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And in Brian had simply bought bitcoins with his $10.000 in 2012, when the price was $4-$12 per piece?

He could have bought 833-2500 bitcoins, with a current value of $5.2500.000 - $157.500.000.

He choose to do more than "HODL" and go through the hard work of building a product and a company, which in my book, makes him a true hero. Even though he went the casino/shitcoin rout later...

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Would bitcoin be worth nearly as much as it now if Coinbase didn't exist?

Plenty of exchanges out there, so I would say yes.

but Gemini is the only other regulated US one. Coinbase is huge, even bigger than binance. Something like 50 million ppl have an account. Ppl wondered why the July 2020 Twitter hacker made so little. The reason is, coinabse blocked withdrawals to the hacker address, which if they hadn't, the hackers would have made 3x more..so let that sink in..

Isn't Kraken also based in the US? Last I heard they're in the process of getting a bank charter.

Sure, Google is also huge. Would that mean there is no search engine market when they wouldn't have been there?

Coinbase is huge because of the user demand, not the other way around.

Because Coinbase succeeded others didn't pop up. If they didn't exist others would exist.

But could he have held the BTC through all the crazy volatility since 2011?

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