Personally I'm very sceptical that current valuation for Coinbase is justified. It is a great company for sure but there definitely arent similar network effects as with Airbnb. There's plenty of competition in the crypto exchange space.
What do you think US real estate is?
You might say that any type of travel is a luxury. Ok, I guess. This trip was for a funeral. The flight was under $100. While I'm fortunate to be able to afford such a thing, no part of the trip was "luxury travel".
Airbnb serves a wide variety of customers, via a large range of temporary housing options.
Bitcoin as chaos insurance (or schmuck insurance as Chamath calls it) is the use case that makes the most sense to me.
this to me is where the comparison to gold falls off. i can hold physical gold and silver and trade it at will even without power, pricing updates, etc. this does not apply to crypto. considering cutting internet access is now a normal thing during unrest, being able to pay with anything that is not physical, probably wont work out.
If the global internet goes down and stays down, then I think it's safe to say that global civilization is permanently collapsing, in which case billions of people are going to die in the resulting famine and the survivors probably won't be able to maintain enough technology to survive long term as climate change continues to snowball.
In this scenario, yeah bitcoin is worthless. But so is gold. The only thing worth stockpiling for this scenario is brass and lead (and a strong local community of other preppers who can organize into a new micro state after the collapse). And even then, you have to ask if the reward of surviving is even worth the cost of prepping.
you see, gold can still be traded without power and internet, as could cash or really anything physical, as the value is assigned by those trading it at that time for whatever use they have but BTC is totally useless, toilet paper would literally have more value. brass/lead(killing people) isn't the only way to survive.
People keep using that argument about gold, but is it really realistic? If the SHTF and the USA goes dark for whatever reason, how good is gold really going to be?
First, how does someone know you're really giving them pure gold and not some worthless alloy that looks and feels like gold?
Second, how much is gold going to be worth? Will a gold bar buy you a house, or a loaf of bread? (probably not a good example, after a month or so, houses will probably be less valuable than food)
And without any government to enforce a stable market, how will you even trade safely when the guy who has all the stuff you want can just hit you over the head and take your gold and whatever other possessions you may have with you?
Eventually these things would be sorted out by forming some sort of communal groups for protection and resource gathering, and barter prices will eventually be set, but will the guy with the most gold be valuable, or the guy with real survival skills (or at least some more immediately usable possessions like weapons, farming tools, etc)?
For the short term disruptions that are far more likely (like a regional power outage), cash is probably going to be just as good or better than gold because it's got an accepted value and everyone knows what it is (product values may rise, but in a society that's not used to using gold as currency with infrastructure to do so, it's a lot easier to sell a loaf of bread for $60 than for a gram of gold)
Get real. When governments collapse gold is not even remotely as useful as people seem to assume. There is no hedge against a failure of civilization. When things break down like that, you need to think on your feet and start organizing people (or joining up with a group someone else organized) to stand guard against the roving gangs of murderers, rapists, and thieves. "Trade" beyond the level of barter involving food, fuel, medicine, and weapons does not enter the picture until some new form of government can be established and some semblance of order is restored.
The caffeine addicts will be desperate when the beans stop flowing.
You can flee with some gold, but I'd expect that to all be taken from you by the border guards or smugglers you have to pay off to get out. They can't take your bitcoin if they don't know you have it.
It doesn't take anything this drastic. All it takes is the country you are in deciding to cut off access. This has happened in various unstable countries many times over the last decade so it's not unprecedented.
The very time you would need something more stable than a currency is the time when the local telecom infrastructure would mean you can't transfer bitcoin.
> Pretty sure I am going to want either some other country's currency -- because I still need to buy imported food or fuel or whatever
Explain why, just saying you want Euros or something isn't a very convincing argument. Importing cash Euros is non trivial, and good luck finding banks and credit cards that let you transact in them.
It is much harder to transport gold and silver, and those can be easily confiscated. A mnemonic seed can be stored in your head, and you can add a passphrase as a salt on top of that to create an infinite number of permutations, each being their own wallet, and provide just one of those if under duress.
If you backup your private key in a redundant way, multiple storage locations can be completely destroyed without any loss. If you were really paranoid, you could distribute it around the world to mitigate geographic and geopolitical risk.
So, that's what I think is more likely the mentality of western people holding long term. A check against incompetent government.
You can’t drive a house.
(You can adjust the currency for whatever country you might be considering if dollars are not the local currency.)
Don't kid yourself -- without exchanges of some sort (including payment processors) cryptocurrency is basically worthless.
In this case convenience is necessity, for practical, real-world definitions. Sure, in a theoretical sense, there is no reason why I couldn't use Bitcoin to buy food and clothing, make rent/mortgage payments, buy plane/train/bus tickets, buy furniture, tools, electronics, etc. But the reality is that I can't do it (with some narrow exceptions), and I don't see that materially changing within my lifetime, not to the point where using Bitcoin (or any other up-and-coming cryptocurrency) is more convenient that using fiat currency.
It took a significant pivot for AirBnB to recover and maintain revenues.
There is a whole professional services coinbase for institutional investors, custody, etc that has a huge potential.
What you probably have in mind is "direct network effects", more like what you'd see with a chat app or social network (though social networks also have cross-side effects between users and advertisers).
Hotels have much more guest nights than apartments, so the network effects are much smaller there.
There were companies trying to compete with AirBnB, but I'm not sure if they are still used, at the same time with hotel sites I just find the cheapest one for the hotel that I like.
Coinbase seems less threatened by regulations
There is also an "inverse" regulatory risk for Coinbase. In the best case (where cryptocurrencies are actually being used as payment systems at any significant scale) cryptocurrencies fill a need that is not being filled by existing banks as a result of regulations on the financial industry. Instead of more stringent regulations being imposed on cryptocurrencies, less stringent regulations could be imposed on the mainstream financial system that would allow banks to create more convenient electronic payment systems. The need for a cryptocurrency exchange could implode if the relevant technologies (e.g. offline ecash) were deployed; you would "withdraw" or "deposit" money in the bank just like paper notes. There is even a case for such a system if banking regulations became stricter e.g. if banks were forced to deploy a less fraud-prone and more privacy-preserving system than the credit/debit card system in use today.
That actually improves the situation for them. (Similar to how GPDR improved Google and Facebook's position in the ad market against competitors)