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Comment by deviation | Hacker News Reader

Credit to him for following through with his vision, and standing his ground in his replies to all the comments in that thread. Looking back now, it's certainly evidence of a group bias and the "If the opportunity was that great, X company would be doing it by now" way of thinking.

Props are owed for bringing some true innovation to the space.

I'd love to know how this turned out. Did he eventually find a co-founder? Or did he continue in his YC application as a sole-founder?

For those that don't want to click through: There are replies in that thread such as..

- "No thanks. I'd rather sell sugared water."

- "Because bitcoin worked out so well. Have fun with that, dude."

View on HN

How did he follow thru with his vision? Read his other comments to get better picture - he was angry at the system of Credit Cards, PayPals etc that charge outraged fees just to be able to use their network. He wanted to build network that performs exchange at zero fee. Instead, he ended up building and owning one of the most expensive crypto exchanges in the USA.

Sure props to him to pull it off, you don't get net worth of $20B by accident or pure luck... but in terms of his vision of the world more united where it is easier to send and receive money without paying outrages fees, he definitely failed on that promise.

>> but in terms of his vision of the world more united where it is easier to send and receive money without paying outrages fees, he definitely failed on that promise. <<

It was Bitcoin that failed to deliver that promise, not him.

Or both. Bitcoin and Coinbase each have outrageous fees.

Depends on the kind of transaction you are doing. For bigger transactions it is actually nice not having to pay percentual fee as with Bitcoin. However with coinbase I believe they are high percentually.

You can easily buy fee free on coinbase if you use buy orders instead of market buys.

This changed in 2019 (https://ethereumworldnews.com/end-of-coinbase-pro-introduces...).

At this point, there is no way to trade for free on Coinbase or Coinbase Pro. However, maker orders do still have a lower fee vs taker orders on Coinbase Pro, depending on the pricing tier / how much you trade per month (https://help.coinbase.com/en/pro/trading-and-funding/trading...).

You can pay 1$ for a BTC transfer, so outrageous.

I recently paid $50 for a BTC transfer, and it took 16 hours to get into a block.

A lot of the US crypto exchanges have high fees. They can get away with it due to US laws preventing US citizens from legally trading on asian exchanges, which have much more competitive fees (i.e. Binance.com, not Binance.US). Gemini has even more ridiculous fees than Coinbase. Also if you use Coinbase Pro, which is more like a stock brokerage account for crypto, you get a lot better fees than Coinbase.com. Gemini also has an equivalent to Coinbase Pro, except they call it ActiveTrader. Kraken, another reputable US crypto exchange, has decent fees in general. US securities laws are preventing US citizens from getting the best deal and US crypto exchanges are getting away with higher fees based on that.

Now he charges 4% each way to buy and sell bitcoin..

I regularly tell people this - that Coinbase really could have "died being the hero" but instead has "lived long enough to see yourself become the villain"

>Did he eventually find a co-founder? Or did he continue in his YC application as a sole-founder?

IIRC, he did - they met on Reddit.

They met through a reddit post or some other way?

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