Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.
Is that the best litmus test? My impression is that Valve is decentralized and self-organizing company[1] even though Gabe still has a "President" title.
In any case, it's quite an achievement to lie twice in a relatively short title. It's also ironic considering that Coinbase's business model is built on centralizing cryptocurrency services.
[1] "Welcome to Flatland [PDF]": http://dl.pcgamer.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
TLDR: "Welcome To Flatland" is Valve marketing and it doesn't hurt to take it with a grain of salt.
https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidde...
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
In hindsight, seems smart to pull the plug so far in advance.
I'm sure the complaints about informal power groups, careful politicking being required and gaurded groups are true... if only because that's true in every office I've worked in.
Not knowing the product, this looks like it may be a valid interpretation; could another be that the project would be more likely to succeed with the commercial backing of a company like Valve?
Edit: I can't edit it anymore. Was going to change it to "Based on this limited insight, it may have been the best option for both parties to part ways given the project teams complaints and valves lack of interest in the product"
They say that nobody on the executive team lives in San Francisco anymore, so that much seems likely to stick.
A truly decentralized company, in the ideological sense, would have none of that.
What a loose use of the definition, which is oddly very much like Armstrong to attach his name and Coinbase to Bitcoin's virtues. And this is despite him actively helping push Bcash during USAF.
> As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.
Also recall that these guys are ex Goldman Sachs with deep ties to VC, which includes YC and is definitely not decentralized in anyway. Why this is on the front page is showing it's ties to YC because otherwise the focus should be on how they keep shutting down during ATH, and price dips.
The Bitcoin Core cooption of Bitcoin - which was the cause of Bitcoin Cash being created - has led to Bitcoin being transformed into a currency that in any kind of future success scenario, only power-users (banks and exchanges) will directly transact with on-chain, with their own private keys. Armstrong's vision is much more pro-decentralization.
Core accepts the technical realities and limitations of Bitcoin’s design and works within them. Bitcoin Cash simply wishes them away and ignores them, and that will eventually cause the whole system to fail.
They’ll learn the hard way what the wiser small block contingent have understood from the early days. Bitcoin Core’s layered architecture is the only realistically viable architecture given Bitcoin’s inherent design constraints.
Then decentralization is dead and can never exist.
Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth.
The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
That wasn’t the tradeoff. The tradeoff was that increasing transaction throughput would also increase the risk to loss of decentralization and thus effectively the systemic catastrophic failure of Bitcoin. Without decentralization it’s just technological trash.
The most vocal big blockers were business guys prone to the same kind of risk-blind short-term thinking that led to the Global Financial Crisis less than a decade before - improve some easily measured metric now at the expense of introducing greater medium to long term total failure risk into the system.
Part of the problem is, systemic risk is difficult to measure and quantify, whereas other metrics like ROI or TPS are easy to measure and quantify. And thus we get more of what we measure, and less of what we don’t (systemic resilience, safety factor, redundancy, etc.). Everyone has a very strong bias for optimizing measurable metrics while being blind to the unmeasurable but important, and that’s what was happening here.
Thankfully the Bitcoin engineering community understood this and resisted making this tradeoff.
>There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints,
This is a fundamental and irreconcilable philosophical difference. You think third parties can be trusted indefinitely and safely integrated into a core role in a decentralized system. That kind of mindset is why Ethereum is being run almost entirely on Consensys’s centralized Infura database. But that mindset doesn’t fly in the Bitcoin community. Core and most others that prioritize decentralization and censorship resistance will, rightly, never agree.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/
> The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
No, UASF proved that wasn’t true at all. The majority of people actually running Bitcoin nodes preferred Segwit and no block increase. The “loud minority” was the cartel of highly visible large businesses that wanted to increase the blocksize, not the “vast majority of Bitcoin”.
> It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
No, it was wise, responsible, foresightful, and technologically savvy leadership that understood the potential butterfly effect here, small changes compounding the systemic catastrophic failure risk over time.
Even if that systemic risk to decentralization couldn’t be easily quantified, Core and small block advocates nevertheless acknowledged it, and integrated it into their analysis of the decision, and came to a very different conclusion from others who did not and who only focused on measurable metrics and short-term considerations.
It was the latter loud minority who proved to be irresponsible and almost forced Bitcoin into making the same category of error that Wall Street made in creating the GFC.
There's no reasonable case for there being a systemic risk to Bitcoin from node operators needing Netflix streaming levels of bandwidth.
>>This is a fundamental and irreconcilable philosophical difference. You think third parties can be trusted indefinitely and safely integrated into a core role in a decentralized system. That kind of mindset is why Ethereum is being run almost entirely on Consensys’s centralized Infura database.
Completely disingenuous characterization of my argument, complete with a disingenuous characterization of Ethereum's decentralization profile.
One more time: Bitcoin could remain fully decentralized, with tens of millions of people capable of running full nodes, with 100X greater throughput.
We were all abruptly pushed into WFH due to the circumstances. It's perfectly logical to embrace this status quo, and then just gradually transition back to the office (in full or in part) as the dust settles.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...
The future is hybrid. Not all people would go back to office that often, making office less important, and company would spend less on office benefits. This is a self-enforcing feedback loop.
I suspect anything in between won't work very well. "Come in when you like" is obviously untenable; if there's no knowing when your colleagues will be in the office, then there's not much point in going in either. (Except maybe to near-to-home cafes and coworking spaces, which I expect to become more popular.) All of the N-days-a-week compromises end up seeming pretty arbitrary.
I honestly really enjoy close, collocated collaboration. But it seems so impractical to get all the right people close enough that the productivity bump is worth the commute. I expect I'll be working mostly remote from now on.
But I disagree with "f2f for god knows what reason.". Face-to-face is really important to lots of people. That group of people is relatively less well-represented in HN comment sections, where lots of hacker types who are motivated by the work and would prefer to avoid socialization hang out, but it's a huge factor for lots of people.
I, for one, am considering changing jobs to find one with an office as soon as possible if my workplace doesn't go back to having a physical office, which it looks like it won't.
(Obviously things can get trickier across national borders, but that falls under the "with no issues" clause.)
A lot of people seem to operate under the assumption that there's a huge pool of talented engineers outside the tech major metros, eager to work for cheap salaries.
I just don't see it all. The reality is almost all talented engineers are currently being paid tech industry salaries. Yes, there's a lot of IT workers making $85k at regional banks in suburban Ohio. But the vast majority of these workers are not anywhere near skilled enough to step into a typical SV role. (I've seen the codebases of Ohio regional banks... they certainly wouldn't pass review at Google.) There's a huge shortage of software engineers-- everywhere, not just in the Bay Area.
Imagining that FAANG giants are just gonna hire a bunch of cheap IT workers from middle America, is like imagining that Goldman Sachs is going to replace their investment bankers with loan officers Missouri.
2 devs with the same abilities will have different willingness to work in a situation because of their cost base.
Essentially, one gets more because they are demanding more and that demand is based on a kind of very hard negotiating legitimacy, and the company, on the other side of the table knows that and knows they have to concede if they want the table.
I don't think the cost of living shifts are quite that much however, they are generally not a true reflection of the change in cost of living, just a minor adjustment.
At an individual scale, you have to pay enough to convince the person to join your company over their other options. Their set of other options is still heavily influenced by geography, so geography is a always factor in the negotiation.
On a global scale, developer compensation in the US is an outlier, and not just in expensive cities like SF. If you truly want pay equality, you have two options: Either raise everyone’s pay to That of the most expensive market you want to hire in, or simply exclude the expensive markets from your hiring plans so you can bring the number down.
Ignoring geography in compensation discussions sounds great, until you realize that they end game is reversion to the global mean, which means most US salaries would have to come down. Way down.
For the company: - Lower productivity (burnout, people not adequately connected, people not on same page, more difficult to manager remote workers, more distractions) - Less innovation - Less / No company culture - Less employee satisfaction; harder to recruit at all WFT firms - Difficulty onboarding new employees
For employees: - Competing with talent globally, lower wages - Fewer perks - Less community, more atomization
Many of us were working remotely before the current situation. I guess that makes me not average. But many people are saying they're looking forward to not going back to a commute every day even if they stay in the same general area and maybe go in a day or two a week for collaboration/meetings. The big negative for me has been working remotely during a pandemic with my usual 100 or so days of travel curtailed.
It worked out really well since everybody came together at the same time.
I can imagine it, because I've been doing it every day for the past year. It sucks. It sucks a lot.
I can't even count the number of people in my tech circle who went from (pre-covid) "ugh, so-and-so works from home at an all-remote company, that sounds fantastic" to (early-covid) "wow, working from home is fantastic, I can start a bit later, no boring commute, this is amazing" to (late-covid) "holy crap fuck working from home, i never want to do this again, I'm over it, get me back into an office".
COVID itself had something to do with this, in the sense that never leaving your home, for work or play, is exhausting, and makes work-from-home worse.
But, I don't think most people will disentangle that from the reality of how they feel. I think many, many people want to get back to the normalcy of a commute and office life. And, a few years from now, we'll all be tired of it again. And that's fine.
This whole "remote-first" wave we're seeing is almost entirely isolated to tech jobs in tier-1 tech cities (SF, Seattle, NY). That's definitely a situation where, many many people wanted to get out of the city pre-COVID, due to rising costs, and COVID-fueled remote work became the excuse they needed. Then, companies corroborated by going all-remote because corporate real estate is expensive, and if its what employees (and especially c-suite) want, lets do it.
I fundamentally believe that its not the wide-spread movement that's so easy to conclude it to be. First, because many people want to go back to an office, especially outside of tier-1 metro areas. Second, because going remote is fucking hard on your business, and executives generally aren't dumb, they know its hard. Collaborating asynchronously? No one can do it. Human beings don't have the patience. Scheduling a 60 minute meeting because a topic isn't resolved in ten minutes of Slack chat? So fun, much asynchronous. Documenting everything? Ha. Nope. We can hire anyone! I mean, in our timezone, maybe +/-1, because timezones and latency are a fundamental, physical, law of nature bitch and a half. Sorry, my microphone was muted, and my dog is barking (and if you think we're going to "solve" online video chat in our lifetimes, go buy a printer and realize we haven't even solved that).
Also, to some degree I hold the controversial opinion that many of these "pioneering" remote-first companies (Gitlab, Coinbase, Spotify (to a lesser degree), etc) are generally involved in product domains which require, lets say, less creativity. I love their products; they're absolutely fantastic, and I don't mean that disparagingly in the slightest. I simply mean that their biggest problems are generally operational in nature, or have relatively well-defined edges. If you're at a company where you can't even imagine what your product/project will look like in 12 months, where you need zero latency high creative output from your team, remote is even harder.
I have a friend who works on Azure, and she said they were seriously considering full remote. Its like, duh, that'll work great for Azure, because they're highly operational and a ton of their product development is just "what did AWS do last year". It works for some companies, and it definitely won't work for others, but maybe they need to go through the pain to realize it.
Every human who interacts with (externally) and works on (internally) S3 has an intrinsic understanding of what S3 is. It has well-defined edges.
Higher definition of edges within a product domain naturally correlates with a decrease in necessary creativity and an increase in operational expertise. Its more important that someone who works With and On S3 understand what S3 is, rather than what it could be. That's just the nature of the beast.
That isn't to say that it requires zero creativity; that isn't remotely what I'm saying. There is creativity involved in operational expertise, and beyond even that, S3 gets awesome new features all the time which requires creativity in thinking about how to solve customers' problems in a generic, customer-agnostic way, how to implement those solutions at scale, etc.
Though, even developing out these features are more operational, because you have the defined edges to anchor yourself against. You have customers who are reporting their problems to you. You have a profitable operational model which guides investment in the product.
If everything is remote work, you hire the same worker, and pay them Jakarta rates (you can sub Jakarta for any very-low COL city).
Companies that are good about integrating foreign workers into their existing teams are already reaping the benefits of this. Fortunately for Western tech workers, the majority of companies are terrible at integrating their offshore workers and have very outdated concepts of "outsourcing" where trusted local workers send robotic tasks to offshore teams being paid ridiculously low salaries. This model will continue to fail and should slow the enthusiasm for offshoring for a lot of companies.
Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.
It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.
Like lots of employees working in lots of different states/countries, no “home base”.
Is there an easy way to do it?
Generally, you only have a location-specific business created if there are location-specific benefits acquired, or benefits avoided, by doing so. (Like say, access to tax credits, or avoidance of certain compliance responsibilities).
If your employees reside in a US state, you usually have additional obligations there related to state income tax withholding or state unemployment insurance, as applicable.
Note that a "foreign business" is a technical term in this context, simply meaning that a business operating in one state that is incorporated in another state. (See for example https://www.californiaregisteredagents.net/incorporation/for...) For example, almost every YC company is incorporated in Delaware, but is registered as a "foreign business" in CA where they are physically headquartered.
At the international level you usually form subsidiaries, due to the vast differences between laws at the national level, but some companies will simply register a "branch office" in other countries in which they have small operations. In fact, many countries, like the U.S., have tax forms specifically for these companies: the Form 1120F...
In a nutshell, having an employee in a tax jurisdiction creates a taxable nexus for the company, meaning that they can be subject to income taxes, commercial taxes, sales taxes/VAT, etc., in that jurisdiction. (And note: this has been part of domestic and international tax law for decades.)
For example: Company C in CA has an employee, E, who moves to NY to work remotely. Company C is now subject to NY income taxes, and must now collect NY sales tax if they have any sales to NY customers (though note: in the US many states now require sales tax collection even in the absence of physical presence, so C may already have been obligated to collect NY sales tax). If E is a programmer, the NY income tax exposure is probably very low, but if E is in sales, they could be looking at significant NY tax liabilities based on how they may be required to apportion (aka allocate) their income between CA and NY.
If E is a salesperson is it complicated because they’re bringing contracts to C in NY or because they might work on Commission?
Otherwise, no. Most places in the U.S., you are treated as earning the income where you are actually physically located (i.e., your home residence).
[1]https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/new-hampshire-v-... [2]Which is already subject to sales tax after the reversal of the Quill Corp vs. North Dakota decision in South Dakota vs. Wayfair
ADDED: So I guess (although it's not super-clear) that it's a matter of being officially assigned to an office and maybe going in semi-regularly. Presumably if someone is 100% officially remote at a company with many offices, it wouldn't apply. https://andersen.com/pressroom/telecommuters-beware-of-state...
The you'd be surprised what certain states would say, do, and compose in their legal briefs to justify extracting as much money as possible.
Also IANAL, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
Presumably, there could be some kind of test. If someone lives in NH but is 100% WFH, he may be subject to MA income tax under the following standard:
1) If the company is headquartered or incorporated in MA
2) If the work done is provided (a) to directly benefit operations of aforementioned company that are affiliated with a location in MA or (b) to be sold/provided to third party legal person(s) for which business operations /purchasing/selling would be done in MA. (i.e a business/service nexus)
Hardly a fair comparison. You don't have to love, or even have any real feelings towards business colleagues, customers etc.
The opposite to a long distance relationship.
The issue in LDRs is mostly lack of intimacy these days, since you can easily be connected all the time.
I'm not sure you would need this from someone in sales from company X.
As you say the problem would be _building_ relationships, which is different from _maintaining_ them.
People have been leaving their parents' place for a very long time, but this rarely means become estranged, because the relationship is already there, and it's not that hard to maintain.
And trust is the foundation of both romantic relationships and business relationships.
People don't want to sit at home all day in zoom calls. You can try to prevent people from being able to see each other in person, but those attempts will always eventually fail.
It's hard to predict the post lockdown world is what I'm saying.
- company pays to fly me out (biz class) - puts me in a decent hotel for a week - I need to get from hotel to wherever we go (rideshare) hopefully it’s walking distance but not always.
This happens once every quarter or so given covid has stopped.
We might have real offices again some day but till then it’s all ephemeral stays and juicing the industry you say is fucked.
Bay Area has always had boom & bust cycles, and the busts can last for 5+ years. They also seem to precede the recession by about 2-ish years. I'd agree that 2016 was effectively the end of the last boom, 2016-2018 we were coasting, and the crisis was COVID in 2020. So we'll probably see the next boom start around mid-2022, and really get going through 2023.
1972 I'm dating from the replacement of the Polaris SLBM program with the Poseidon one, though my uphill neighbors say that the crash actually happened in 1968-1969 (they bought their house as a foreclosure in that recession, after the developer went bankrupt). 1972 is also connected with the age of most of the housing stock here, and the end of the Vietnam War. Much of the Bay Area economy of the 1960s was connected to defense: Lockheed Martin was the primary contractor for the Polaris missile program, the engines & nuclear reactor parts for the submarines were built by Hendy Iron Works (then Westinghouse, now Northrop Grumman), the nuclear warheads themselves were designed in Berkeley and Livermore, the chips for ballistic missile guidance were made by Fairchild, the military personnel connected to the project were based at Moffett Field. When Vietnam ended and you got the 1970s economic & defense slowdown, it hit the Bay Area hard. A lot of the 1970s microcomputer companies grew up against that backdrop: you had lots of electrical engineers looking for jobs, abundant new construction that was sitting vacant, and a welcome place for counterculture ideas.
"You mean to tell me the factory owner said the entire factory is now distributed? And you must now put the equipment on your own property in addition to using your own equipment, and you still don't get a share in the wealth? And on top of that, they will pay you less?"
I would take paying for my own home setup (which most companies will give you a stipend for) over commuting any day.
But most importantly you don't own the distribution channels. In the days of Marx if you made the goods you were guaranteed to sell them, but we live in the world of Keynes and making the goods is the easy part but selling them is the hard part.
Someone should upgrade Marx with some Keynes.
With the pandemic there is a flat amount everyone can deduct for 2020.
Just a pet peeve of mine - it seems like it's well intentioned, but for many people who really could use it (people in small spaces starting their own business), it's not applicable. On the other hand, it can cut a nice chunk off of a big house's mortgage.
I say this as someone who has never been able to take advantage of the writeoff despite working from a small home for years.
Here you can write off the entirety of the space if it's used for business purposes, or a pro-rated amount if it's used for any non-business purposes.
Unfortunately, as soon as you step into "pro-rated" the value drops immensely.
If you have a 1000sqft house with a 100sqft office for which you pay $2,000/mo in rent, for a dedicated space you can write off `100sqft/1000sqft * $2,000/mo` = $200/mo = $2,400/yr
If you use that office for one hour once a week to join the video calls of your secret club or something, you can now only claim a fraction of the hours you used for work (160hours/mo) versus _total hours_ it exists (720hours/mo), not total hours you use the room. So the equation changes to `100sqft/1000sqft * 160h/720h * $2000/mo` = $44/mo = $528/yr
Since the denominator is the total hours available for use, not the total hours you use it you're no longer claiming any value for the time you're not using the room.
It's a little disappointing because I do have a spare room I could dedicate to an office, but I also have a nice desk with a nice chair and five monitors, speakers and mic set up for comfortable video calls, etc, etc. The extra tax refund would basically pay for me to re-buy a second copy of all this stuff after a year and I'd be saving money from there on out, but it's just so wasteful.
This year they offered a "simplified" deduction of just a flat $2/day up to $400/yr and so I didn't even bother with the paperwork for the detailed claim... this actually pays me more even though my rent is several thousand dollars a month.
See e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/your-home-office-deductions-ch...
But that has always been the case. Anything you purchase that is used for work purposes can be deducted (at a pro-rata basis if need be).
This has huge implications for California. The state of California is horribly mismanaged, but the tremendous amounts of money that is bought in by tech, covers a multitude of sins. However, if that money starts drying up, California will be in a world of hurt.
Compared to what? Texas?
Edited to add: Wikipedia:
> The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, boasting a $3.2 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2019.[9] If California were a sovereign nation (2019), it would rank as the world's fifth largest economy, ahead of India and behind Germany.[10][11]…
California's large GDP could then be in spite of its management, not a product of it.
CA's large GDP is the result of the diversification of its industries. CA has the largest agricultural industry in the U.S., the largest manufacturing industry (yes, people still make things in the U.S.), the largest entertainment industry, and the largest tourism industry.
And that doesn't even take into account the purely local-market GDP in the Bay Area, LA/OC metro area, or San Diego, each of which boasts a local GDP larger than the total GDPs of most of the Midwestern states, or, for that matter, industries where CA has a large market but isn't a national leader, such as finance, biotech, or resource extraction.
Shouldn’t you at least divide these by population to get any meaningful metrics? Otherwise you’re just saying it’s the largest state in different ways
Everyone thinks CA is just tech and entertainment, but CA is a very diversified state, which is why it has been able to weather COVID19 so well despite essentially no tourism in 2020.
There are many kinds of decentralization, and in this blog post it refers to decentralization of location -- there is not one place that is "Coinbase headquarters".
No.
Conceptually a decentralized structure sounds great but it creates power and process vaccuums. And in those vaccuums centralization manifests itself based on office politics. I predict some high profile Coinbase employees are going to coalesce around some location and that will start turning into a de-facto headquarters.
> The executive team should lead by example... even after people can safely return to offices, the executive team has no plans to be “in-office” on a regular basis, and none of them currently live in San Francisco. This is one of the most powerful things we can do to keep Coinbase from inadvertently returning to an in-office culture.
If they're serious about this, how far do they have to go? Would an official or unofficial policy of not promoting employees who come in to the office too much be enough incentive?
Most exchanges also use a service like Chainalysis to help identify which addresses need to be blocked or are high risk and need additional due diligence.
They take compliance incredibly seriously.
I agree that it's a frustrating / bad experience for customers especially when they get flagged by a false alarm e.g. https://news.bitcoin.com/the-moss-piglet-dilemma-paypal-bans...
But I find it interesting that they do this even though they technically can't know if the intermediate address was really under your control. Wouldn't this make any transaction out of Coinbase inherently risky? Like, if I were a troll that wanted to get as many Coinbase accounts banned as possible, could I simply set up a service that accepts payment at a specific bitcoin address, then immediately pass on all payments to a blocked address - and have everyone who uses my service auto-banned from Coinbase?
It makes sense though that tracing the transaction chains can be a reliable way to find repeat offenders. If your transaction history shows a consistent pattern of "your account -> some random intermediate addresses -> blocked address" then there is reason for suspicion. No one has that much bad luck.
The goal doesn't seem to be simply to avoid "money laundering." Of the small sample of people I know who've been banned from Coinbase, all of them have been simply for transacting with gambling sites.