
Move deliberately, fix things: How Coinbase is building a cryptocurrency empire - prostoalex
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/move-deliberately-fix-things-how-coinbase-is-building-a-cryptocurrency-empire/2018/05/17/623d950c-587c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.59de653c6d60
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siruncledrew
Coinbase is essentially transforming itself into a bank to compete with the
other Wall St. banks, but rely on their early crypto position as a competitive
advantage. This seems very much opposite of the "No Banks" and
"Decentralization" mantra of cryptocurrency.

~~~
PeterisP
The success of Coinbase seems to indicate that customers are voting with their
wallets that "No Banks" and "Decentralization" (including anonymity and
censorship resistance) are _not_ actually that highly desirable features for
most people, they're willing to give them up and eager to use a trustworthy
centralized service that's a bit more convenient and handles the technical
risks for them.

~~~
tmh88j
Do you think decentralization is not actually that desirable, or that there
are just very limited avenues for buying/selling? Cryptocurrencies are scary
enough for most people, throwing them into a forex like platform on currencies
they don't understand the technology behind only amplifies the confusion and
reluctance. I think the desire for decentralization is very real, but the
"front end" technology hasn't caught up yet.

~~~
simias
>I think the desire for decentralization is very real

Ideology aside, as a random human being, why would I care about that? I need
to buy bread at the bakery, I can use cash, my "centralized" Visa or my
Bitcoin wallet, all other things being equal what difference does
decentralization make?

And if it's solely about principles then I have bad news.

I think most people would agree that ideologically speaking if you value
privacy it makes more sense to use Duckduckgo rather than Google search, yet
even though DDG now offers a quality of service comparable to the big G it
still remains extremely confidential. The friction to get from one service to
the other is like 3 clicks in your browser's UI, yet most people don't care.

If 99% of people can't be bothered to ditch Google search in favor of
something else even though there's very little friction, how can you ever hope
to convince people to switch from Visa to a bitcoin wallet which is
significantly less convenient and makes it easy to irrevocably lose your
money? That's a pipe dream IMO.

~~~
codetrotter
> even though DDG now offers a quality of service comparable to the big G it
> still remains extremely confidential

I’ve tried to switch to DDG a couple of times and I use it as the default
search engine on my cellphone now but it’s not yet as good as Google is for
easily finding exactly what I want and I doubt it will ever be because it is
thanks to the very thing I don’t like about Google — the amount of things they
know about their users — that Google are able to give the results that their
users are looking for.

I bought a book called Relevant Search because I think that it might be
possible to build a very good search engine for oneself but I have not yet had
time to even start reading that book so.

~~~
dx034
It's the other way around for me. I use it as default on the desktop because I
just type !g whenever the query is more complex. Most searches are still sth
easy (or programming questions where DDG is really good) so I probably only
use Google for 20-30% of queries. On the phone that's too much of a hassle
(and my queries there are often more localized) so I keep using Google.

I think switching to DDG is worth it even if you only lower your usage to a
certain degree. It means no company has your full profile anymore.

------
xchaotic
They are building all this on very weak foundations. The assumption is that
all these services built on top of crypto currencies will somehow be more
efficient than existing systems.

They are not. It takes more time and electricity to confirm a BTC transaction,
therefore it's slower and more costly.

Those shaky foundations mean that the actual winners may be other fintech
companies like Revolut, Stripe or TransferWise who are not distracted as much
by the whole crypto mania.

~~~
whataretensors
POW limitations. Check out POS and DAG systems

~~~
Semirhage
So far they’re long on talk and short on results, with no indication that’s
likely to change.

~~~
whataretensors
POS works right now on several chains, although I think they are not nearly as
robust as Casper will be.

Various DAG mainnets are launching or have launched and are operational today.

------
starpilot
I still wonder if anything came from their internal investigation for insider
trading around the hard fork.

~~~
bdcravens
I thought it wasn't the hard fork, but rather, when they started listing BCH
(several months after the fork)

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jay_kyburz
I didn't read the article because I'm not interested in crypto, but I love
"Move deliberately and Fix things."

I love that it implies that you know where you are going and making steady
progress towards that. It also subtly acknowledges that you are building on
the work of others, and that bugs happen. It's OK, but fix 'em when you find
'em.

~~~
seibelj
“I didn't read the article because I'm not interested in crypto”

An attitude that would never past muster on HN except in regards to this
subject

~~~
hapnin
I'm baffled why so many on HN seem to actively dislike cryptocurrencies. Is it
fear? Spite? Envy?

~~~
ballenarosada
It uses more energy than a medium-sized nation to accomplish nothing of use?

~~~
hapnin
I wouldn't call Money Over IP "nothing of use." Goldman Sachs and other large
concerns appear to share the sentiment.

The dollar's value derives, in great part, from the existence of the US
military. It uses far more energy per year than Bitcoin does.

Bitcoin's energy usage seems a better deal. I doubt anyone would ever launch a
war funded on Bitcoin.

~~~
PeterisP
IDK, we've had "money over IP" with cryptographic signatures for decades
already in various financial exchange protocols, with the main difference from
Bitcoin being the requirement of pre-existing trust relationships.

However, since the vast majority of people and institutions _do_ have some
pre-existing trust relationships, Bitcoin doesn't bring that much to the
table, we already had the technology to wire money worldwide.

~~~
hapnin
P2P MOIP is Bitcoin's innovation. I can even write my own transaction and
inject it into the network at a point of my choosing.

We can't do that with classical banking.

~~~
PeterisP
Writing your own transaction messages and injecting them for execution to
whatever banks hold your money is a standard, widely used product of classical
banking, not some novelty. Ages old cash management services and accounting
system integrations run off of that ability. It's not P2P, but it remains to
be seen if P2P by itself is a worthwhile benefit.

~~~
hapnin
You still need an agent in classical banking for that transaction, even if the
agent is just the bank's server.

I'm my own agent and an international network is the bank. Classical banking
can't compete with that in the long run though I'm sure they'll still be of
use.

~~~
PeterisP
Can you elaborate why exactly can't that compete in the long run?

I'm sure that there are multiple niche use cases where being your own agent
has some benefits and it will certainly be of some use, but it seems that for
the mainstream usage it does not, and there are certainly all kinds of
practical advantages for some centralization and delegation of tasks to
another agent, so it seems quite plausible to me that the classical banking
might dominate the majority of transactions forever.

------
curiousgal
Customer Service seems to be way down the list of those things ain't it

~~~
bpicolo
It's incredibly hard to scale a customer service organization as quickly as
they've had to. It's definitely a growing pain that will improve - it's a good
problem to have.

~~~
aneidon
Unless you're one of their users.

------
ninedays
Coinbase is trying to create a bridge between centralized financial systems
and decentralized financial systems. I can understand that some people might
not like that but I think this is ambitious and necessary if we want crypto to
be part of our everyday life.

------
hapnin
Banks, media and the masses for the past 6 years: "Bitcoin is only for
terrorists and drug dealers!"

Banks now: "lol jk. No Bitcoin for you."

------
shalmanese
Is Coinbase still using MongoDB as their primary database? Article talks about
moving deliberately and fixing things but then talks about double transaction
problems that weren’t fixed for weeks, something that would be easy to make
impossible in an actual mature database solution.

~~~
slewis
Nothing’s easy with growth at the rate Coinbase has experienced!

~~~
nerdwaller
This is certainly a true statement - but there are known technologies that
provide better characteristics for scale than others (looking at big scale
names such as Netflix as a start). Simply writing it off as “well they scale
so fast, whatever!” is completely sidestepping the issue of using knowingly
error prone tech at scale, and frankly is a bit irresponsible. (Note: this
isn’t a statement on what CB uses or if they’ve tuned it appropriately or not)

~~~
dx034
Keep in mind that Coinbase always had to expect being banned by other
companies if they adapt a no-crypto currency. I would've been very careful
putting all infrastructure on some easily scalable cloud service. You'd
probably want to be able to run with at least two cloud providers at the same
time (preferably two providers from different jurisdictions). That means
you'll have to build a lot of scale infrastructure yourself.

