Coinbase announces proposed direct listing
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
Coinbase shares would be subject to an auction and the market for them will open at the price where supply meets demand.
100 shares at $100
200 shares at $60
This will satisfy your demand position.
I would still enter two bids; it's just a matter of adjusting how many at each level.
All the shares in the auction are sold at the same price. If the market clears at 60, a person entering the bids I described would buy 300 shares at 60.
100 shares at $100
100 shares at $50
This will satisfy your demand curve.
In a direct listing, the initially listed shares will all transact at the same price (the clearing price).
Are you saying that an auction of this kind is a bit complicated, and it's possible to make a mistake? I suppose that might be true, but that is a very different assertion from your original position:
"since people had to enter a single point on their demand curve as a price and quantity of shares (instead of their entire demand curve)"
https://decrypt.co/55136/coinbase-to-launch-secondary-market...
Better option might be to try a pre-IPO trading platform like EquityZen.
"Shares that are the subject of investment through EquityZen are generally subject to a lock-up period of up to 180 days after the effectiveness of a company's IPO filing, during which time shareholders are restricted from selling their shares."[1]
The 180day lock-up period could EquityZen poorly suited for investors with a short time horizon.
that said, options usually are available a few days after the ipo, so may not accomplish the objective
There's a bit of an adverse-selection problem with SPACs: not only do they need to find an undervalued asset that the public markets will value for more than the acquisition price, they need to convince that asset that the SPAC adds value and can take them public easier than doing the process themselves would. Big tech companies like Coinbase, AirBnB, and Roblox have plenty of money to hire the lawyers, accountants, and investment bankers that going public themselves requires.
Since you’re not raising money in an OTC listing, trading should begin roughly at market price, no?
I could be wrong I don’t really play IPOs. Well, SPACs, haha.
https://ftx.com/trade/CBSE/USD
(this was mostly informational, but if anyone actually decides to use the platform and wants to get 5% off trading fees, also happy to share a referral link)
[0] https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash
Bitcoin Cash came from a minority group (big blocks) in the Bitcoin community.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-deba...
Bernie put it best today- “The business model of Wall Street is fraud.”
Anyone that wants out of this system, come over with me to where the crypto is. It has its flaws, but not like this.
There are much more mundane explanations for Robinhood's actions[0][1] than a high-finance cabal hiding in plain sight.
Is there some institutional conspiracy theory version of Hanlon's razor, something like "Never ascribe to a secret cabal that which is ascribable to finite resources and inflexible regulations"?
Disclosure: currently short to the puppet master lizard people cabal from Nibiru a double-touch knockout option on my soul ;-)
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx8bpx/experts-say-robinhood...
Plot twist: they already have, and worse. Check the historic BCH fiasco.
Those investors being inclined to hold, did not sell, yielding a relatively small float that was massively outstripped by demand, causing the price to skyrocket.
Maybe some of those investors were friends of the bankers and cashed out but that would only be (a small) part of the story
However, Airbnb allocated a number of shares to its own hosts, and a lot of Little People were able to partake in that if they were on the ball.
In keeping with the grand theory that cryptocoins allow the rediscovery of financial regulations and procedures from first principles, the following could happen:
* Coinbase uses the funding to get to the point where they can release a "dual currency" set of stock. One set of stock based on being traditional shares purchased with USD, one set based on being a tied to a "share token" purchased with whatever people choose to exchange (but initially sold by Coinbase for bitcoin). Presumably they would have voting rights per share tied to the conversion between bitcoin to usd.
* The normal shares are regulated in the boring SEC way.
* The share tokens are regulated according to wild west tech rules. Tokens are stolen, token private keys are lost, exchanges rediscover circuit breakers on facilitating token trades, etc.
I think there is also a second story if Coinbase were to release share tokens: Many scamcoins are essentially a way to buy shares in some service that does not fully exist yet, but has great upside potential. If this super simplistic description sounds like investing in stocks, then watching Coinbase share tokens toe the line between "scam coin" and "real deal Wall St. asset" will be an interesting experience.
Time for a SPAC token offering!
I predict that as the news digests GAMESTONKS, we're gonna see a decent amount of talk about crypto and a block-chain based stock market.
But I'm far out of the crypto loop these days so IDK what the contenders are.
1. Coinbase raises money from the IPO. 2. Coinbase takes some of that money and gives it to Grayscale. 3. Grayscale uses the money to buy cryptocurrency... On Coinbase!
Not only do Coinbase shares appreciate from the increased value of assets on their balance sheet, but they earn some of their money back from fees, too. Just make sure that steps #1 and #2 have some delay, after any lock-up period.
And since Grayscale can only divest from its funds for fees and doesn't allow redemption, more cryptocurrency tokens get "locked" in the funds indefinitely, unable to affect the spot price.
Microstrategy is using Coinbase.
Traditional stock market buys tons of coinbase cash -> coinbase uses said cash to market-buy BTC with bots driving the price up -> BTC/their crypto of choice is now worth far more.
If the market follows their run they end up making far more than they reinvested.
How much money would Coinbase have, if instead of building the company they had just bought Bitcoin back in 2012 with their seed money?
I think it had dropped to about $7.50 around then.
Not to say it's impossible, but their work and approach definitely helped bring Bitcoin to the masses.
My point is more that I find it a bit sad that 'just buying bitcoin' rather than doing work paid better than basically any work anyone has done since 2012, even building insanely successful startups.
If you live in Venezuela, converting to BTC even if you cannot buy anything with it but perhaps Columbian or Brazilian currency at a slight loss, is a hugely valuable capability, with significant advantages over both traditional fiat currency exchanges and custodial stores of value like gold.
What is the total global demand for cryptocurrency for this use case? Certainly not anywhere close to the total market cap of first world fiat currencies, but also probably still much higher than today’s total market cap of BTC.
This stands in contrast to smart contract and d-app marketplace currency like ETH, which has a completely different hypothetical valuation model.
Which means selling shovels is still roughly 30x better than buying shovels.
Looking more and more like it’s going to be something like Subway.
It will be much better if the crypto community moved to decentralized exchanges like Bisq.
For Bisq to succeed governments needs to clamp down on central exchanges, but so far that is not happening.
Now take that and multiply it by a factorial with the general interest, shilling, and breadth of the crypto community!
Recipe for INSANITY around this listing.
Too many people with money and time on their hands.
edit: the only way you could be losing your life savings on GME is with a dumb, arrogant short position. yes, you should starve...isn't this what a short sale is anyway? A bet that someone else will starve?
If you deny them this opportunity to vent their anger then they are highly likely to stab you, not because they wanted $10 from your wallet, nah it's because they are still angry and want someone to pay for it and going by the events that lead to WW2 a lot of them considered a life to be an equally valid price.
Never use margin trading.
Only invest what you can lose.
Remember, they have grown thick skin and know what losing money is like. It only takes one lesson to learn that.
The myth of the "free market" is in the same vein as the centrally planned economy of a socialist state.
Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.
All caused by revolutions caused by massive economic issues and societal issues. In other words, capitalistic collapse of society leads to dictatorship which leads to horrible things. Like I said in the post you replied to. So thank you for making my argument for me.
Organised groups of people do these things, governmental or not - private corporations are responsible for plenty of similar occurrences, and so are NGOs (e.g. religious groups). Centralisation of power is bad, absence of checks and balances is bad, lack of accountability is bad - but insisting that limited-liability corporations be allowed to grow arbitrarily large is the opposite of avoiding those problems.
The question is how you manage that lack of freedom and to whose benefit you try to manage it. I prefer it be managed towards the general stability of society. Of course it will be managed in an imperfect way but I prefer the goal be a stable society.
edit: The government intervening will never really make the market more free but it wasn't free to begin with (see robinhood today). So you lose a bit more freedom but you shift the benefit of the overall loss of freedom from "a bunch of rich people get richer" to "society as a whole get's richer and more stable." Not fully but a bit further.
While I'm generally in favor of debt forgiveness for 2021 America, in his talks he's primarily described jubilees in the context of regime change: a new conquering emperor, or an aspiring revolutionary leader, cancels the debts to secure the loyalty of workers and soldiers, and the nobility has to acquiesce at the point of a sword.
What I can't figure out is how this could be done on a predictable timetable (as per the Biblical jubilee concept: every 7 or 50 years). In a conquest scenario, a lender might only withhold lending if the current power structure looked weak; but if debt forgiveness was institutionalized, why wouldn't they just cease all lending on Year 6 or Year 49? (Or, more likely: fold the probability of forgiveness into a usurious interest rate, so they collect the same income on average.)
As it stands, I think debt forgiveness can only be done as a one-time solution to gross inequality and/or social instability; and that institutional reform (to not need jubilees) has to be done upstream (such as public banking, Georgist land trusts, etc). But I'm very open to being convinced otherwise.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42515482-and-forgive-the...
The Geiger counter randomized debt jubilee is a bit of a play on the scheduling problem.
I do agree debt jubilees only make sense as a emergency post-hoc fix. If you think about it, UBI + good confiscatory taxes at the margins is basically a nice smoothed amortized debt jubilee. That's much better.
A cursory search isn't turning up much, do you have any reading material for the Geiger counter idea? Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Agreed on UBI, etc. One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
Yes, I forgot the "and". "that Graeber" lol. Pity there is no more "that graeber" :(. To think Chomsky outlived him...crazy...
> Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Pure spitball. If predictibility causes bias, try randomness. PRNG is fine except one could exfiltrate the hidden state maybe? So try something even more black-box like a hunk of radioactive something.
> Agreed on UBI
:)
> One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
There is the quote "I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows". I had some crude thoughts in my own head, but with some friend's advise on putting in that terminology, it seems both that the stocks are are more fictions and the source of the economic problems of society. I question the ultimate game example then because it seems very "stocks first", dividing up some amount one off. I would much rather see "capitalism without ownership" or "rents all the way down".
I think the DeFi work is more interesting, particularly stuff like this: https://uniswap.org/
Still early, but truly decentralized exchanges are super interesting.
I just don't see them as that different from Robinhood in the service they provide and the risks associated with it.
Is there additional risk (beyond crypto prices dropping) like Coinbase deciding to simply close accounts in order to get funds in times of trouble due to the stock market acting up?
Would private wallets become more advisable?
Stock prices dropping effect companies only indirectly, in that it may make it harder to secure loans or raise capital through issuing shares
If you don't own the keys, you don't own the coins.
Frontent is nice and all but I've had double charges, frequent overloaded servers and an account lockout experience.
For a company that charges hefty fees like they do that's unacceptable.
Venting here. Sure, ipo will be great.
Coinbase entering the traditional stock-market is a flat-out rejection of that; They're just another bank, except they trade in ponzi schemes rather than government-backed currency. Awful
Monero (and other privacy coins) are the future of DeFi.
As an example Michael Saylor could change aegentin peso to USD in an argentin bank ($1M), but the surprise came when he wanted to move it to US.
Coinbase is basically a bridge between traditional and decentralized finance.
> Coinbase entering the traditional stock-market is a flat-out rejection of that; They're just another bank, except they trade in ponzi schemes rather than government-backed currency. Awful
My guess is they debated internally whether to do an IEO but ultimately decided it was not worth the regulatory risk.
Cryptocurrency is more an alternative to banking, Coinbase is like a bank but more like a wallet collection and connector from currency to other digital currency. Some see it as securities/speculation as well including the IRS.
Part of the reason they are going into the market is big money returns but another is normalizing digital currency as part of the overall market, it also helps with marketing to new users that would never trust it previously, new channels. No doubt it will affect some of what happens as regulations come down, they are inevitable as money/market caps grow in anything.
If BTC and ETH are just a replacement for visa and mastercard, they've done a good job, in that they've driven visa and mastercard to be so fast and cheap that it's essentially impossible for any blockchain based solution to be faster or cheaper per transaction.
Heck, my visa card pays me 0.3% nowadays.
So what's the purpose of crypto if it's centralized by a company like coinbase that's regulated by the SEC and all other US law ?
I'm not trying to be a crazy anarcho libertarian here, I'm just saying that the only person for which crypto makes sense is fundamentally, in this day and age, and anarchist or libertarian, or both.
But either of those are not holding crypto with a company that wants to be listed on a public us exchange... so who is !?
Does your visa pay the merchants too? If banks/cards are are still charging merchants 2-3%, then some of that is passed on to us users as well (just not explicitly)
That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.
But you're right that from the merchant's perspective, depending on country (e.g. the US) things can be worst.
Then again, from the merchant's perspective cryptos seem to have much larger downsides, after all there's a reason why they aren't widely used, and lack of good supplied for crypto is larger than lack of people willing to use them.
Are you saying that you only pay 0.1% in fees for accepting credit cards? Is this in the US? If so, please tell me whom because that's an insanely good deal, and they are surely losing money.
Some other pieces you aren't including - credit cards are prone to fraud. Despite paying 2-3% in fees to banks, merchants have to build systems to limit this, and pay to refund any fraudulent charges. Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.
Which customers don't want. Customers like paying by credit card because they know that if your product/service was fake, the credit card company will make sure they get their money back.
I personally would love to have the option in return for a portion of the 2-3% + fraud fees.
Similarly BTC prices dictates gross volumes.
They sent a draft in December for this, so yes we knew, but now its official.
Anyhow, thanks for the explanations.
I kinda wonder about that. I've been INUNDATED by Coinbase advertisements on mobile apps and etc talking about incentives for learning what they do and etc.
They seem to really be pushing to get the general public on board.
From a business point of view it's more like...who the f*ck cares what you use? Did they read it? Yes? Good, move on.
Usually companies use blogs as marketing tools to drive traffic to their websites. I might be wrong, but in the case of Coinbase I have never really seen anything they wrote that was precisely intended at selling a product. It's usually more informative, and shows they are trying to be more of a positive force in the industry compared to a dominant one. Kudos on them if it is the intent, and I guess it would explain the choice of platform instead of investing time and assets in developing their own.
the opportunity cost is too high.
Look at the dns entries for lots of big company's blogs. Many of them are just CNAMEs for wpengine or some other third party host.
1. Allocation of engineering effort
2. Familiarity with readers
3. Discoverability
If they have a wordpress blog at blog.coinbase.com, then any xss attack in wordpress can steal customer accounts.
Sure, it's a fixable problem (by moving high security cookies into login.coinbase.com or something similar), but that's a big migration, and probably nowhere near the top of the engineering priority list.
I highly doubt either WordPress or Medium are susceptible to an XSS attack, but if I had to bet on one being safer I would bet on the open source software already used to power thousands of high profile websites.
Also, the customer is the PR/marketing department, not the engineering department. The marketing people already know how to use these platforms well, so just let them use those.
Which, honestly, is frequently deployed so poorly that it becomes an attack vector.
*Yes I know this makes some people like them more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/10/08/60-emp...
As someone who has never lived in the bay area, it was kind of surreal to see employees expecting their company to get involved in amplifying their own personal political preferences. I've always been reasonably politically active, and had fairly liberal coworkers who, even if not politically active, at least believe similarly. I've always thought that work hours are for working though, and political activism has always seemed like more of an "after hours" activity.
It's nice when a company says they're in support of one thing or another, but it doesn't really mean anything without human boots on the ground willing to put in the work to make positive change happen. Corporate PR press releases always seemed really insincere anyway, so I don't get why people would be upset when some company decides that they're not going to do them.
The cofounder of reddit, Alexis Ohanian, owns a capital firm called Initialized Capital. That firm owns coinbase.
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-announces-proposed-direct...