back-rationalize the decision using whatever HN tells you. Stonks only go up.
- willyg123 6y agoNo matter if you think we're in a bubble or if this valuation supports your view that we are in a bubble, at the end of the day we are all losers who have decided to spend our precious time on a Friday night glued to HN.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI'm in the bath relaxing and learning. How u doin'
- randomopining 6y agoYeah dude I gotta quit this and my other forums lol. I spend so much time reading about stuff and trying to learn... instead of chilllin.
- rakejake 6y agoSame here. I convince myself by saying, hey this is not reddit or some sportsforum or <insert-forum-here> but this is probably a worse form of procrastination. At least when I visit /r/nba or espncricinfo, I can relax a bit and just enjoy.
- thekashifmalik 6y agoI swear I was just thinking the same thing :(
- bustin 6y agoCovid makes it harder to be someone who has plans on a Friday night. Don't be so hard on yourself, it gets better.
- vmception 6y agoI was thinking about writing that it gets better, but its too presumptuous when you dont know someone’s life circumstance. If they aren’t of a mind stable enough to stay on this plane of existence, don’t not not stay.
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- endisneigh 6y agoSo what happens to global valuations once the world population starts shrinking? I also wonder what would happen if there was another significant war - surely peace cannot continue forever.
- djrogers 6y ago> once the world population starts shrinking What's your reason for such a firm belief that this is absolutely going to happen in any timeframe that matters to this valuation?
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- eloff 6y agoThat's a long time out, maybe not in my lifetime (I'm mid thirties) The population is not really the factor here, it's economic growth, which is connected to population. Growth must slow eventually too. I'm not sure how long that would take or how we'll adapt.
- randomopining 6y agoI don't get how everybody is just making a killing right now. What goes up must come down? Are people going to get uber burned? Like somebody who put in 50% of their net worth today, and maybe it drops?
- lazylizard 6y agowhy must it come down? there is no gravity.
- eloff 6y agoAll bubbles pop eventually. I think there's little doubt crypto is a bubble right now. Maybe it pops tomorrow, maybe it goes on for years. I don't know, nobody really does.
- chillacy 6y agoIf you value stocks based on book value + dividends and discounted cash flow, this bubble's been going on for almost a hundred years by now. We've just gotten used to the new multiples.
- Aunche 6y agoYou also have to factor in growth into the equation as well. That's the most subjective part of a company's valuation.
- eloff 6y agoI don't see that. You'll need a source if you want to argue that. We've gone through cycles of higher and lower valuations. You also need to compare that to interest rates, because lower rates make the market more forward looking.
- qq4 6y agoThat's the thing about bubbles, you don't know you're in one. My life is a bubble. I'm not going to worry about when it pops.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- technotony 6y agoHow does the lay person get in on these test the market secondary offerings?
- nine_k 6y agoI'd suppose by educating themselves first, as not to be so much of a layperson anymore. Then thinking twice, based on the acquired knowledge.
- practicalpants 6y agoI wish Coinbase would support more cryptos or allow storage of ERC-20 tokens so people would be more encouraged to spin up ETH projects. Feels like Coinbase is trying to be the big corporate face of crypto, kind of going against the spirit of it IMO.
- kevindeasis 6y agoAh yes, possibly the 5th company that I wished I joined this past 18 months... Historically there were some exchanges that have been hacked. This caused not only the company to go bankrupt but people losing a lot of money. How does coinbase prevent this from happening? This is very much one of the reasons I will never hold crypto (FYI: I've wrote my own Golang flavour of ethereum blockchain and solidity when it first came out, since im gonna get bashed for this post. I also regret not putting 1k during ethereums ICO when that was the only money I had in my bank account. This is not an investment advice). If my etrade or bank account got hacked, I can still get my money back through FDIC and SIPC. If a non-tech personstarted hyping a cryptocurrency and placed 100k in it, and they get hacked, essentially their 100k evaporates right? I guess there are worse ways to gamble your money What I like about crypto though is the 24/7 market. I wish there was something like this in the stock market.
- herpderperator 6y agoTD Ameritrade's 24/5 is the closest we have to this at this time. The volume is quite limiting.
- kevindeasis 6y agoThat's interesting, I googled this and I didn't know this existed. Thank you
- tony101 6y agoIt's not perfect, but I believe Coinbase uses a combination of cold (offline) storage for most of its coins and insurance for the rest. Also, as you probably already know, people should not hold large sums on exchanges if they can use secure their own keys (and wallets) instead. > "Coinbase prioritizes the security of our customer's digital currency through a combination of online “hot storage” and offline “cold” storage. Coinbase maintains 98% or more of customer digital currency in cold storage, with the remainder in secure hot servers as necessary to serve the liquidity needs of our customers. All digital currency that Coinbase holds in its online hot storage is insured. If Coinbase were to suffer a breach of its online hot storage, the insurance policy would pay out to cover any customer funds lost as a result." https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/legal-policies/how-is-coinbase-insured https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/legal-pol...
- wave_function 6y agoMaybe coinbase stock becomes the next cryptocurrency! One coinbase is one coinbase?
- herpderperator 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised to see Coinbase stock track bitcoin extremely closely.
- throwsaways212a 6y agoThere can only ever be 21 million Coinbases
- antoniuschan99 6y agoCheck out binancecoin. It shot up so fast last few days it looks like its #3 in market cap now!
- Proven 6y agoIn line with the rest of new State- and Fed-driven parasitic economy - out of control consumer spending, ever moar gov debt, zero interest rates, nobody makes anything in the US (gov spends 2bn of taxpayer money to send a robot to Mars but needs foreign companies to set up semiconductor fab in the country).
- 1helloworld1 6y agoI am afraid that we might be on the verge of another dot com level bubble. It's interesting to see how one inflated asset is propping up another. Tesla - which rose by 1000% in 2020, bought bitcoin. Ark Invest Etfs - some of the biggest actively managed etfs, hold significant amount of Tesla, and with the profit generated from Tesla's phenomenal rise, they are investing more on bitcoin. I believe in the future of cryptocurrencies, but the current state of bitcoin is abysmal. It's slow, expensive and the hacky patches on top (lightning network) either haven't been widely adopted or are still buggy. This all seems so much like the pets.com of the dot com bubble era. Great idea but terrible implementation. https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2020/07/09/bitcoins-lightning-network-is-struggling-to-overcome-fundamental-issues/?sh=6e803af45f77 https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2020/07/09/bitco...
- hackypatch 6y agoCould credit cards not be considered a "hacky patch" or really a layer 2 solution to the slowness of adoption and traditional banking policies? And they eat up 2%+ fee even for people that wish to pay in cash?
- lottin 6y agoNo.
- cm2187 6y agothe nice thing with that bubble is that because it is manufactured by the Fed, you have an easy signal for when it has reached its top, just look at the weekly fed balance sheet: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren... And right now they are still printing more and more.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoFed contributes, but it's hardly a singular explainer for the current market mania. The chart you shared hasn't even changed significantly since July. The Fed didn't print enough money to buoy Tesla 1000% or send Bitcoin up 100% in a month. There's no mechanism directing money straight from the Fed into the riskiest assets. Market mania has taken hold.
- vmception 6y agoThe ICE man is going to pump this so hard. Too bad his wife isn't still on the Senate oversight committee, but it wont matter
- blhack 6y agoICE man?
- bdcravens 6y agoJeffrey Sprecher (wife is Kelly Loeffler). He's the head of the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) (also chairman of NYSE) https://ir.theice.com/governance/executive-management-team/default.aspx#:~:text=Chairman%2C%20New%20York%20Stock%20Exchange,the%20New%20York%20Stock%20Exchange https://ir.theice.com/governance/executive-management-team/d....
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redact207 6y agoWe're just at a point in the economy where it doesn't make sense to hold on to cash. It's just completely losing its value thanks to a long sustained QE. People are just putting their money into anything as a hedge - real estate, stocks, crypto, gold. Until the value of the at can be sustained and inflation comes back, it's unlikely much else will change.
- adventured 6y ago> We're just at a point in the economy where it doesn't make sense to hold on to cash. We're not at that point, and I'm speaking as someone that supports a gold standard or equivalent to prevent rampant fiat debasement. I take it you didn't live through the 1970s. There have been numerous times in the past century where currency in major economies was prominently debased far worse, far faster than what we're seeing today. Sutained QE has done far less damage to the USD as one example, than what the 1970s did to it or the extreme destruction we saw during the George W Bush years (go to Google, type in "Belgium GDP", Netherlands GDP, Czech GDP, or Brazil GDP, almost any nation; you'll see a comical liftoff in their GDP chart, far beyond any real growth rates, that's the dollar getting massacred thanks to the idiotic fiscal policies during the GWB years). Gold went from around $250 to $1900 over a little more than a decade from ~2000-2011, before sustained QE became a thing. In the 1970s it basically went up 1,000%. Not much has actually changed about how governments destroy currencies, it's the same old same old. Perma QE didn't change much, it's not a new tool, and nothing is very different today versus the past (except that so far this is a cakewalk compared to the destruction in the past; maybe it'll get a lot worse yet, of course). You're better off holding cash than Tesla shares at $800 or $900. I'd rather take a 3% average debasement per year than sit in the S&P 500 at these levels (especially given what the US economy is going to look like in the coming decade). From these heights I'll bide my time for the next inevitable crash or significant decline, that's when the serious returns are generated, not chasing mania ever higher in markets at late stages. The big money was already made in Bitcoin, from $0 to $50,000; the upside from here is a joke by comparison to the risk. So it goes to $150,000 (maybe). That isn't a crazy return vs the outsized risk, that's the kind of return you could have gotten in any cloud stock after IPO. Yet it takes an extraordinary move of adding ~$2 trillion in market cap for Bitcoin to get there. The risk vs reward in Bitcoin at these levels is like a lot of absurdly overvalued stocks presently. And of course everyone becomes certain that something is fundamentally different today - it's not, this mania won't endure either (to be clear, we're not just in an asset bubble, this is a mania, the 8th or 9th inning of a bubble phase). Significant inflation isn't coming back anytime soon (not until or unless they start devaluing the USD directly, but that isn't for at least 20 years yet), the US is in a heat-death stage of economic erosion. Ever greater sums of capital are being put into the freezer in the form of very low yielding debt, that process will continue to rob the US of dynamism and growth, trending growth toward zero as it goes. This is the exact same process Japan went through, and it's why they were unable to spark traditional inflation with their crazy spending and QE-like programs, they tried everything in the Keynesian book and it all failed (for the same reason the US didn't drown in inflation from 2010-2020 despite the rather insanely low interest rates over that time). We're not going to see a serious wave of inflation this decade now for the same reason we didn't the prior decade.
- throwawaygulf 6y agoAfter they cleansed themselves from toxic activist SJW leftist employees, it looks like they've only gone up.
- rvz 6y agoThere you go right there, sounds like those who stayed were the smart ones or even there are some who want to time it perfectly after the direct listing + the lockup period. Given the industry-wide reaction to Coinbase's apolitical policy last year and the peak of the political chaos of 2020, I doubt they considered staying. In general, If you get woke, you'll only go broke.
- ggm 6y agoIt doesn't much matter to me if its crypto currency or real goods, when markets, stock exchanges float, I think we're insane. The marketplace should not of itself be valuable. If it is, its extraction of value for the goods/utility being traded. Its rent seeking. The only possible value derives from what is a tax on trades by volume and value, to NOT fund the engine which runs the trades. Sure Lloyd's of London is priceless. Priceless really should mean "does not usefully have a price, in that sense" If coinbase is worth $100b what does that even mean in terms of the sustained value of the dollar?
- logicchains 6y ago>The marketplace should not of itself be valuable. If it is, its extraction of value for the goods/utility being traded. Due to regulatory capture Coinbase gets away with charging literally 10x higher fees than international exchanges, as US regulations essentially ban Americans from trading on most of the popular international exchanges, so Coinbase has little competition.
- ggm 6y agoYea... that's a scaaaaam. Its not sustained value.
- runako 6y ago+1. I do think that a $100B public company engaging in the activity makes a really strong case for regulatory reform. I would expect it to be straightforward for other markets to add crypto for US residents once Coinbase goes public. I don't know that I would want to own Coinbase stock once CME/ICE/CBOE have crypto exchanges with lower fees. Coinbase could end up being the victim of its own success.
- uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y agoVery American to bump prices for the sake of national identity lock-in.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wyxuan 6y agoI think a bet on coinbase, not bitcoin is the best bet for anyone who is looking toward betting for a future of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has a lot going against it- the tether fraud stuff, connections to money laundering, slow transaction speed. Coinbase is tied to none of those things, and has the unique advantage of having a reputation in both security and compliance in an industry full of greenhorns.
- fergie 6y agoWhat about the environmental impact / physical limitations of cryptomining? At this point BTC alone consumes more energy than Argentina (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952)- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952)- will legislators allow this to continue? Will it even be possible for it to continue much further?
- wtfrmyinitials 6y agoMost crypto mining is done with renewables because it’s the cheapest kWh when you don’t have to factor in energy storage.
- qeternity 6y agoAnd? If miners use it, it means John Doe needs to use coal power to charge his Tesla instead of renewables because the mining setup next to the hydro plant is gobbling it all up.
- runako 6y agoThe chart here provides context: https://twitter.com/JohnStCapital/status/1362859527230672896 https://twitter.com/JohnStCapital/status/1362859527230672896 In case the tweet is deleted, a summary. Coinbase is now being valued at over half the combined market value of the companies that collectively own most major global markets outside of China. Those markets trade everything from currencies to stocks and bonds to commodities. For scale of asset pools: The value of all Bitcoins ever mined just hit $1 trillion. The CME Group exchanges trade nearly 6x that daily. This funding values Coinbase ~50% higher than CME Group.
- radicality 6y agoSomething similar that intrigued me recently is that Airbnb is valued at more than all the USA publicly listed hotel chains put together (Marriott etc)
- runako 6y agoIn that case, the comparison is between a capital-efficient tech company and a real estate management company where capital is tied up in real estate around the world. If there's a similar distinction between the business models of Coinbase and e.g. CME Group, I have yet to hear it.
- pgwhalen 6y ago> If there's a similar distinction between the business models of Coinbase and e.g. CME Group, I have yet to hear it. Traditional finance and crypto finance are often hard to compare, but here's a surface level comparison: Coinbase is an exchange, a brokerage, and a clearing house all wrapped into one. I'm not aware of entity in traditional finance that is all three, though plenty are two out of three (Robinhood is a brokerage and clearing house, CME is an exchange and clearing house).
- csomar 6y agoThat's meaningless. For all we know, these companies could be buried in debt and thus have little value in their assets. The price is a prediction of future payouts (whether in dividends or value of the assets the company is holding).
- Gunax 6y agoIt's great for coinbase, but I don't understand why it's winning the competition. It's fees are incredible, and it doesn't even seem to offer basic features like limit orders.
- _rohan 6y agoI see a lot of people talking about the market being in a bubble, and that they’re holding cash waiting for a crash. Even if that’s true, I recently read about the bubble potentially “bursting up”: instead of prices coming crashing down, prices stay stagnant or grow slowly, while earnings grow quickly. The net result is the same (P/E ratios stabilize), but you lose out on a lot by staying out of the market.
- hiq 6y ago> instead of prices coming crashing down, prices stay stagnant or grow slowly, while earnings grow quickly Do you have a link where I could read more about this? As a layman I fail to understand how this would work, and I couldn't find a page explaining it. My naive understanding is that a bubble pops when investors lose confidence in the market, and instead of anticipating growth, anticipates a correction and create a feedback loop down to a certain level (at which some counter feedback stabilizes the movement). How can earnings increase when investors have lost confidence?
- _rohan 6y agoThe market is overvalued when the price-to-earnings ratio is too high (ie, valuations outweigh the actual money that a company makes). When it gets really high, investors can panic, and sell stocks, driving prices down and hence reducing the PE ratio. The alternative I’m describing is one where panic selling doesn’t occur. Earnings can continue to rise (because earnings reflect consumer spending and other similar trends), whereas prices don’t go up as much because market speculation reduces and people are less bullish. It doesn’t have to devolve to panic selling.
- lottin 6y agoBitcoin has no earnings so I don't know how that could possibly work in the case of the bitcoin bubble.
- frankbreetz 6y ago
- raiyu 6y agoOne important thing to note is that these are secondary transactions and not where the stock may potentially trade. Secondly, Coinbase doesn’t allow any secondary transactions, this was a company sponsored (approved) secondary. As a result this created immense scarcity so you can see how much the price changes just in these limited sales. Third, as we saw with the last bull run of Bitcoin everything with blockchain in the name had a halo effect so there is definitely upward momentum. Fourth, there is no Bitcoin tracking security on public markets. Obviously if Bitcoin succeeds so does Coinbase, this is an Avenue to get exposure to that without having to invest in Bitcoin directly and since Coinbase makes money on volatility which Bitcoin has a tremendous amount you get to ride the swings up and down by investing in Coinbase and not having exposure to Bitcoin directly. Investing in the shovels not the gold. Eventually companies grow in to their valuations and that is determined by supply and demand and ultimately revenue and profits. Coinbase is still growing rapidly and profitable so in today’s market there will be a huge premium for that. Technically it most closely resembles zoom from a financial perspective and from a capturing the trends perspective so while the valuation may seem high if Coinbase isn’t worth this then neither is zoom. When will there be a market correction it’s impossible to know. We could have said the same thing for the post two years and it still hasn’t happened. Don’t forget that getting yield outside of stocks is increasingly difficult and while we are on HN trapped in the echo chamber of tech and tech stocks when you look at the old staples like Coca-Cola they haven’t appreciated during this time. Large mutual funds could be rebalancing their portfolios to move more into tech which they should have done from 2010 onwards but largely resisted outside of FAANG stocks. The only thing that is certain is that this is a wild ride.
- ianai 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law Not sure of how it applies but there it is. One way I could see this going: the smallest unit of a Bitcoin is a Satoshi. What happens when that value is greater than a transaction base cost? Right now it’s $0.0005 or 100 millionth the cost of a coin. This implies a lot of runway.
- tracedddd 6y ago
- theXspidy 6y agohttps://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-high-of-over https://thesnippets.substack.com/p/bitcoin-records-a-new-hig...
- graeme 6y agoOnly tangentially related: How do bitcoin network costs scale with market price? We can expect the marginal cost to mine a coin to scale with price. So if btc worth $52,000 then people will invest on average $52,000 in equipment and electricity. There are 6.5 coins mined every 10 min. So daily network cost approximates to 6.5 * 6 * 24 * $52,000 = $48,000,000 This is not strictly accurate as past equipment costs less and people may over invest expecting appreciation. But it should be close enough. So to run the network at a price of $52,000 you need $17.76 billion dollars to enter as fresh capital to be burned as electricity and equipment, correct? And if the price hit $1,000,000 as boosters claim, mining difficulty would rise to adjust and the new annual maintenance cost would be: 6.5 * 6 * 24 * * 365 * $1,000,000 = $341,640,000,000 And then this would decrease as halving happened. In May 2020 and then 2024. So the annual cost to run a $1,000,000 btc network post the may 2020 halving would be about $170 billion per year. That much new capital needs to enter the market and be burned up simply to maintain the price at $1,000,000. And to be useful to the world a $1,000,000 bitcoin would need to generate $170,000,000,000 in value annually. Have I got this right or did I make a grievous error somewhere?
- martinko 6y agoYou've got it right. That being said, I dont think anyone realistically expects 1m / btc this decade.
- graeme 6y agoRight just thinking through the claims of the boosters to their logical end. If it did happen in nine years the next halving is 2028 so the cost would be ~$85 billion per year. And that would be less than it is now due to inflation. Ok that’s actually not as bad as I thought, though still pretty expensive. You need $85 billion from new entrants in burnt capital just to maintain the value of existing bitcoins at that price, and people need some reason for putting in capital other than price appreciation assuming appreciation stops.
- usehackernews 6y agoYou seem to have a good grasp of creating high level models. I always see people referring to the energy consumption of bitcoin as though it’s strictly additive. What I’d be interested to know is how it compares relative to energy costs for transacting with and securing fiat currencies. Second, what people tend to ignore is that innovation doesn’t come in a vacuum - there are second, and third degree improvements triggered from it. In a world where bitcoin is $1million, it means the world has agreed on the benefits, and we will see innovations to address the tradeoffs that come from this. For example, we could see significant investment into renewable energy as a means to support the energy consumption of bitcoin. Third, and this isn’t directed at you, just a general statement based on arguments I see on HN - cryptocurrency itself does not have high energy consumption. Proof-of-work mining does. There are methods to support cryptocurrency that do not result in high energy consumption (Proof of Stake, DAGs). It’s wrong to generalize energy consumption issues to all cryptocurrencies.
- airhead969 6y agoI have a large selection of common tulip bulbs. They're only $800 USD each. Get them while they're still a bargain.
- emehex 6y agoPerhaps a dumb question: why is Coinbase even entertaining an IPO? Give away shares for fiat money? Isn't that antithetical to what they're trying to do?
- willio58 6y agoI don’t think it’s antithetical, going public is a natural step for many companies. It makes the people at the top of the company that much richer. Also in a weird way going public is sort of decentralization because suddenly the people running the company are answering to the shareholders instead of a few key stakeholders.
- Proziam 6y agoI'm someone who used crypto to buy my current residence. Until you and your staff can pay their rent and taxes in BTC, fiat money is the only real money. That said, I have my doubts about the 'purity' of any crypto company.
- globular-toast 6y agoMaybe you're confused about what they're trying to do. I'm pretty sure they're trying to get rich and nothing else.
- qeternity 6y ago21st century Levi Strauss
- bob33212 6y agoThey are trying to "Exit". That is what they call a IPO or a Sale in startups. They get paid with cash, then they buy houses, stocks, bitcoin, cars with that cash. The "Mission" of Coinbase exists because they don't want to say "Our mission is to build a 100 billion dollar company and then cash out" it sounds better and feels better to say that you are democratizing and decentralizing power for the people.
- vmception 6y ago
- vmception 6y agoCoinbase will make a lot on their staking products, I can see huge growth there! I am surprised by this multiple but I can see it, as the law of diminishing returns has not set in and won't for a while. Pretty much all aspects of this require growth in other parts of the market to support, but they are all things I agree with. For example, Coinbase should be allowing people to pool their REN to run hosted darknodes - darknodes function as a progressively more trustless exchange letting people move assets across blockchains. Coinbase already lists REN. Taking a cut of that as the volume grows there will essentially allow Coinbase to double dip. They get the transaction fees when people trade, move funds off of their exchange, and a cut when people move funds to other blockchains through RenVM, which will be a many-to-many relationship. The Forex market does several trillion $ a day in trades, so another mere order of magnitude in growth of the crypto economy would support the growth of all the infrastructure projects inside of the economy.