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Interesting to see his business pivot that eventually happened. His original motivation (Bitbank) was a "WesternUnion/Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe" payments p
by jasode 6y ago
Interesting to see his business pivot that eventually happened.
His original motivation (Bitbank) was a "WesternUnion/Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe" payments processor using bitcoin. At the time bitcoin was ~$5 instead of ~$60000 today.
Instead of that, his Coinbase is more like a forex market maker. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market
It was other entities (e.g. Blockstream bitcoin Lightning Network) that pursued the "small payments" space.
So the only constant theme was to do something in the cryptocurrency space.
- jkhdigital 6y agoYeah the early hype around disrupting transaction fees turned out to be... somewhat misguided. Although, to be fair, Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper made this exact same miscalculation. While Coinbase does function as something like a forex market market at this point, I think its business is not nearly as commoditized as that label would suggest.
- mustafa_pasi 6y agoYes, at the time there was still lots of hope that Bitcoin was going to be a currency, so everyone thought, the way to make a quick buck was to start literally any online retail/service and start accepting Bitcoin as payment. That enthusiasm was short lived. Every crypto enthusiast was wrong about that including Satoshi. The economists who shat on Bitcoin from the very beginning were right about that one thing, it was never suited to be a currency.