
Coinbase Ventures - coinwoke
https://blog.coinbase.com/introducing-coinbase-ventures-c67865a1d2fe
======
slg
It is impressive that Coinbase took VC money as recently as 8 months ago
according to Crunchbase and they are now funding other companies. Although I
am not sure I would love that if I was an investor in Coinbase.

~~~
austenallred
They also did over $1B in revenue last year

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BillinghamJ
Actual revenue, or just market trading volume? If the latter, $1bn sounds like
a lot but actually isn’t really.

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ajiang
I believe it's actual revenue

~~~
ascar
Might still not be that much, if earnings through exchange rate gains were
also part of their revenue. btc made what? Over 1000% in that year? If they
pooled earlier in the year that are huge gains. If it's only from their 1.5%
cut, it is really impressive.

~~~
charlesdm
Exchanges are literally printing money. I think nearly a million Ether a day
was traded on Gdax at the top.

At $1,400 you're talking $1.4bn a day in trading volume, on (at least) half of
which they take a 0.3% fee. That's $2.1m a day, just from ETH. Then there's
Bitcoin and Litecoin. Bitcoin probably makes a similar amount. And their
"simplified" website on which they charge higher fees.

~~~
garmaine
They would be fractional if they were literally printing money.

~~~
annabellish
Right, it's Tether which is doing that, not Coinbase!

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dandare
Sorry, I have been living under a rock recently: did somebody already
discovered an use case for block chain other than money laundering?

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slowmotiony
Yes, I can send money to my buddy in the US for a few cents and I don't care
about Western Union opening hours or ELIXIR bank session times or whatever
really. It's just me, my buddy, and the money. Takes only a few minutes, I can
do it whenever I like. Even sundays. And nobody even knows. It's beautiful.

~~~
Yizahi
And your buddy has to pay income tax on that transaction. And IRS will know
later, when his chosen exchange will decide to share their records with them
(and they do this).

~~~
sodafountan
LOL just like everybody pays all their taxes on gifts right? Do you know how
Monero works? Monero is completely private and there's too many exchanges for
the government to audit them all, and besides that the laws are bound to
change in the near future as crypto-currency becomes more viable. Stop being
so cynical, it's a poor long-term life strategy.

~~~
spookthesunset
So besides money laundering, the other use case for the blockchain is tax
fraud?

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sodafountan
what I'm saying is that anybody who gives somebody five dollars is technically
supposed to pay taxes on that, but when's the last time you did that? "Tax
fraud" is rampant if you're going strictly by the book, it's not just limited
to crypto-currencies. (But the fact that you attempted to make that point
isn't surprising considering Hacker News in general seems to be very cynical
towards crypto-currency)

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mbesto
> You may also see us invest in companies that ostensibly look competitive
> with Coinbase. There may be nuance to the way these startups are building
> out their products. Or, in some cases, we may be comfortable investing in
> companies that are potentially competitive, because it’s in everyone’s
> interest to see the ecosystem innovate. We’re taking a long term view of the
> space, and we believe that multiple approaches are healthy and good.

In other words, everyone else in SV has conflicts of interest when it comes to
funding startups from corporate entities (GV, SalesForce Ventures, angels who
work at big corps, etc) and we're just gonna come out and be somewhat explicit
about it...and well hey it's crypto, so there's no rules anyway!

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aaron-lebo
Is stuff like this still an issue?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261136)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16106793)

Seems wrong to invest in companies and not serve your own customers first.
That should be the absolute priority. You're basically investing their money.

Many unhappy customers:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/)

Why don't you "create customer value" by doing right by your customers?

~~~
blazamos
Coinbase employee here

We’ve significantly scaled our support organization over the last few months.
Most customers are getting a first response in a few hours now.

~~~
colept
Bragging about first response metrics is a little disingenuous when most of
those are automated replies. To answer the question, support is still a
disaster and why I left Coinbase last month.

~~~
eterm
Yes, the 95th %-ile of time-to-resolution would be a far better metric,
although you would need to correct for the fact that open unresolved cases are
right-censored.

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unclebucknasty
Like this company as a customer and admire them as an entrepreneur. They are
smartly run.

But, it does bug me a bit that "traditional money" is once again co-opting and
effectively centralizing what was supposed to be a democratizing, de-
centralized paradigm shift.

~~~
wpietri
Primates gonna prime. In many ways, Bitcoin was a technological solution to a
social problem. But the primate dominance dynamic is, like most things that
predate humanity, pretty baked in. It's hard enough to fight that when you're
explicitly working against it, as with the origin of the various western
democracies. Doing it as a technological bank shot is even trickier.

~~~
unclebucknasty
> _Doing it as a technological bank shot is even trickier_

OTOH, if ever you're going to end-run the money-changers, it'd be by
supplanting their money with something that can't be controlled/centralized.

~~~
wpietri
Alas, I don't think they are end-runnable. Their whole business is end-running
whatever system exists so as to maximize their own profits. And they're very
good at it; their rake has quadrupled since WW II:
[https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-
wee...](https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/10/number-of-the-week-
finances-share-of-economy-continues-to-grow/)

~~~
unclebucknasty
No doubt it's tough, but I tend to think anything human-made can be
changed/un-made by humans.

~~~
wpietri
Oh, agreed. I definitely think we should keep financiers and rentiers on a
much tighter leash. I just think we have to do it explicitly and politically.

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prolikewhoa
Hopefully they invest heavily into making blockchain technology green and
energy efficient because without doing so, you can't "help billions of
people".

~~~
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Right now PoW blockchain doesn't require energy consumption to scale with # of
tx or even total value tx, but rather with value tx * time spent waiting for
confirmations * probability of double spend attempt.

Unless we start seeing cartels that would aggregate tx that they'd like to see
double spend having a long tail of users and tx means that the likelyhood that
you'll be targeted for a double spend attack decreases.

All that to say that you don't necessarily need to increase the electricity
spend to extend the same security to more people.

~~~
prolikewhoa
How many blockchains aren't using proof of work? There are large mining
operations everywhere for various cryptocurrencies (the largest most popular
ones!) taking large amounts of power and greatly contributing to climate
change.

The graphics card shortages proves my point here.

~~~
droidist2
> The graphics card shortages proves my point here.

Oh man, do you think if the popular coins start moving to proof of stake, used
graphics cards will flood onto eBay and the like and we'll get to snap them up
cheap for some machine learning?

~~~
merlincorey
You probably don't want to use graphics cards that have been abused mining
cryptocurrencies in generally poor thermal conditions.

Floating point math errors similar to the recent Titan V issues could
potentially mess with your machine learning.

Regardless, if it has been mining for some time, the lifetime of the card is
greatly shortened, if the operator did not take precautions such as running
undervoltage and designing a good thermal solution. Most people will not have
done these things!

~~~
lozaning
Do you have proof that mining reduces card life outside of mechanical fan
failure?

Anecdotally, I've been running 12 RX480's to mine ethereum since AMD launched
the cards some year(s) ago. They're still just as fast as the day I got them.
What in your opinion would make the cards fail at this point?

If anything im inclined to argue that reduced thermal cycling will result in
these GPU's lasting longer than cards that get torched to 100% to game for an
hour every day and then sit at idle the other 23 hours.

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philfrasty
not answered in article: where does one apply?

~~~
almostApatriot1
don't call them; they'll call you

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almostApatriot1
why in the world did they link to that Vitalik tweet that implied crypto was
in a massive bubble?

~~~
paulsutter
Vitalik's tweet was a call to direct effort to more important projects
(quoting Vitalik directly):

\- So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we _earned_
it?

\- How many unbanked people have we banked?

\- How much censorship-resistant commerce for the common people have we
enabled?

\- How many dapps have we created that have substantial usage? Low added value
_per user_ for using a blockchain is fine, but then you have to make up for it
in volume.

\- How much value is stored in smart contracts that actually do anything
interesting

\- How many Venezuelans have actually been protected by us from
hyperinflation?

\- How much actual usage of micropayment channels is there actually in
reality?

\- The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some
cases it's quite significant. But not enough to say it's $0.5T levels of
significant. Not enough.

~~~
isthatart
Market cap is misleading. Example, this week. The market cap of one first 100
coins, as seen at coinmarketcap, grew with $3M because of a trade of $2000.

The reason is simple. Say 1 coin is valued yesterday at $1, there are 300M
coins, so the market cap is $300M. The total coin trade today was such that
one instance when somebody bought at $3/coin, for $2000, makes the coin price
today to be $1.01 and $0.01 X 300M coins = $3M so called growth in market cap.

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venantius
Is this officially up and running, or just an announcement? Would love to talk
to someone at CV about what we're working on.

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neelkadia
All because of crypto-boom. Flip can come anytime just take care.

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tardo99
You can't make this stuff up.

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xiphias
Coinbase still didn't implement transaction batching. Whenever Bitcoin's price
drops for a few months the company forgets that its system needs to be solid
and scale 10x for the next bull run. They should be already be preparing for
Schnorr signatures support (not a year after it's in production). There's a
lot of things they could do to solidify their business instead of spraying
money around.

~~~
flashmob
This is the fault of the bitcoin project, not coinbase. Bitcoin transactions
should just work without the end user not having to worry about what's under
the hood. Why the bitcoin client cannot just use segwit / schnorr
automatically? Why it doesn't provide a simple API for batching? All that
stuff is up to the end user to develop.

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SirLJ
Hope they keep some for lawyers...

~~~
wslh
This is one of Coinbase core assets.

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aviv
Coinbase wants in on the ICO action. This is exactly what this vehicle is for.

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r32a_
Armstrong is pretty anti-bitcoin and anti core and pro Ethereum and bitcoin
cash.

Most likely they will invest in alt coins companies.

~~~
smaili
source(s)?

~~~
r32a_
Follow him on Twitter, it's pretty obvious by looking at the things he likes
on there. Just today he liked some non sense that Roger Ver posted. Coinbase
also wanted bigger blocks.

In an interview with bloomberg
([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-12-07/coinbase-
ce...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-12-07/coinbase-ceo-on-
crypto-surge-bitcoin-futures-irs-video)), he didn't say that he thinks Eth is
better but it's obvious that they are more bullish towards Eth. They have also
built Toshi, a Dapp store for Eth.

Coinbase has become a giant on the back of the work of Bitcoin Core developers
and will continue to do so however, they have given NOTHING back to Bitcoin
Core. Not a single BIP, they don't sponsor any core developers and they are
not helping at all with Lightening Network.

It's very easy for them to sit back and complain about the state of Bitcoin,
but Bitcoin is an open source project and they have the money to invest some
money into Bitcoin core to improve it. But they rather prefer to pump shit
coins and engage in insider trading. In my opinion Armstrong doesn't care
about Bitcoin, they are short sighted and don't believe in the long term
vision of Bitcoin.

~~~
atomical
The Bitcoin community in general is very toxic and unsavory. That's probably
why they aren't funding them.

~~~
charlesdm
If you compare core to the Ethereum community then it really is a world of
difference. They both have their problems, but from a development point of
view, one tends to be open and embracing of changes, and the other one is
often hostile and inflexible.

~~~
r32a_
Short sighted. How will Eth survive without Vitalik? Bitcoin has already
passed that test.

