I really wish more startups (if you can call them that at this stage) would go public earlier. There are so many companies I'd love to invest in at much earlier in their life. Coinbase is one of them for sure.
I think what we actually want is the ability for us normal people to invest in private companies more easily, rather than for private companies to become public more easily. This is difficult partially due to the SEC and partially due to historic reasons for how private equity is generally allocated and traded, but I'm hoping it gets better some time.
But I share the sentiment, I'm continually disappointed when there's a company I really want to invest in, but I know that I won't get a chance to buy it until 5 years later when it has already 100x'd and then just gets IPO dumped to retail, becoming more of a short-term casino (e.g. see all recent tech IPOs) instead of long-term bet placed intelligently early-on in the race.
If I could purchase shares in anything from Stripe to Discord to even Chik-fil-A (not to mention a certain 10 or so certain YC companies...), I would in a heartbeat (and I'd be willing to pay a premium for this too!), but the privilege likely won't be given to me until I no longer desire it.
And you do own shares in an SPV instead of owning the shares outright, but that’s a lot of what makes the lower minimums possible.
What ownership/distribution issues have you seen?
>I think what we actually want is the ability for us normal people to invest in private companies more easily
I think these two sentiments both make sense and are in tension with one another. A lot of the work of going public is putting the company into a state that outsiders can understand. Preparing a prospectus isn't just writing down what exists, it's ensuring that there are controls in place to check that expectations are being fulfilled.
An individual can decide that one or more of the requirements to go public aren't important to their particular investment strategy, but that choice involves a certain level of expertise about how public companies work v.s. how this particular private company works. So you're really suggesting that we should let individuals make their own choices about if the current circumstances of a private company make it suitable for investment. That's, as you said, a lot of work. We generally demand companies do that work before they can receive money from public markets. It's unfair, because it means wealthy individuals can get in early on companies, but the whole reason they can decide which companies to get into early is that their wealth gives them access to the resources to evaluate these companies. Allowing people to enter into investments they don't have the resources to evaluate is not going to, on average, help people build wealth.
Personally, I think we could have more "levels" of public-ness. But I'm also aware of the penny-stock scams of the recent decades and think that opening up private companies to early investment has all of the same problems.
And SOX was born because of Enron. So blame Enron for this trend.
I remember the ,,thin protocol vs thick protocol'' comparisions that said that for Internet it was worth investing in the companies over the internet, as with Bitcoin, just buying it can give a better return.
Ethereum is a complementary to Bitcoin that's a more complex and less secure, less scarce store of value, and it's much more about running complex financial contracts.
As these protocols have strong network effects that give their value, it's really hard to just ,,overtake'' them.
Ideally (from the perspective of Coinbase) they end up offering an absurdly broad range of services to consumers in the entire sphere of cryptocurrency, similar to how some banks don't just let you hold money with them, but may offer 10 different services as well, from exchange to lending to credit to trading and so on.
And making it worse for people who simply don't know any better and catering to high-net worth people? Amazing business model.
> Ideally (from the perspective of Coinbase) they end up offering an absurdly broad range of services to consumers in the entire sphere of cryptocurrency, similar to how some banks don't just let you hold money with them, but may offer 10 different services as well, from exchange to lending to credit to trading and so on.
So, they're a bank? The very incarnation of Bitcoin's persona non grata ever there ever was one.
The apologists around here trying to suck off YC and VC money teet may be more complaint, but I hope this new wave of customers goes to Square/CASH (an easier transition since so many already have it on their phones) in order to steer them to companies that do actual meaningful work in this ecosystem, instead of act as a parasite as Armstrong and Coinbase do.
Bitcoin is stronger than the current financial system, so I'm not afraid of companies that bridge the two systems.
Personally I stay with Bitcoin, as it has a monopoly position, unlike Coinbase that has great competitors for all their important products at this point.
They once served as training wheels, but we have moved on from needing Coinbase a long time ago, and now they're a drag on over all UX of onboarding new users as they quickly realize how intrusive, invasive and altogether bad the experience is with delays, transactions being reversed, and accounts being frozen or canceled arbitrarily.
It's clear their focus is operating as an investment/bank platform for wealthy investors, see Microstratgey's position, but it remains to be seen what they have done in the last 5 years that isn't antithetical to the values of the Bitcoin community as they simply cancel accounts they deem invalid (wikileaks), they sell information to 3rd parties and banks and the IRS, they serve as gatekeepers into a walled garden system that plays judge/jury/executioner if you transact with what they deem to be 'inappropriate' wallets.
The list goes on, but over all we're worst off having them associated to Bitcoin at all at this point and we would be better off if Armstrong just focused on alt trading entirely as it seemed we had finally achieved getting rid of a lot of deadwood with the bcash fork. Sadly, most of us in the Community are actual staunch advocates of free market enterprise and commerce so we cannot do to them what they do to others out of sheer principal.
To this day the best exchange in my opinion was BTC-e, it served as the axiom of what we wanted most from an exchange which is to simply work, and despite all the hallmarks of being a massive exit scam they were the most honest of all until it got shutdown in 2017: its very telling the FBI/DOJ went after an anonymous Russian (Online only really) based exchange for 'money laundering' at a time when neither the SEC or the IRS considered Bitcoin 'money' at all. This was after having jailed Ross Ulbrich for Life plus 40 for simply hosting a website and acting as middle man and HSBC was caught red handed laundering money for the mexican drug cartels and they walked away with a fine.
What Microstrategy did with getting $650 million debt with 0.75% rate and moving to Coinbase institutional Bitcoin storage is to use the vulnerability of the current financial system that was used by bankers for a long time for financing wars to finally do something good and move us closer to a non-debt based financial system.
What matters is having the option of total freedom, not using it all the time. Sure, I could make anonymous payments with Bitcoin if I really wanted, but as long as the laws don't get to the levels of gold confiscation, I'm OK with being 100% legal and being tracked.
Ross Ulbrich was not using the fact that Bitcoin is a trojan horse: don't talk about the vulnerability of the central banking systems, just use all the legal tools and loopholes it gives and get rich.
"In a gold rush, sell shovels"
People like Greg Maxwell and Adam Back were able to kick out the original maintainers and are hell bent on making Bitcoin not work.
Bitcoin Cash is the closest thing to "Bitcoin" now but Blockstream employees an army of Twitter and Reddit trolls to block any real discussion. Greg is basically a one-man-army himself at this point.
I don't know what it was when they forked, but it should have been the same size.
The people you accuse of hijacking Bitcoin seem to have a much higher transaction rate since the fork than the Bitcoin Cash team has achieved.
1) Indirectly: Find a publicly traded VC firm that owns a piece of the startup(s) you like, and invest in them. You'll benefit from the upside if those startups do well, and be buffered from the downside through the VC firm's diversification.
2) Directly: There's a few ways to invest through secondary markets. Sharepost & EquityZen provide some access in this area, possible others as well.
If you're interested in Coinbase in particular, EquityZen has you covered: https://equityzen.com/listings/?q=coinbase
Not at all, I just like to follow the industry. It's a fascinating time to be a spectator from the sidelines.
I'm perfectly happy with the "aggressive" setting on my retirement fund, paying 0.08% annual fee (that's $0.80 per $1,000) with an average return of 7%-10% over the last 20 years. I'll wind it down to less aggressive as I get older.
Apart from that, I have little trust in myself to, on average, make decisions that will outperform the above. My tolerance for risk of that sort is pretty low, and I'm not particularly motivated by money beyond the comfortable lifestyle I have now: It's zero debt, will see college tuition paid for my 3 kids, a reasonable retirement ready in a few more decades, and some assets to leave to my children to make their lives slightly easier when I ultimately pass away. I guess I'd like to have more money, but it's not a burning desire and I don't see a path to it that doesn't risk either quality of life, lots of stress, or both.
These regulations were created mostly in the name of protecting "mom-and-pop" investors, but the net effect has mostly been to shut "mom and pop" out of the most lucrative investments. This might or might now be a good thing, depending on how valuable you think it is to decrease variance for "unsophisticated" investors.
If you think they will still grown, I'm sure the owners do as well. They don't benefit from selling at a lower price than they think they will eventually, unless they need the cash. But if they need the cash, getting it from a single source like a VC comes with many other benefits.
The only way it would work out for them is if 'going public' would give them significantly more money per share than a VC would. Which I guess may be possible