
Coinbase and the Widespread Adoption of Cryptocurrency - rmanev
http://melewi.net/blog/2018/08/01/coinbase-and-the-widespread-adoption-of-cryptocurrency/
======
samatman
> A quick Google search will reveal hundreds of unanswered support requests,
> API problems, and some shady internal business practices.

Ugh, please don't blog like this, hyperlinks exist for a reason. Each of the
noun phrases composing the object of this sentence could have been a link.
What Google tells you today won't be what Google tells you a year from now.

~~~
cco
What Google tells you and what Google tells me also differs, another reason to
not treat "a Google search" as immutable and ubiquitous.

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judah
Oiy, that was a bad article in terms of content, broad assertions without
supporting evidence, superfluous animated gifs.

Besides the title containing the word "cryptocurrency", I'm not sure why this
got on the front page.

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gruez
off topic, but what's up with the gifs in this article? they're super
distracting and they make up 80% of the page.

~~~
ve55
It's pretty relevant though. The article is completely unreadable for me
unless I disable images. I don't understand the mindset of someone putting
huge gifs everywhere in their article, that is something a small child would
do, not someone that wants to be taken seriously.

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sp527
Why is this guy shilling so hard for Coinbase? Is there a conflict of interest
disclaimer I missed in this post?

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chrisco255
Coinbase is the most user-friendly crypto exchange for non-technical users. It
more closely resembles an online banking experience that most people are used
to. On this point, I have to agree with the author.

~~~
sp527
This is sort of a question independent of that. The enthusiastic praise reeks
of a potential conflict and I was hoping someone might have dug into it
already.

And Coinbase is far from spotless. They have a track record of doing sh*tty
things to their customers that you can piece together with a simple HN search.
They might be the least bad option, but that truth is not nearly as ringing an
endorsement as the content of the linked article.

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mtgx
The countdown to Coinbase getting acquired has already started. Now it's just
a matter of when it will happen and which of the tech giants will end-up
owning it.

~~~
EthanHeilman
Why would Coinbase agree to an acquisition by a tech giant?

* Coinbase is making plenty of money,

* Google, Facebook or Apple etc wouldn't provide much more additional value,

* and there would be a real risk that an acquisition would be a disaster since tech giants clearly don't understand cryptocurrencies (see AOL/Timewarner).

I could see an acquisition by a large bank or exchange.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Coinbase is making plenty of money_

Coinbase’s volumes have consistently fallen every month since December.
January was less than December, February less than January, March less than
February, _et cetera_. They're not in a terrific place, for raising an up
round nor selling their business.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-biggest-u-s-bitcoin-
exc...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-biggest-u-s-bitcoin-exchange-win-
over-wall-street-1527418800)

~~~
EthanHeilman
Coinbase volumes spiked due to an insane spike in the price of Bitcoin.
Starting your measurement on the peak of that spike seems likely to bias any
trends. A better question is what does coinbase's volume look like if you
measure 12 months from today or 24 months from today? [0]

[0]:
[https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?c=c&exchange=c...](https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/2y?c=c&exchange=coinbase&r=week&t=b)

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davesque
It's almost impossible to pay attention to the article's content when it's
constantly distracting you with huge animated gifs.

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dev_dull
Why would something that serves such an extremely small niche market ever be
“widespread”?

Rather than focusing on what crypto is bad at (nearly everything because trust
is useful for 99% of its applications), crypto should focus on the niche where
it’s actually good at: large money transfers across international boundaries.

~~~
lost953
aka Crime (for the most part)

~~~
zhonwang
Silk Road has been gone for a long time. At this point I would guess that 75%
of the volume of BTC movement is from speculators. That's probably
conservative.

~~~
empath75
Money laundering, ransomware, election meddling.

