
Employee #1: Coinbase - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/09/employee-1-coinbase/
======
largehotcoffee
I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher
and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work
with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All
support tickets took 3 - 5 days to get a reply and it was always unhelpful.

For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our
readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on
their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not
protect artists/publishers.

Do not use Coinbase.

~~~
barmstrong
Coinbase CEO here. I think this boils down to a misunderstanding about what
our product is.

There are some companies which operate purely in the digital currency world,
and never store people's money. They are not regulated businesses. I'm glad
these exist (and it sounds like this is what you are looking for) but this is
not Coinbase.

Coinbase is an exchange that integrates with the traditional financial system
to help people convert their local currency into and out of digital currency.
I wrote a post about this here which may help: [https://medium.com/the-
coinbase-blog/coinbase-is-not-a-walle...](https://medium.com/the-coinbase-
blog/coinbase-is-not-a-wallet-b5b9293ca0e7#.obvdyhi2b)

When you say Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for, I have to disagree.
We are enabling millions of people to get access to digital currency so that
it can succeed. We do this successfully by playing by the rules in the
existing ecosystem. You may not like these rules, but if you want millions of
people to have easy access to digital currency (so that a new economy can
develop etc) we are the greatest ally you have on that mission.

One company can't play both roles, of integrating with the existing financial
ecosystem, and creating the brave new world that you want to see. That role
probably needs to be filled by separate companies.

We are much closer to Stripe and other businesses which don't allow adult
businesses either. [https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-
allowed](https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed)

Further reading: [https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge-
why...](https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge-why-
compliance-is-key-to-digital-currencys-success-7bfdd88a084c#.la2sbe32x)

~~~
largehotcoffee
>playing by the rules in the existing ecosystem

Are you implying that by supporting my business you would not be playing by
the rules? If that's what you're saying, you don't seem to be fully aware of
the rules. That, or you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the financial
ecosystem or somehow believe that a company selling mature content is not
"playing by the rules".

My business has a physical store, existing relationships with banks, existing
relationships with credit card companies, approval to sell adult comics on
Amazon, and even approval to sell with PayPal (yes, they know we sell adult
comics). When our customers requested we accept Bitcoin we turned to Coinbase,
and you banned our account without providing a reason.

It's ironic, given their history, that PayPal is more accepting of merchants
like myself than your company.

This is why I chose to speak up.

You may be an ally to the big banks, but you are not an ally to small
businesses or consumers.

~~~
barmstrong
There are many banks with many rules out there. Paypal may be in a different
negotiating position than we are. Believe me, I'd love to support all legal
businesses (including yours). Sorry we couldn't get there yet - we may be able
to eventually.

~~~
largehotcoffee
That was a good response! I hope you get there too.

------
kndyry
I was one of the remote hires brought on through the first Bitcoin SAT on
Reddit. I recall completing the test and thinking "well, that was fun, but
there's no way I aced it," particularly because one of the questions, I was
pretty sure, was a trick meant to see how you'd handle _not_ coming up with an
answer.

To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could
meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot
in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock
climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked
whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered
"when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit."

A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined
the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North
Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and
tickets) were pouring in.

The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing
resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and
something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part
of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds.

It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very
often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his
continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.

~~~
mbrock
I'd love to hear something about your thoughts on anthropology and computers
(and work).

My girlfriend is finishing her master's in anthropology. I'm going to the
Anthro/IT conference in Tartu (Estonia) in November. I'm curious about the
intersection.

~~~
kndyry
Sure, though I have to confess to trending more toward IT than anth, and being
limited in exposure to my sub-discipline (cultural anthropology).

Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University.
My team provided web application development and protected data management to
social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public
Instruction on certain projects.

Without question, data management is _the_ thing. Field data is almost
entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of
tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made
electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia,
but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress
and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions
and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air
gapping).

It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT
to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the
medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work
can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of
best practice in the social sciences.

------
smcl
I thought we were over the "torture the interviewee" interview stuff, this
blows my mind

\-------

Olaf : This is just to Fred. Fred and I probably talked for 45 minutes–a long
time. Then Fred gave me a really brutal mathematics problem ...

Okay. So there are 100 lockers in a row. They’re all closed, okay? A kid goes
by. He opens every single locker. A second kid goes by. Now he closes every
other locker, every second locker. Third kid comes by, every third locker. If
it’s open, he closes it. If it closed, he opens it. Then the fourth kid goes
by. Every fourth locker, he changes the state. And now 100 kids go by. What is
the state of the lockers after 100 kids go by?

...

Craig : What was the actual job?

Olaf : Customer support

~~~
throwmeup
I interviewed with Coinbase a couple years ago and had a horrible experience
from start to finish. The whole team was super disorganized throughout and the
people I talked to weren’t inspiring in the least. The CEO was super rude at
the end of the process too.

I aced the stupid online test they wanted, then aced the phone interview with
Brian (the CEO), and then on top of that they wanted me to come in and
contract with them for a week as a “trial” which I did do partially (didn’t do
the full week because I was busy that time of year). Their expectations of the
trial were entirely unrealistic, misguided, and in some cases nonexistent
(which is worse than misguided imo). It was doomed to fail from the beginning.

Anyway, jokes on them because they lost out on a great engineer. I wonder how
many more they lost out on due to misguided and _mismanaged_ hiring practices.
Now I’m shipping software to more users than Coinbase can ever dream of,
having more impact on those users than Bitcoin ever will, and making far more
money to boot while working with a higher caliber Eng team. So I'm incredibly
thankful for having dodged that bullet.

~~~
scurvy
Was the trial week paid? If so, that's becoming a more common practice. Unpaid
trial week? Pfft no way.

~~~
ryandrake
I wonder if they expect this "trial week" out of all candidates. A trial week
of work, paid or not, pretty much eliminates from the hiring pool anyone who
currently has a job (i.e. people who were already qualified by some other
company at least once).

~~~
scurvy
Most people just take a week of vacation. Especially if it's in another city.
Take your SO and get a paid vacation.

------
simonebrunozzi
I am not a math genius, but I spent a few minutes thinking about the locker
problem.

It seems to me that:

1) Every locker essentially is open (let's say "1"), and it will switch to the
other binary state ("0" from 1, or 1 from 0) a number of times.

2) The number of switches is based on number of factors that comprise that
number, minus one. E.g. position 1 = zero switches. Position 2 = one switch.
Position 3 = one switch. Position 4 = two switches. Position 5 = one switch.
Position 6 = three switches. And so on.

Am I correct?

In case, the final result is something like: 100100001000000... Which is
essentially 1 + a number of zeros equal to two, then four, then six, then
eight, etc.

Edit: I've now continued reading the article and, well, the solution is down
there. In a way, it seems I was correct.

~~~
gct
He said the perfect squares are the only ones with an odd number of factors,
which doesn't make sense to me. 16 for example has 4, 25 has 5, 36 has 4
again, so I'm not sure what he was getting at.

~~~
shaldengeki
The first door will only be flipped once, by the first person. The fourth door
will be flipped by the first, second, and fourth people (three times). The
ninth door will be flipped by the first, third, and ninth people (three
times). The sixteenth door will be flipped by the first, second, fourth,
eighth, and sixteenth people (five times). The twenty-fifth door will be
flipped by the first, fifth, and twenty-fifth people (three times). The
thirty-sixth door will be flipped by the first, second, third, fourth, sixth,
ninth, twelfth, eighteenth, and thirty-sixth people (nine times).

It should be clear here that the number of times the nth door is flipped is
the number of unique divisors that n has.

For any non-perfect square n, for any divisor p, n/p = q is another divisor
not equal to p. So non-perfect square numbers have an even number of divisors.

Perfect square numbers are the only numbers that have an odd number of
divisors, which in this game corresponds to being flipped an odd number of
times.

~~~
bryondowd
You could take this a step further. For any number of lockers/kids, if you
start at 1 and square each number until you get a number that exceeds the
number of lockers/kids, you've found all of your perfect squares in that
range. Which, of course, is the square root of your original number, rounded
down to the nearest whole number.

So, for any number of lockers/kids, n, the number of open doors is simply
floor(sqrt(n)).

------
nikanj
Coinbase told me I need to verify my residence information. I cannot start
that process with funds in my account (0.01e), I cannot move a sum that small
away from Coinbase, or buy BTC for just 0.01e.

I complained about this to customer service, and got a canned reply saying I
need to empty my wallet to proceed.

A lot of companies are guilty of the same sins, having weird catch-22 glitches
on the platform and customer service that wants to close tickets, not help
customers, but if Coinbase seriously wants to handle my money, they need to
start doing better.

------
kough
Had the pleasure to work with Olaf during an internship at Coinbase. Great
guy, super fun – if you're reading this, good luck with your new startup!

------
40acres
> Okay. So the first one was on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams.
> It is complicated, but it’s a mechanism to induce lucidity in your dreams.
> You can control your dream by waking up in the middle of the night and
> taking an over-the-counter supplement called galantamine, which increases
> levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse. Fun fact is
> that I’ve been writing down my dreams for 11 years.

Uh, what? Has anyone heard of this kind of procedure? I'm aware of other
methods to induce lucid dreams but never ones that involve OTC medicine.

~~~
aab0
Not sure there's anything to explain. Waking up and then going back to sleep
is going to help with inducing lucid dreams, supplement-assisted or not,
that's the point of WILD.

~~~
enraged_camel
I've actually always been able to wake up in the middle of the night, then go
back to bed and continue dreams where I left off.

------
bisRepetita
>I’m actually buying units of the protocol. I’m buying scarce blockchain
tokens and creating a portfolio of those tokens. I’m basically buying
ownership in all of these new 2.0 peer-to-peer protocols.

Is this any different from buying actual bitcoins, ether, litecoins etc?

~~~
cloudjacker
No, but the VC world has been ill equipped to attempt to profit in this sure
to profit way in the blockchain space.

A lot of capital backed projects in the blockchain space were attempting to
"responsibly not buy the speculative asset because we don't want to lose money
irresponsibly", and they all lost money irresponsibly because they couldn't
find a way to make any money

There are ways to improve the blockchain space, with capital, and it so far
requires getting capital into the tokens itself.

~~~
doctorpangloss
> Now, instead of just normal network effects, there’s also monetary incentive
> network effects built into this protocol.

That kind of sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme. Is that a more
responsible way to make money?

~~~
cloudjacker
It is direct investment into a new asset class

There really is no rebuttal to the clever savant that makes this observation
whether you are at a VC fundraising event, an Amway meeting, or talking to
Charles Ponzi himself

------
rer
Another gem

> My belief is that the inexperienced, interested person will outperform the
> experienced, uninterested person over time.

------
rer
> I did customer support by myself until we had 250,000 users

It's good to know what the limit to customer support can be. Don't say
customer support doesn't scale.

------
paulcole
Minor nitpick and I enjoy reading these, but they could be edited a little
tighter. Does every single one need to include: [Laughter] at some point?

~~~
sathishvj
I think the [Laughter] part is important to get a sense of how the
conversation was going, and whether that particular comment was said jovially.
A lot is lost otherwise on plain text.

------
dev1n
Anyone know where can I find this thesis?

------
sit12
$5 Million is hardly a hedge fund.

~~~
cloudjacker
We are all here because we dare to dream

------
zizzles
This is now a thread about lucid dreams and the galantamine/choline stack.

Galantamine is marketed as an Alzheimer treatment, and although me and others
are weary of pharmaceuticals (side effects? cancer? higher-morality rates in
clinical trials?) drug induced lucid dreams sound very interesting to me. Has
anyone on HN experimented with this?

~~~
gnarbarian
Lucid dreaming is fun. You can use apps like Android sleep coupled with
Android wear and hue smart lighting to help learn how to do it. No drugs
necessary.

It does take a bit of practice/getting used to. The apps monitor you heart
rate and movement patterns to try and detect REM sleep and send a signal to
you. At first these signals will wake you up but with practice you will
recognize them in your dreams without waking up.

~~~
Osiris
Can you provide a link to any resources describing the technique and how to
practice it?

~~~
gnarbarian
[http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-
features/...](http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-
features/lucid-dreaming/)

[http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream](http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream)

Keeping a dream journal is probably one of the best techniques.

