No question. It's pretty evident they are aggressively spending on acquisition to boost their top line numbers. Timing wise, this effect will probably show up after they IPO and for their first publicly reported earnings announcement. Which will hopefully keep the stock price high long enough for the employee lock-up to expire.
Article says friend is in Manhattan and earned (i.e. total comp) $1.2mm. Very unusual for anyone in finance to have that high a salary short of being a CEO earning $10mm+.
Suppose he lives on the UWS in a 2000 square foot 3-4 bedroom condo which he bought for $4mm and has a $3mm mortgage. With a 30year fixed mortgage, that's maybe $180k a year. Don't forget the $60+k a year in condo fees and taxes. Throw in anywhere from $40-80k for nanny/childcare/preschool for the 1-2 kids he may have and you already have nothing left over if he went to a $600k comp.
I'm not saying he can't choose to live more conservatively, but when you're used to making $1.2mm a year, it's not hard to imagine how he got here. High cost of living does play a part, especially in NYC.
The number is without question much smaller than the current market cap of BTC. The current price and number of shares traded on the exchanges is not very meaningful since exchanges are unregulated and you have behavior such as wash trading where you can manipulate the price and inflate volume.
What I would like to know is how much money has actually been transferred into the exchanges. That is what matters. If Coinbase has 12 million accounts, and on average only $100 was invested (I'm assuming there are MANY opened yet unfunded accounts), then we're talking about $1.2billion at play moving back and forth on that exchange. (this is just a hypothetical number, I would love Coinbase to produce statistics, but know they have no incentive to.)
If no new accounts get opened and no more money flows in, That $1.2b will slowly drop to zero as Coinbase and the miners eat up that pool with fees.
I'll disagree. Gold once mined will be there for us forever. Bitcoin once mined will need us to perpetually mine it to exist.
Gold will survive a nuclear war. EMP blasts, Hard drive failures, viruses, quantum computing and the lack of an internet connection aren't real risks to gold.
In the throws of WWIII, with buildings burning to the ground off in the distance, as you cross the border to mexico with just the clothes on your back, which would you rather line the seams of your jacket with: gold? Or a piece of paper with some numbers that unlocked your 'virtual currency'?
Let's see how well that shared belief holds up then.
This meme needs to die. You think if bitcoin became a transaction standard there wouldn't be thousands of institutions and companies servicing the use of bitcoin? You don't think Coinbase won't become just like JPMorgan and employ 100k people to provide customer service? Just look at all the startups and people currently employed to figure out blockchain today. So take your assumption of all of modern-day finances's electricity demands and add that to the infinite loop of energy that is required to keep your bitcoins in existence whether you transact or not.
I see what you're saying, and that's an interesting way of thinking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. I suppose in estimating the value of the ledger you should also consider the negative value contributions to having this particular ledger, such as environmental impact, potential to destabilize governments, expected loss from hacking/user error, etc and see whether that outweighs the benefits of what some may perceive to be positive value.
I suppose what I meant to say is there is technically no money sitting somewhere held for owners of bitcoin to lay claim to.
I agree that this might be a wealth transfer to China. Bitcoin inherently does not hold any value, it is a ledger. When someone buys bitcoin, someone else sells it and takes the cash out of the system.
Right now, a lot of mining is still taking place in China since energy is cheap. These miners sell their coins outside of China and bring cash back into the mainland to pay for the energy and hardware used for mining. So in it's most simplistic form, when you buy a bitcoin, you are adding to the earnings of Chinese energy companies and hardware companies (and some naturally goes to speculators and miner margins).
You know they will. But they should have no basis as this is an unregulated market and global, so local governments will have no incentive to socialize the losses of foreign citizens.
Governments need to quickly enforce suitability guidelines along the lines of accredited investor status asap (I believe some countries already working on this.) Some would argue this is unfair, but people just getting by have no business playing in this wild west.
I really don't understand how people can relate gold to bitcoin - other than the fact they both seem to trade at prices unrelated to fundamental underpinnings.
In my opinion, bitcoin is not digital gold, and quite the opposite. Both require a large amount of energy to be mined, however, once gold is produced (i.e. found), there is no more energy required to keep that nugget of gold in existence. Bitcoin, on the contrary, requires a constantly increasing amount of energy to maintain it's utility.
If today we stopped mining gold, all the mined gold in the world will still be there and will probaly increase in value due to scarcity.
If today we stopped mining bitcoin, all the bitcoin in the world will be worthless.
You don't get to pick just the bitcoin exchanges as well. If bitcoin ever became a standard, you would by your logic have to include every financial institution that pops up to service bitcoin, custody bitcoin, swipe bitcoin at a store - and include all their headquarters etc etc. That whole layer you include for fiat will also exist for bitcoin, only, now we have the much larger energy expenditure to maintain bitcoin vs fiat.
Fair on the first point (thank you, good to learn). Still doesn't make me feel better if I send something to the wrong (yet) valid address that I have no recourse to fix that. Or if I lose my key there is no institution who would be there to help me.
Hydro may be cheap for now, but does that make it okay? If Bitcoin keeps going up, at some point we'll exhaust those more convenient resources. The comparison to holiday lights is misleading because I never said that wasn't bad for the environment either. I'm not sure I can trust a site like icenter.co given it appears pro-bitcoin, but many people are analyzing the environmental impact of bitcoin and it's not negligible and only growing. You're right, it's nascent, and that's the scary part given how inefficient it is.
I stand by too confusing, especially when it comes to financial products. Try to explain proof-of-work to a non-technical person in less than 30 minutes. Explain hard-forks, segwit2, lightning network, double-spend, network attacks, and why the recommendation is to never leave your bitcoin on an exchange.
Our current system of money and banking isn't great, but this is not an improvement.
Edit: Now you've sent me down this other rabbit whole of educating myself on China's Hydro power. China's overbuilding of Dams may be in itself be a big problem (methane release, destruction of biodiversity, 300k deaths). I'd hate for Bitcoins popularity to contribute to the demand side of this equation.
If you follow the money, Bitcoin does not replace fiat. If I bought $100USD of BTC on coinbase, that $100USD goes to someone else who sold me their BTC. It's still fiat. I'm not confident the governments really mind in that respect because the money is still here.
Where that money goes in the end? Some goes to speculators, and the rest goes to lots of ASICS, graphics cards, electricty bills and food for miners. But none of it is every actually really stored in Bitcoin.
I view this paper with both love and hate. I think it's technically brilliant and fascinating, and at the same time incredibly naive and will do far more harm than good in this world.
While a trust free payment mechanism sounds wonderful, this implementation cannot succeed in the real world. In my mind proof-of-work is already an ecological disaster. As long as the price of bitcoin goes up, there is an incentive for miners to commit more energy and resources - yet those resources do not increase productivity. Whether there is 1 transaction or 200k, Megawatts are wasted to mine that block. I doubt 99% of people getting into Bitcoin have a remote understanding of how this works. This concerns me far more than the threat of upending governments - my biggest fear is in fact that governments will instead choose to adopt this technology because they would love the ability to track the history of every transaction.
While there are several proposed solutions to many of bitcoins weaknesses, we live in the real world, and the real world goes where the money is. While bitcoin is decentralized in design, in reality, it is controlled by a few mining factions who ultimately control what code enhancements get adopted and how the game is played. Why would they want to increase the block-size, when a smaller block will lead to greater fees? Running a full node is getting expensive, and soon, only the deep pockets will be left to guard.
People will never get bitcoin. It's simply too confusing for the average person. The user experience is a disaster. You're telling me once I buy bitcoin, I'm supposed to transfer it to a hardware wallet? What's a hardware wallet? Wait, so if I accidentally am off by one character in the address I sent money too it's gone forever? There's no one I can call? Bitcoin should never have been any more than just a novelty for the technically inclined, or a technology used for something other than a currency. It's why I can't stand Coinbase - they are lining up the naive (and greedy) masses into the slaughterhouse.
I have non-technical friends who do not understand that their bitcoin is not backed by anything. They do not understand that the money they put in, was immediately taken out by someone else, and that the price of bitcoin is just a funny number. The $XXX billion dollar market cap is fiction. Owning a bitcoin does not give you claim to the output of some productive asset like a stock would. Unfortunately, history tells us we're in the early innings. The real dumb money is just getting in the door. But when the music stops, and the evangelists have squeezed enough out of this lemon, that funny number will go back to zero. And a lot of people who couldn't afford it will get really hurt.
I'm confident that I could be making a killing in bitcoin right now. But it's not about the money for me - my conscience just keeps saying stay away. I really hope either I've completely got it wrong or bitcoin just dies soon.
As someone who is neurotic about parking (I will walk up and down the street 3 times making sure I didn't miss anything), I think this is wonderful. I don't care if it's hard to read or if I have to re-park at times. Simply being 100% confident that my parking is ok is a big relief.
Revenue shortfall? Raise our taxes or fix your budget, just stop profiting from misleading confusion.
I really like this. However, I don't see anything regarding the terms and valuation which I would invest at. How can one responsibly invest without know what my $1000 actually gets me?
If the process is that the valuation will be set once funds are raised and I will have the option to back out at that point - then this needs to be spelled out. Some clarity here is needed.
I really like this idea. As someone who doesn't have an office to send packages to or a doorman, I will use it.
I'm actually interested in seeing how they'll address utilization if it gets popular. What if 100% of the spaces are taken, and someone decides to wait a few days to pick up their package. Is there a penalty fee to prevent such behavior?
Definitely. One reason why we created it was that even though Facebook and twitter can add location to posts, no one really uses it in the proper mindset. On facebook, you're constrained to your social graph. You can't try and seek out neighbors who live across the street that easily on FB or Twitter, but here it would be really simple to do.
Hey guys, we've seen similar ideas coming out recently so we wanted to get our work out there and try to validate the idea.
What we've created is a way to let people leave messages at any latitude/longitude point for anyone else to read (so not just venues.). There are a lot of potential uses for this: i.e. meeting your neighbors, self-guided walking tours, missed connections, local classifieds, lost dogs etc... We've made it optionally anonymous and pretty open in terms of use. We're not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but want to see how it evolves.
Right now you probably have to pan over to SF to see it in use, but it's open for use anywhere.
I for one couldn't agree more that yelp has gotten a little bit out of control. So much so, that my personal project has been to make an alternative (but solely focused on restaurants.) My version is also more social and list based. I'd love to have you test out the prototype and let me know what you think so far... it's at eaterguide.com