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why is a coinbase ad on the hackernews frontpage?

dageshi 5y ago
Why shouldn't it be?
kodah 5y ago
Coinbase was a ycombinator startup and they made a Superbowl ad that successfully converted enough users from TV to phone that it crashed their app. There's a couple interesting points there: - Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash - Coinbase ignored advice from an experienced ad agency for a Superbowl ad - The entire production was under $100k and had the desired effect It makes sense this is on HN.
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  > Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash I'm not so sure it shows how popular Bitcoin is. Since it just crashed the website, I imagine the only takeaway is: If you spend 60 seconds showing nothing more than a QR code, then a lot of people will scan it and try to load the website.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    ... which makes this as much a story of opsec as advertising. Imagine if someone were to go through that whole process of prepping the ad, going through the meetings, getting the sign-offs, and then had rug-pulled what resource is linked by that QR code at the last possible second...
  - lttlrck 5y ago
    if the camera apps do any preloading on QR URLs there is even less awareness...
- jaywalk 5y ago
  The ad was just a bouncing QR code, people who scanned it had no idea that it was anything related to crypto until they were directed to the website.
  - addaon 5y ago
    Yep. Definitely shows opportunities for getting value out of zero-day exploits next Superbowl. If you can find a straightforward-to-monetize attack that works on either of latest iPhone or Android, I'd imagine it would be easy to cover the cost of running the ad. And behaviorally, I have to assume that folks would consider a QR code on their TV a more "trusted source" than, say, an unsolicited e-mail, so you can probably even get some behavioral co-operation.
s5300 5y ago
At least one major old guard YC partner has been a a major investor in coinbase for some time. People are probably interested in what went wrong with the site crashing when they very well knew they’d be seeing a large amount of traffic.
dang 5y ago
It's not. The story behind the ad is. That's on topic, partly because the ad was unusual and partly because the story of how these things come to be is sometimes interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why shouldn't it be?

Coinbase was a ycombinator startup and they made a Superbowl ad that successfully converted enough users from TV to phone that it crashed their app. There's a couple interesting points there: - Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash - Coinbase ignored advice from an experienced ad agency for a Superbowl ad - The entire production was under $100k and had the desired effect It makes sense this is on HN.

banana_giraffe 5y ago
> Bitcoin is popular enough with Superbowl fans to incur an app crash I'm not so sure it shows how popular Bitcoin is. Since it just crashed the website, I imagine the only takeaway is: If you spend 60 seconds showing nothing more than a QR code, then a lot of people will scan it and try to load the website.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  ... which makes this as much a story of opsec as advertising. Imagine if someone were to go through that whole process of prepping the ad, going through the meetings, getting the sign-offs, and then had rug-pulled what resource is linked by that QR code at the last possible second...
- lttlrck 5y ago
  if the camera apps do any preloading on QR URLs there is even less awareness...
jaywalk 5y ago
The ad was just a bouncing QR code, people who scanned it had no idea that it was anything related to crypto until they were directed to the website.
- addaon 5y ago
  Yep. Definitely shows opportunities for getting value out of zero-day exploits next Superbowl. If you can find a straightforward-to-monetize attack that works on either of latest iPhone or Android, I'd imagine it would be easy to cover the cost of running the ad. And behaviorally, I have to assume that folks would consider a QR code on their TV a more "trusted source" than, say, an unsolicited e-mail, so you can probably even get some behavioral co-operation.

s5300 5y ago

At least one major old guard YC partner has been a a major investor in coinbase for some time. People are probably interested in what went wrong with the site crashing when they very well knew they’d be seeing a large amount of traffic.

dang 5y ago

It's not. The story behind the ad is. That's on topic, partly because the ad was unusual and partly because the story of how these things come to be is sometimes interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html