
Coinbase acquires Earn.com - ammaristotle
https://news.earn.com/earn-com-joins-coinbase-a282a36411d2
======
LAMike
21.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?

~~~
vinniejames
This explainantion doesn't make sense. You're alledging a16z funded 21.co with
$100M, then took it all back to buy Bitcoin?

If that's the case earn.com would own the BTC, which would mean Coinbase
acquired all the BTC held by earn.com

Unless there is something I'm missing, this almost certainly did NOT happen

~~~
harryh
"21.co had been started as 21E6, a bitcoin mining company with a sizable data
center footprint and a monthly bill to match. The company was set up to return
mined bitcoin to its shareholders"

[https://medium.com/@balajis/the-
turnaround-2d145589d814](https://medium.com/@balajis/the-
turnaround-2d145589d814)

~~~
fudged71
Uhh... wow. He's former A16Z so he would likely have devised 21 while he was
working there. Seems totally plausible to put the invested cash into BTC.

------
modeless
I 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.

~~~
wpietri
Looking 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?

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a
blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.

By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the
world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where
a payment system can operate.

Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users
of the winning paid-email service would be locked into using the same
financial intermediary, which would then have significant power over its users
owing to its network effect.

~~~
wpietri
This is a solution in search of a problem. Most people barely want to accept
email from people they are likely to do business with. What American is
excited to get email from some stranger who literally doesn't have two nickels
to rub together?

Also, you're just wrong about traditional financial intermediaries. It's easy
enough to provide a few different ways to transfer funds. Or to do it over a
relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-
in possible.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>What American is excited to get email from some stranger who literally
doesn't have two nickels to rub together?

I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the
US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to
the international and open nature of the internet.

>>Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer,
where there's no lock-in possible.

Making a wire transfer to use email? That'd be ridiculously expensive. You'd
need a payment system built on top of the bank wire system, and it would need
to be truly international in scope, and open, which no trusted third party
based financial system is.

~~~
wpietri
> tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial
> system seems quite limiting and archaic

The important word here being "seems". Seeming is a thing that happens in
someone's head. So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has
tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political
vision".

It does not seem like that to me. Or to 99.9% of companies, who start out
tying their companies to the reach of a specific national or regional
financial system and then move happily beyond it.

In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much
more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more
like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their
economic activity through that financial system than those in developed
nations do.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much
more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more
like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their
economic activity through that financial system than those in developed
nations do.

Of course but that's pretty disingenuous, because it ignores the obvious: that
those pushing this track see cryptocurrency becoming mass adopted over the
coming years.

Their point is that cryptocurrency's potential reach is far greater than any
centralized legacy financial system's.

Their other point is that it's more consistent with the open and decentralized
nature of the internet.

>>So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their
identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".

Are you sure that's not you?

------
orliesaurus
I 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.

------
crabasa
This 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
Actually, 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-
advert...](https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advertising-
platform/)

~~~
crabasa
You'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.

------
wyldfire
I 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
There is nothing interesting coming out of cryptocurrency space other than ICO
spam

~~~
jMyles
How 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.

~~~
hk__2
I’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?

~~~
jMyles
Two things:

1) The whitepaper describes the nature of our network and how Alice and Bob
use it. It does not describe (and isn't meant to describe) node operation
except as Alice and Bob need to understand it. We'll have an additional node
operation whitepaper that describes the smart contracts in more detail. We -
and I know this may sound strange - decided to build our cryptography and
network first and foremost rather than race to build "something, anything, as
long as it's blockchain."

2) Do you think that the whitepaper insufficiently describes how Alice and Bob
use the blockchain? If so, do you have suggestions for how we can do this
better? I think our whitepaper is pretty solid, FWIW. If you are Alice or Bob,
I think this gives you exactly the understanding of the blockchain application
that you need.

~~~
hk__2
Thank you for the clarification. Re 2), I didn’t read the whitepaper in full
but rather grep’d "blockchain" to understand how you used it.

------
dzink
At 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.

------
exolymph
Here 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
This 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.

------
mychael
Nothing to see here. Just another highly connected businessman making a ton of
money on a startup exit.

------
roy100
This sounds like a acqui-hire, highly doubt that Coinbase would have paid
200-300M (representing a 2-3x investment multiplier) - BTC or otherwise?

------
jamestimmins
Looks like Balaji (Earn CEO) is joining Coinbase as the CTO. So this is
potentially a straight acqui-hire.

------
kristianc
> 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
Everyone in adtech. Especially those that understand blockchain.

------
donttrack
I 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...

------
wiradikusuma
Just 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)?

~~~
CryptoPunk
Fiat 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.

------
crsv
I 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
And an aggressive spam producer.

------
srj85
So begins the conglomerate

------
jreyes333
Earn.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
The 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
Interesting how there is no keywords for 'security' and 'privacy'. Seems like
a good acquisition to implement tracking of people's financial activity.

------
wollw
As 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.

------
m3kw9
There is probably a non-block chain way to replicate this

~~~
aiCeivi9
> 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.

------
arisAlexis
I launched veropost.com a while before earn.com pivoted. Didn't get much love,
I hope now people can see the value proposition.

~~~
arisAlexis
yes that was the problem SV trolls downvoting

------
lavezzi
They started spamming me three days ago but I have no idea where they got my
email from...

------
iblaine
Wow, that was fast.

------
perseusprime11
I am now seriously worried about Coinbase after this baseless acquisition.

~~~
loceng
It'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).

------
nickwanninger
"Joins" isn't in the thesaurus for "was bought by"

~~~
ghayes
Separate but related events?

------
loceng
So 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
By 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
I 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).

~~~
hndamien
It seems you have a problem with other people having large pieces of pie,
rather than the more important point that all people that have pie have it
grow.

~~~
Retra
Let's hear you say this next time you try to run a political campaign against
someone who can outspend you a thousand times over.

You'll lose, and they'll have everything they need to take whatever scraps of
pie you have on your plate.

~~~
loceng
Interestingly my comment here -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16867880)
\- ties into the concern you voiced.

