Coinbase opens at $380, up 60% seconds after opening | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase opens at $380, up 60% seconds after opening

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42 pointsjbverschoor46 comments

And now it's far lower than it opened. Is there even a point to reporting on IPO secondary markets like this?

Doesn't seem at the very open. Have to let the chaos shake out for a bit before any of that means anything.

It takes time for price discovery - A simplification would be to imagine a simple moving average of say N, Sure it looks very smooth, but if you look at the very beginning where there was less then N datapoints it'll be all jagged because there's not enough data yet.

Yeah, which means that reporting the value of a security seconds after opening is an act of advertising, not one that evaluates the securities actual value.

> Yeah, which means that reporting the value of a security seconds after opening is an act of advertising, not one that evaluates the securities actual value.

Do you have any other way of evaluating it's value? You have to evaluate it somehow because it's worth more than 0, your broker can't give it to you for free. There is a real bid/ask spread, and I'm guessing you don't want to buy with no idea what price you're buying for.

The pricing is inefficient after opening but it's still real. Also who's to say it'll be over priced? It could just as well be underpriced immediately after listing. I'm not sure how this counts as "advertising"

Isn't this a direct listing and not an IPO?

Yes, further the pump. Fill whitespace. Both, if lucky.

It wasn't up 60%, $250 was a nonsense bottom of the range number they use because they have to pick something. Nobody could buy at that price.

Exactly. The last sale before it hit the market was... can't find the number but I think $340. So $250 was clearly a number invented just to create hype.

I don't think so; I read that $250 was created by the exchange using a formulaic process.

It's meant to be the very bottom of the range, so it might be formulaic but it's not intended to represent the actual value at that moment.

Pretty similar to Palantir's public open, which started at $9, jumped to a high of $45 before the employee blackout ended, and then settled into a stable rut around $23 it's been in since February.

What is an employee blackout?

When employees are not allowed to sell shares. I think in the case of Palantir though they allowed them to sell up to 20% of their shares.

It's a policy that prevents employees that have been awarded shares or options to immediately sell their shares once the company goes public to avoid it flooding the market and lowering the price.

So the company could have generated over twice as much revenue from the listing had their financial advisers prices the shares at $20.

Why is that not considered gross incompetence?

Because Palantir went public through a direct listing to sell existing shares, not issue more.

When is Coinbase going to start working on the Portfolio section? It's been ass for years. A basic unfilterable list of transactions without the years is embarrassing.

They want you to pay (more) for Pro

This makes me really wonder how much some of the other exchanges should be valued.

Coinbase has less than 10x the volume of Binance. It's not even in the top 3 by volume.

>Coinbase has less than 10x the volume of Binance

You're assuming the volume on Binance is real.

Given that they have no reporting requirement (do they even have an actual jurisdiction they're based in?), it's rather unlikely.

That's how many IPOs are, especially tech ones. Not unique to Coinbase.

Really kicking myself for not joining in 2018.

Am I the only one who finds it funny that Bernie Madoff died within hours of Coinbase going public?

whole market dumped shortly after btw before any FUDsters come in saying "it crashed"

So we have a company that is making money on a virtual money that is basically mostly based on no real value at all.

I'm wondering where this will go.

where should it go?

coins are like collectables. no real value, but limited supply.

where should the unlimited dollar spam go? collectables, stocks and cryptos.

Ha, I thought you were criticizing Coinbase for now being denominated in a long-term worthless US dollar. Funny what happens once you realize that crypto is real money and fiat is imaginary...

> Ha, I thought you were criticizing Coinbase for now being denominated in a long-term worthless US dollar. Funny what happens once you realize that crypto is real money and fiat is imaginary...

On a long enough timescale all money becomes worthless. The currency of the universe, for instance, is entropy. Eventually the universe will succumb to heat death, at which point there will be no currency left to spend.

Entropy is the only true currency. All other currency is imaginary.

"Virtual money" is an oxymoron. Is a dollar in a bank account more virtual than a dollar bill or less virtual than a bitcoin?

> "Virtual money" is an oxymoron. Is a dollar in a bank account more virtual than a dollar bill or less virtual than a bitcoin?

I believe it's closer to a tautology (opposite of oxymoron, and by "closer" I mean that it doesn't stricly qualify as a tautology, but I believe that's the direction you intended), right? Because money is nothing more than a promise that people believe in. The value of money is entirely dependant upon people's confidence that they will be able to exchange it at some point for real goods.

Does anyone else remember as a kid giving your parents "coupons" that they could redeem for services later ("Two free lawn mowings")? If your parents believed that they could redeem those pieces of paper scribbled by a child, then that was "real" currency.

It'll go down. I say short it.

> So we have a company that is making money on a virtual money that is basically mostly based on no real value at all.

So ... just like a bank?

Exchanges are financial service providers. The value they create comes from the offered service.

I wonder about volatility of these crypto exchanges. Cant a single government of a large nation deal a serious blow to such a company?

I wonder what the collapse of the 46 billion fake tether dollars will do to it too.

These exchanges could be a good way to short it for when it eventually happens, the only question is how to predict the timing.

Tether most of the time slightly valuable than real dolar which strongly indicate nobody printing tether to pump BTC. It is well debated yet i havent seen any solid argument about fake tethers. I also think cryptos will eventually crash but stable coins are real deal. They will be around even if people stop trading shitcoins.

That would be trivially easy to prove with a simple audit, which they have not done, so the default assumption must be that there is something fishy with them.

It's actually worse than that. They fired their auditor, presumably when that auditor uncovered the fraud and refused to produce a positive report.

They claim to have 46 billion dollars but are very shady about which bank it's supposed to be in. That's quite a large amount of money to hide, it's like claiming I have the Ever Given in my bathtub. Someone would notice.

And we know from the NYAG report that in the past they’ve:

- Not had 100% reserves

- Not been forthcoming about it

There’s no obvious reason to suspect that they’ve cleaned up their act. As the saying goes, a cheat is always a cheat.

Do yourself a favor and do some digging on the folks behind Tether and BitFinex.

Look in particular at their track record starting in Italy in the 90's.

Then draw your own conclusion about the actual existence of their claimed 46B USD reserve.

Actually, I think a large portion of the market has realized these are fake and just don't care. As long as everyone treats them like they're real, they're real. The risk is some sort of run on the bank where everyone tries to cash out to fiat, but I can't imagine what would cause that at this point.

This is true of any company, crypto or not.

Just ask Jack Ma.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/tech/ant-group-restructuring-...

US deregulation would. Coinbase has a captive market. US customers would love to use one of the many much cheaper foreign exchanges but are prohibited from doing so.

100% agree.

Coinbase is a total ripoff fee-wise.

No one uses them outside of the US because they aren't competitive at all, either on rates or on features.

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