1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company
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The commentary that I find frustrating is about the "retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces." The press does suck in many ways, but when you're own a massive chunk of a $65B company you should expect some negative press and be prepared. It makes him sound like he isn't open to dissent which is an incredibly privileged stance.
Non-sequitur.
Imagine a rowing team where half the team rows in one direction and the other half rows another direction. They never agree on which direction to row and the direction constantly changes. Even if it's just a dedicated 5% rowing somewhere else, it's going to throw the whole boat off course. Or they're not rowing at all and just yelling at each other on Slack all day. Compare with a team that focuses on the mission, all rowing in the same direction. It's not hard to see who is most likely to reach the finish line.
The age old wisdom of not bringing your personal politics and religion into work is wisdom for good reason.
I've had my hair cut in like 5 different countries by dozens of different barbers who speak different languages, come from different generations, the barber themselves are male or female, and I don't remember the last haircut that didn't bring up something that was either explicitly or expansively political.
Sometimes it was partisan politics. Trump came up pretty often, for better or worse, during those years -- I had a milestone birthday the day Trump was elected, so I remember a haircut maybe a couple of days before where that was a natural springboard.
Sometimes it was cultural politics. #MeToo came up a lot; a surprising amount of young male barbers want to talk about how they pick up chicks, which I've always found a little weird because I'm old and I'm married and I am really surprised they judge I'd be receptive to that kind of thing. One talked to me about how he saw a sex worker. Maybe that's not something you'd code as political. I remember someone mentioning the Aziz Ansari kurfuffle. Again, it's all politics baby.
My work overlaps with politics, and anyone who asked me about my work typically volunteered some kind of politics in response. If I told you I ran a polling outfit, what do you think your followup questions might be?
But what I'm saying is that partisan politics isn't the same thing as politics, which is one of the fundamental dimensions of the Coinbase story, and so it's pretty relevant. A woman who cut my hair in Los Angeles was telling me about her travel experience. Non-political. I talked about my travel experience. I wasn't from the states either, so I talked about where I was from. Wait, my hairdress is from a country that was affected by the Trump travel ban, and her parents were no longer able to visit her here, and her status -- though documented -- was such that she couldn't easily get back to see them and get back in the country. She wasn't going on an unhinged partisan rant about Republicans, she was just talking about a basic para-political topic in a pretty unobjectionable way. And that kind of thing happens very often.
Presumably you got a haircut during COVID. Did you talk about COVID? Isn't COVID (para-)political? Do you live in a city? Did you get a haircut that summer? Were there boarded up businesses because of the protests/riots connected to George Floyd? Did you talk about that?
Did you talk about sports? Most of the barber shops I'm in display ESPN. The worst was a place where I got my haircut in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and jesus christ, the "Go Big Blue!" is insufferable. Is sports para-political? Yes, in two ways -- as we're seeing with the NBA and vaccines and as we saw in 2016 with the kneeling and anthem protests and as we saw with LeBron's bizarre China apologism, and as we saw with the WWE doing stuff in Saudi Arabia, and as we saw with Blizzard and Hong Kong, and as we're seeing with the NCAA student pay dispute (had this particular conversation three or four times, in Ann Arbor, in Los Angeles, in Ontario Canada...) it turns out that sports overlap with politics a lot.
But let's say you avoid all of that discussion, and you just discuss teams. What I'm trying to say is that the kind of torturous, almost religious, tribalism that people hate when it comes to talking politics casts a shadow over a lot of other stuff. I hate talking to sports people who are nuts about a particular team and perform all the chest-beating bullshit surrounding it. It's not partisan politics, but it's the same kind of "why are you getting on with this shit?" implied by it. That's what the word valence means and why I used it.
I got a haircut in Kilkenny, Ireland recently. Fun little town. It's got a castle. It's got Cartoon Saloon animation studio. Since I wasn't getting my beard shaved, I wore a mask, so did the woman cutting my hair. Once she figured out I wasn't from Kilkenny (believe me, with my accent, it's pretty easy to tell I'm not Irish) she asked what I was doing in town. Just some tourism. She asked about how I found the barber shop, I off-handedly said "Well, I'm just a walk-in" -- side note, Irish people don't use review websites so it's impossible to find anything here -- and mentioned I saw a few other barbers but they were unmasked with customers and I'd rather not take a gamble. It was a pretty short exchange. I wasn't trying to bring up politics. Her question wasn't political. But I think you could agree, it has a distinctly political tinge, and it invited further conversation that could be more or less political depending on comfort level.
I am agnostic about Coinbase's decision to ban politics. Seems reasonable enough, and seems reasonable enough for workers to leave or stay on that basis. I think the kind of advocacy model of you demand what you want and I demand what I want and we see how it shakes out is actually a very good way to structure society. But I think a lot of their position relies on an extremely crude and unsophisticated view of politics: what it means is "We don't want to hear about the woke SJW representation intersectionality critical race theory BLM bullshit". So you end up with a workplace that absolutely tolerates discussing politics, just not a certain kind of boat-rocking politics that makes people mad.
That leads to the analogy that barbers cutting your hair aren't political, when really what is meant is that they are political, but they tend to be a little more subtle about navigating it, and because the relationship is transactional, mostly there's no ongoing stress about having to continue to work with them.
That's not my experience at all with barbers. All they've ever talked about are topics that are considered safe for smalltalk, such as "what do you do for a living?". Of course this doesn't invalidate your experience, but I think your point about "quitessential part of the barber shop" may not be as universal as you think.
Your reply is a classic example of HN taking an analogy too far / too literally and removing it from the original argument being made.
> Or they're not rowing at all and just yelling at each other on Slack all day.
I have never seen an office where you will not be fired for turning politics (or anything really) into a flamewar. Period.
And that's because companies past a certain size know they always have multiple "5%ers" rowing in the wrong direction.
If it's not politics it will be pay, if it's not pay it'll be the tech stack, if it's not the tech stack it'll be an exec everyone hates, it's not an exec it'll be a client that sucks, if it's not a client it'll be the...
So a company needs to be resilient to those disjointed efforts anyways, and being "mission focused" will never let you escape that.
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That's why even just pretending to care about these social issues puts you in a better place than a company like Coinbase.
Making statements for social causes costs nothing at all and those who don't agree with the statements generally have apathy towards them, while those agree are affirmed by the statements.
So it's a win-win vs alienating those who would have been affirmed by playing it off as a distraction from the mission.
Why would you not do it and just enforce the fact that people need to be civil?
Agreeing on a mission is a form of specialization. In the case of Coinbase there are likely plenty of debates about cryptocurrencies, and that’s controversy enough.
The point is the fraction of things you rule off-topic by becoming "mission focused" is infinitesimal compared to the the topics that can disharmony can form around.
It's in people's nature to find things to discuss, and eventually some of those discussions become debates.
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You might as well play both sides by allowing yourself to support causes, with the explicit understanding that doesn't give anyone free reign to shit on their coworkers for their beliefs.
That's just good business since beliefs don't have to be political...
That there is no company-wide shutdown for a holiday observed by 2% of the population is not some great injustice that requires waging a culture war in the office to remedy.
Like, even if you think crypto is going to be super relevant, there's tons of other cryto startups. Coinbase has or had first mover advantage, but that's no longer an enormous advantage.
Some major ones aren't included such as CoinSwitch Kuber which Coinbase Ventures recently co-led a $260M round.
The decade where it wasn't "mission focused"?
Coinbase is down a little over 27% since IPO, at a time when the wider US stock market is up around 10%. That's not "approximately equal" in any meaningful way.
> At the IPO, the rocketship factor is already priced in.
I'll agree with you here - there was a ton of hype and the IPO price was largely based on an expected rocketship trajectory that failed to materialize. Its extremely telling that many of their executives have cashed out 100% or nearly 100% of their available stock options.
Where in your analysis do you talk about how these other crypto startups have (1) easier onboarding/KYC than COIN, (2) access to more coins to trade (3) better tooling (4) better fees (5) etc. etc. ?
> their offers aren't particularly better than <anywhere else>
citation needed, I mean 'anywhere' is a big space. I'm seeing north of $100K on a quick google, that's a lot more than most places pay. Or are you speaking from a privileged, SF-blinkered position?
That's where the "isn't better than other offers" part comes in. If you get 40K in stock from Coinbase or 40K in stock from Robinhood, and one went up and one didn't...
> citation needed, I mean 'anywhere' is a big space. I'm seeing north of $100K on a quick google, that's a lot more than most places pay.
I'm speaking as compared to the list of stock tickers I listed.
> Or are you speaking from a privileged, SF-blinkered position?
If we're at the point where Coinbase can't hire "privileged" employees and is having to settle for ones who don't have other options, I think that makes my case for me.
https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-is-rethinking-its-app...
1. You get $X of stock grant when you join. This gets converted to number of stocks based on the value of the stock when you join and then the stock vests over the next 4 years. So if you get a stock grant of $400k when you join and the price of the stock at joining is $1000, you get 400 stocks that vest over the 4 years.
2. You get $X of stock grant when you join. This grant gets divided into $X/4 over the next 4 years. The number of stocks then gets decided each of those 4 years based on the value at the start of that year. So let's say you get a stock grant of $400k. So you get stock worth $100k every year. If the stock is at $1000 for the first year you get 100 stocks for the first year. If the stock goes up to $2000 at the start of second year, you get only 100 stocks. If it goes down to $500 for the third year, you get 200 stocks. So upside is capped. You will only get stocks worth $100k each year.
2. is what followed by Coinbase and Stripe. Some other companies are moving that direction as well. 1. is followed by FAAMG.
This should be explained in any offer letter.
I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them.
This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal Twitter playground.
If you do have something political to say, a grave social justice error in the company's policy for example, you can still be reasonable about it. To mention it respectfully and proportional to the issue, rather than going nuclear.
I work in a tech hub in Europe that has 80 nationalities, people from all walks of life. Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
It's a joy actually, to work with people wildly different from yourself, whom you normally might not meet if it wasn't for work. We don't even have rules on politics, because they're not needed. Nobody brings politics or activism to work.
This brand of aggressive identity-based political activism really is a manifestation of the deplorable state of US politics. It's really quite rich to take home 200K a year and feel oppressed. Such a thing is only possible in the US, the rest of the world laughs at you.
European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions (all of these things are, gasp, political! incidentally)
By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance. Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone! Is it really any wonder that “politics” ends up being an issue in the workplace when your employer literally controls your access to healthcare?
All of this stuff is emblematic of a deeply unhealthy relationship with employment in the US. Despite widespread agreement that this arrangement is bad, the US political system is broken enough that changing it feels all but impossible. CEOs like Brian are taking a hard stance against the effects while ignoring the causes.
You’re right that such a thing is only possible in the US, you’re just wrong about the reasons why.
It's still a wonder for me, I don't follow your reasoning at all. How does this force people into being antagonistic and fighting over politics in the workplace? If anything, this should put a pressure on workers to not stand out and keep their mouth shut, so that they wouldn't risk loosing coveted employer-provided insurance.
The one I think you're talking about is the US workers' struggle to defend or increase basic worker rights. Which indeed is a political struggle of workers versus management.
If I'm not mistaken, the Coinbase case is about social justice types of topics like feminism, BLM, trans rights, colonialism, the like.
Just to take two of your examples: feminism and trans rights. Both have healthcare implications. Your employer controls your healthcare. Should the healthcare provided by your employer cover birth control? Abortion? Conversion therapy? This mix is inevitable.
People that are so politically activist at work that they dis-proportionally impact the business. By sowing division, distracting from the work, spoiling morale. And sometimes worse, like stealing data or airing dirty laundry publicly.
I'm not going to touch the morality of it, I'm merely painting the picture of what it is.
There's more companies where this is an issue, Google had plenty such incidents, Basecamp, Facebook, the like.
The thing you're talking about, worker conditions, is not what the article is about. It's not a different perspective, it's an entirely different topic.
But anyway, have a good day regardless.
Maybe there is a point to be made about the overall cost of health care plans being too expensive for an individual to afford without the employer subsidy, but that is orthogonal to "employer control" of healthcare.
No, it's not. A choice in which the alternative is unattainable (or simply worse) is a Hobson's choice, and the direct result is that Americans with full-time employement are dependent on employer-subsidized healthcare.
- Most of Europe prescribes hormones upon a medical indication. This leads to bad gatekeeping; I've been told to see 3 different professionals before starting hormones.
- Anecdotally, I'm on grey market hormones while waiting, without any bloodwork - before starting those hormones, I've had suicidal ideations on a daily basis.
- This seems to be backed by data as well: Ideation rates are reported to be 37-83% and attempt rates are reported to be 9.8-44%. [0]
Given the frequent outcomes of depression and suicide, I think it's fair to say that trans healthcare is not optional and should be fully covered.
Kidney stone surgery is elective. Cancer resection is elective. Most heart surgery is elective. Most brain surgery is elective.
I assume you're not arguing that health insurance shouldn't cover these things, because that would be extremely foolish. It may, though, be worth acquainting yourself with at least the basic terminology of the field about which you want to argue, because overlooking this point makes you seem as if you don't really know what you're talking about.
Neither of us is going to convince one another; you very evidently have strongly held opinions about how medicine should be practiced, whereas I know some things about how it is. That being so, I see no point in continuing this line of discussion any further. Should you feel otherwise, I hope you enjoy it.
I'm not talking about "practicing medicine" at all, just about who pays for what.
The problem isn't that I'm misrepresenting your arguments, such as they are. The problem is that, instead of finding out how this stuff actually works and understanding why it works the way it does, you prefer to continue insisting on your opinions, which are as apparently uninformed as strongly held.
I don't see what you hope to achieve by this save wasting someone time, and my test suite just finished running, so it'll have to be someone else's time from here.
In Europe, neither public nor private insurance covers beauty surgeries (at least the ones I'm familiar with).
/sarcasm
This is Coinbase. The vast majority of the employees there are not stuck in a job they wish they could leave but can't. These are some of the most privileged employees in the world.
The bigger issue is like the OP stated, the state of politics in the US. How does at-will employment relate to issues like not working with certain government institutions because you disagree with their purpose?
Coinbase isn't trying to avoid political arguments over healthcare, they're trying to avoid employees rallying together and changing the company to further their personal political beliefs.
But besides all that I fail to see how any of what you just said are arguments to make the workplace a political Twitter-style fight pit?
So I recently quit a FAANG and they sent me a COBRA notice with the cost of their insurance benefit. You can get great FAANG insurance for about $10k a year, which is peanuts for a Silicon Valley engineer. We need to dispel the myth that Silicon Valley engineers are working for health insurance.
The OP was referring to US companies in general not FAANG companies, which are outliers by many measures. If you read the sentence before the one your quoting it provides the context:
"By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance."
Also smaller companies generally pay significantly more per employee than a megacorp does. And this is the amount one assumes when COBRA kicks in. Also for 10K I'm guessing you have an individual plan and are not covering family dependents which would also add significantly to the premium.
Coinbase in particular will have legions of support people (who do you think answers the phone/customer emails?). I would bet that $10k (or maybe $15k for a family) is a meaningful fraction of the annual compensation for many roles at Coinbase.
In my experience, nobody at all.
Sorry, it's a common crypto joke.
In my experience you can’t even buy a similar plan as an individual. And definitely not at the same price.
I couldn't find a marketplace plan that didn't give me real doubts about the possible financial impact of traveling to other states(!) so I decided to suck it up and pay for COBRA for peace of mind. Of course, COBRA will run out after 18 months, but I plan to get another corporate job before then.
TL:DR if you have (or recently left) a fancy corporate job here, you have access to a group plan with nice coverage. If you have to buy an individual plan, it seems you cannot get the same level of coverage even if you're willing to pay for it, and the available coverage leaves you with the risk of huge medical bills if you suddenly need healthcare while simply traveling within the country.
This is no longer legal in any state as of July 1st of this year.
> Bans out-of-network charges for ancillary care (like an anesthesiologist or assistant surgeon) at an in-network facility in all circumstances.
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/07/01/hhs-announces-rule...
This change was enacted December, 2020 with a July 1 deadline to confirm it would be enacted.
It doesn't go into effect until January 1, 2022 and does not apply to charges incurred before then.
It also only applies to federal plans (including "Obamacare" plans, but not necessarily private plans.
The language of the subsection addressing this is poorly constructed, so be careful.
The HHS link provided above by secabeen has those details and links to further information
The stakes of a job are quite a bit higher in the US, and it goes beyond healthcare.
The quality of a great many social foods in the US, from primary schooling to transit access and many others, are governed by your job. The social safety nets that exist kick in only at the extremes, of destitution (Medicaid) or age (Medicare).
This isn't what is debated here. What is debated is whether Coinbase should display a Black Lives Matter flag on its website and whether employees should be debating about Black Live matters, "Free Palestine", ICE and immigration policies or other wedge issues on the clock.
In Europe the very premise of that question would be completely absurd, and thanks to that both right wingers and left wingers can coexist in the same workplace by behaving professional. This is almost impossible today in the tech sector in USA.
> By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance. Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone!
I think this is an argument in favor of what Brian is doing at Coinbase, though. The problem is that in the current political climate, people are intimidated and discouraged from becoming politically engaged out of fear that if their views are unpopular enough, even many years in the future, their coworkers will circulate petitions to get them fired.
If we as a people were capable of civil disagreement and didn't do things like circulate petitions to get our coworkers fired, maybe it wouldn't be necessary for Coinbase to do what they did.
Kids whose parents would have hated each other getting along well, making friendships, etc. In the long run, seeing this humanity in each other (I think) will contribute more to some large benefits than always going to war on every issue.
Some examples - Student (jewish) whose dream was to join IDF to kill "terrorists" vs kid whose parents were palestinian (and hated jews). The kid who talked trash about blood transfusions for some reason - with a friend whose medical form had a history of them. Some crazy wealth disparities (the private jet kids with the extended passport filled with stamps vs kid who saved mowing money to go on program).
Stripped of all the baggage from back home (and with no cell phone / internet access etc), working together (outdoor program), no parents spoiling them (for the spoiled ones) or whaling on them (one or two parents from south still do this) - very cool to see what happens (in most cases).
I can only attest from both travel and work that exposure to other cultures and peoples destroys any and all bias.
> French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
> Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
This really sounds like you are blaming the black employees at Coinbase for standing up for themselves, and that if they just sat back down and took whatever hand they were being dealt that there would be "zero tensions"... which I guess hinges awkwardly on what you mean by "tensions"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...
I encourage you to read this article--which, FWIW, I'm sure is one of the articles Brian Armstrong here is calling a "hit piece" in his Twitter thread--as this wasn't merely some abstract issue of "politics": black employees at Coinbase felt they were being actively discriminated against.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I don't get why people struggle so much dealing with black people? Like just be empathetic and assume the best. I guess so many people are just racist. It's just crazy.
What is ridiculous? What Brian said? the response? I'm not following.
As his post demonstrates, it turns out to not be controversial at all. A handful of people left and after a few weeks the Twitter mob stops. Then you're left with reasonable people to do the job, which is the point of any company.
They lost close to half of their engineering team, significant percentages of their operations teams, and many senior leaders.
It shows the massive divide between the Twitter world and the real world. Nobody wants real life Twitter.
I’m sure this statement is not true, (racism and sexism don’t exist in Europe now?) but even supposing it is, there are very few companies in the U.S. that are this diverse. And the state of our labor rights in comparison to the EU is atrocious. In the first place, at-will employment, a right wing policy, is to be blamed for how easy it is to fire people for political reasons.
It’s easy to strawman an anonymous group of “aggressive identity-based political activists”, much more difficult to reckon with the real differences in the political economy of the EU vs the U.S.
I suppose by diversity you mean the right kind of diversity then?
The example I gave, extreme diversity, is not the standard in my country, this tech hub is the exception. I've also worked in teams consisting of only white men.
The inconvenient reality is that I couldn't detect a meaningful difference in the quality or quantity of output in either team. As said, I did enjoy the increased diversity from a personal perspective, so there's that.
The reason for the roughly equal output is that the team of white men was also diverse. Pointing at a group of people with the same skin and concluding they're all the same is ignorant. It's factually untrue. Likewise, assuming a team is diverse/better due to them having a mix of ethnicities or other aspects, may also not be the case.
Don't get me wrong, there are cases where it matters, but also cases where it doesn't.
And I'm guessing you want tech companies to hire more black and Latino workers because that's what every diversity pundit says. You know those demographics are overwhelmingly domestic and not international?
Like when you think about it, how is this a big deal in any way? I think the fact that people are making a big deal out of it is a bigger deal than whatever Coinbase's internal practices are here.
It's still pretty obvious to me that Coinbase is run by scumbags, like Uber and Google are.
Tesla, TSMC, Netflix, Adobe, Toyota.
Nobody brings politics or activism to work and that has yielded certain outcomes over the last century.
I actually prefer the mission-focused thing but I wouldn’t be convinced by the Europeans who are notorious conformists.
> What is the scope of our mission?
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.
It's not operating with total blinders on the wider world, becoming profitable as a startup often requires having a vision of positively changing the world. Armstrong wants people who care about the mission quoted above, period. There are people who are passionately committed to this, yet have totally different opinions on abortion, marginal tax rates, racial politics, bail reform. There's no reason to think you can predict any of these for an individual based on adherence to the mission statement.
Achieving change on the one thing that matters to everyone also requires that you have viewpoint diversity on the things that don't, because your current and potential customer base sure does. To the extent that mission creep enforces conformity across a range of issues, you narrow the range of people who would be comfortable working at your company to an increasingly small pool, and you limit access to the sort of insights that lead to a better product.
The alternative is to have separate pillow companies for conservatives and liberals, which is ridiculous.
If wrapping a rainbow flag around it and studiously noting everyone's pronouns made that "ok", it'd frankly be even more perverse.
IMO the environmental impact of crypto is also completely overstated. There are issues so much bigger than crypto's energy consumption that it's basically just a rounding error.
I'm massively excited for the potential of cryptocurrency, but there's a reason ETH is moving to PoS, and newer PoW projects aren't getting the same kind of traction.
- Decentralized payment infrastructure that can't be taken down.
- Currency that isn't issued by a government
- Open financial applications
- Pseudonymous payments (depending on the crypto)
- Infrastructure for fully transparent payments and analysis of value flows (governments and institutions should be using these)
- applications whose source can be verified. Even if a web application you use promises they handle your data securely and publish source code, there's no guarantee what they're running is actually what they've published. Decentralized applications can be interacted with and viewed by anyone (even if compiled to bytecode, you can verify the contracts they've published are accurate)
- Decentralized governance (the potential of this is massive, even moreso when coupled with decentralized identity)
- Access to financial instruments typically only accessible to institutions.
- A global, border-agnostic payment network
What about the fact that china is pumping out something like 1/3rd of the world's emissions?
What about excess livestock?
FWIW - I do agree that PoW is not ideal and will largely be phased out, but there are lower hanging fruit with regards to our climate change crisis than cryptocurrencies.
Livestock also lead to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, so I don't buy it either, even if it could lead to juicy steak.
Lots of lower cap proof of stake cryptos (and Ethereum, which is moving to Proof of Stake) are likely to outperform bitcoin in terms of percentage gains anyway.
Try to think of it in tons of coal. You proud of that?
The 'costs' of proof of work are indeed high though. The amount of energy consumed for one bitcoin transaction to happen is astounding. My point above is that there are numerous alternatives (which in my opinion are poised to topple bitcoin), which don't have these costs.
I disagree with 'no benefit to the species' (even bitcoin has many benefits). But the costs of bitcoin are also high, and the benefits can come without those costs.
The government, tax, justice systems and regulatory bodies are made out of people, you can't fool them with some "haha it's not USD" technicality like a sovereign citizen. It's all the same at the end except for a bunch of wasted energy.
Even though there are a fair share of 'sovereign citizens' among cryptocurrency types, there are many who just see the potential for integration with existing infrastructure. Personally I'm more socialist-leaning, and want governments to embrace technology that will also empower them to provide sweeping social benefits for their citizens in a transparent way.
At the same time, the leading crypto platforms enable an amount of transparency that isn't possible with traditional financial institutions.
The wasted energy argument has already been addressed, and is specific to proof of work platforms which are the minority of the top 50. After the ETH2 transition is complete, it's likely proof of stake crypto will have a larger market cap than proof of work crypto.
There are many good reasons for this system.
Wanting companies to play politics means they will be choosing sides of a political establishment or party, and it is divisive to our society. You should not want to divide our society even if you think you're obviously right and they're obviously wrong. America does this more than any other nation, arguably because their media constantly does it. Shoving politics at others is still fundamentally divisive.
But perhaps it's not such a bad thing for you to push people away from your position with such shameless behavior.
*shareholders.
> *shareholders.
* capitalists
(“shareholders” are one form, in relation to corporationa.)
You don’t have to care about any social issues at all to contribute to the society!
Just curious because I don't know coinbase that well.
The question of our era! Certainly "every" is misapplied in his quote, but his core message of overwhelming private positivity in light of negative press is worth pondering.
> To me, diversity and social justice are critically important. I have the luxury of being selective in where I put my time and energy and it is important those values align with my career. I appreciate aspects of being "mission focused" but I think that there is a gulf between my personal values and Coinbase's values such that I would not be comfortable in the environment.
I can't speak for anyone else but I think I'm not a terrible engineer and I definitely ruled them completely out of the realm of places I'd be willing to work.
I have a ton of opinons, fully formed, in formation, and very occasionally the polar opposite of opinon I held strongly a few hours earlier that have never seen the light of day.
Then they are not compatible with Coinbase's culture, and Coinbase seem to place more important on cultural fit than on raw ability. It's nothing new, really. How do you think an interview at one of the big FAANG goes if you show some controversial opinions? You're rejected for lack of cultural fit. Coinbase's difference isn't in their practice, but in the values that they focus on.
That said, I'll bet there's far more agreement among all of us than not on these issues, it's just that they get all blown up.
Outside of Twitter wars and the most radical voices in a company, I strongly believe we would just all get along pretty darn well actually.
So it very much depends on whether we solve the problem of monopolies. Make progress on that front, and firms wont be able to support these types of employees because they'll be driven out of business by competitors in which employees are not attacking each other but really are just focusing on work.
Thankfully there are dozens of thousands of people as capable who do not intent to discuss social justice on the clock.
From what I've seen, these people typically just want to treat the company slack like Twitter and persecute political enemies while still cashing their paycheck and doing nothing of material value for the disadvantaged.
This pluralism is what makes America great, right? As the beloved slogan goes: “It’s a free country”.
Also, if you're white and claim diversity and social justice to be "critically important" then why don't you give up your job so that a minority can take it?
I have a biais for people that are honest about their values, so I'm glad about their move, but I understand not everyone shares my biais.
Companies trying to meet the diversity quota very much do not focus on pure raw technical competence. In fact, to suggest so, borders on gaslighting.
"Coinbase decided to focus on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence. Companies that try to meet diversity quotas are also focusing on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence. These companies and Coinbase are similar in that way."
I think most of us want to see people treated very fairly, but that it's not any one group's job to distort their situation so much as to hire people on the basis of race or gender or to worry about it that-that much.
The first time you hire A over B due to a very obvious ideological reason, and you come face to face with the plight of the bloke you didn't hire ... it becomes more visceral.
I think we can be pretty good citizens, and maybe even say a few words of empathetic to BIPOC etc (which I think Coinbase should have done) - but without going full woke.
I think that's what most people probably prefer.
I don't think there are really that many truly racist places in tech (most wouldn't want that of course), but I think most people also don't actually want to work in a 'fully woke' environment if they really had the choice. Definitely some. But a minority.
Also, to your OP's point ... I think it's reductionist to suggest that 'companies are an exchange for labour' - this is too much.
Almost all educated workers derive some meaning and dignity from their work beyond salary or benefits.
So 'what we work on matters'.
That said, even if we work on 'some new currency that can help the world' it may still mean that whether or not the company should fly the BLM flag is a bit of a political matter.
Let’s apply this to say the stereotypical 50s “Mad Men” office, gender gap and everything. To be political in that time and say hey women shouldnt just be secretaries and stay at home parents wouldn’t fly, it’s political. That’s what I think is meant by “a no politics rule means acceptance of status quo”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people happy with the status quo, or who think it’s fair and equitable as is.
Not that the ones being “political” are necessarily correct completely or in part right now, but there were plenty who liked the status quo just fine back then too.
What are Brian Armstrong's politics again? And what are mine? The reality is that I don't care what Brian's politics are.
There's no reason on god's green earth that a reasonable person should not be able to work at Coinbase, and in reality, Coinbase probably has pretty much the same level of inclusivity at the end of the day as every other tech company. Moreover, there's no reason why Coinbase can't at least acknowledge some of the social ills flaring up, it's not 'unfair' I think to staff to do so.
It's a sad war of words.
My controversial opinion is that companies like Apple and Amazon did well in spite of their leaders' quirks. AWS would have been a great business even if Jeff Bezos didn't fire people recovering from cancer. The iPhone still would have been a hit if Jobs didn't bring someone to tears over a bug in their code.
I think you can make great products AND be nice to your employees, and maybe even let them discuss how black lives matter at work.
We both know that the program goes way beyond "black people shouldn't be indiscriminately shot", its driven by people who are addicted to social media and perpetually pushing for another rush of outrage. I'd prefer not to be around that, personally.
I say we call their bluff and stop shooting black people indiscrimately anyway. That'll show 'em.
Did they launch more features? Make more money?
RTFA: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
Because all I see is the first half devoted to the sort of generic PR speak that any company does about having an aligned vision, and the latter half is about what they're not doing.
Where's the big reveal? What makes being a 'mission focused' company different than just... actually not making political statements? What did the big meta-political statement add to their company?
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
Basically sounds like “mission focused” = “do your job”
Ultimately employees want more than just to punch the clock and pay their mortgage, especially SF knowledge workers.
That's fantastic! They're honest about the employment arrangement and straightforward about expectations.
Leaders inspire, letting things slide is bad for the culture of succcess.
> if you're in the right industry, you can be the worst manager on the planet and your company can still do okay.
Has Coinbase ever had a culture of success, or were they just in cryptocurrency during the cryptocurrency explosion where everyone made money?
That is not how it works. In practice, there is a bigoted, mostly fresh from college activist group that considers themselves morally superior. Some Gen-X and Boomers join for their careers.
The group looks down on everyone else, treats them with suspicion. Gen-X, who wore Greenpeace and anti war buttons and helped introduce women quotas in the workplace is lectured by brats with $250,000 salaries (which for some reason the little angels don't give away to Black people).
The whole movement is deeply hypocritical and self-serving. It is NOT merely discussion!
Talent: "it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction"
> What is the scope of our mission?
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.
More details here: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
The fact that you immediately jumped to calling it a "screed"—not once, but twice—despite allegedly not knowing this reveals your motives quite clearly. You are simply ideologically opposed to the message, not its form, and in favor of the imposition of a woke monoculture.
Your dishonest use of an obvious motte-and-bailey in your last sentence is just the cherry on top.
Not being a reliable financial exchange, I hope, they already failed at that. (1)
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/coinbase-says-hacke...
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Reddit is at scale a sentence like this often means they’ve established a dominant monoculture and squashed out the ‘annoyances’..
They hired people from all the minorities necessary and ended up with culture that was even more monolithic than before. No dissent allowed.
I am a bisexual dude, and nobody at work (sans my closest friends) know about it because it's none of their business. I did not disclose it during my interview, I don't want them to ask me about it.
What precisely are those diversity numbers? A 5% people of color would be dismal regardless of growth.
In all of the discussion around the blog post from Armstrong last year and the similar discussion around Basecamp, I never once saw an example cited of these so-called distractions from being mission-focused that wasn't just affirming the basic dignity of a group of people. I don't understand why doing so should be controversial. Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support the right of Black people to not be killed randomly and of LGBTQ+ people to exist simply doesn't belong in polite, modern society. How is this controversial?
I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
FWIW, in this case, that "difference" might be that Coinbase was simultaneously treating their black employees poorly--dare I say, as "second class citizens"--while actively refusing to take a few seconds to agree with something as banal/obvious as "black lives matter". The BLM statement struggle was merely a catalyst for what were already existing and somewhat long-standing racial tensions brewing inside the company that had led people to feel that, with its actions, the company did not in fact care about its black employees... context you can't just pretend didn't exist going into Brian's "let's not talk about this and everyone go back to work" post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...
> The tensions at Coinbase came to a head in June, after the police killing of George Floyd. As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter. They organized a meeting where several of them told executives, often through tears, about their difficult experiences at the company, eight people who attended said.
Take careful note: this wasn't "merely" "our difficult experiences in the world", this was "our difficult experiences at the company". Seriously: too much of this comment thread seems to be hyperfocused on BLM statements--as I guess y'all really think taking a few minutes and a couple sentences to acknowledge that in solidarity somewhere is somehow a horrible distraction--while ignoring that this had started in the background of "Coinbase is mistreating its black employees so much that it had already lost 3/4s of them" (and that's before Brian's post, so a lack of strong improvement since then is telling). This is way more concrete than these abstractions.
> But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees.
> “It was the first time I realized what racism felt like in the modern world,” said Layllen Sawyerr, a compliance analyst who is Black. “I felt like I was being bullied every day at work.” She said she filed a discrimination complaint with Coinbase’s legal department before quitting in 2018.
Anybody from the 3rd world reading this garbage feels sick. 20 year olds making 6 figures to build craigslist for crypto crying because their boss won't acknowledge an event.
You are free to affirm whatever you want, and have all sort of discussions about society at large when your aren't being paid for your time by someone else to do a job that has nothing to do with affirming groups of people.
>I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
Its baffling to me that so many people feel entitled to espouse their social and cultural beliefs in the workplace instead of doing the job they are being paid to do. The way a workplace recognizes the humanity of their workers is by offering good wages, good hours and a generous benefits package.
I am proud I have never written RIP Celebrity on twitter when a celebrity died or sent my congratulations to a Kardashian on the occasion of the brith of their child. When I have offered condolences or congratulations it has been exclusively in person or in a non public broadcast message.
I guess that makes me weird, but personally I find posting that sort of shit on social media decidedly odd.
You’re not baffled: you have made up your mind.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWLFWAndSZSYN6rPB/think-like...
You now this shit will make a lot of leftists lose their mind and show up at ur company offices trying to cancel you out of existence. In a society going mad like ours, opting out of the madness like Coinbase did is the best option.
Obviously white lives do matter like others, but making a statement of something communicates something other than the literal meaning: it asserts that there's part of the meaning that the receiver isn't demonstrating knowledge of, and it evokes connections to things people have encountered before. If you say "white lives matter", intending it to mean something about suicide statistics, and other people interpret it as racist pushback against solving police brutality, the other people aren't doing something surprising or wrong. You would just be fruitlessly rebelling against how language actually works.
If you want to raise awareness about suicide, go ahead, but don't use a slogan that already has a meaning that will be misinterpreted in your context, and certainly don't do it competitively against people raising awareness for a different issue.
It's not a honest movement. I refuse to support it even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
And given that the two of us, as reasonable people, can have a rational disagreement on this issue, why should our employer take a side? Why bring this discussion in the office? It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution. And employers don't take stand opposite of it because... it's unconstitutional.
> Since Biden was elected for example
Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". You're reaching to creating a narrative that doesn't fit the facts.
> even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
> It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution.
The stuff you mentioned doesn't start out in the constitution (and arguably actually still aren't). It only got there due to activism by people and organizations, some of which happened in the workplace. Were they wrong to do so? Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms. That misses the point, unless your point is that the norms shouldn't change.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
There is a perfect correlation.
> Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
It's not the issue here. I am not even trying to say you are wrong about BLM. My point is it's one of those issues where 2 reasonable people can disagree. And employers shouldn't take sides.
> Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms.
Strawman fallacy. My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized. Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment. If you were my co-worker I would refuse to discuss this issue unless we have a very close bond/friendship outside of work and we are comfortable discussing this kind of stuff.
We can effect change through debates, voting, protests, ...
Erm, no. If there were some sort of correlation, looking at that graph you should be able to tell me where on the graph Biden either won the election or took office (Nov 4th or Jan 21st). You can't. What you do see is a wonderful bit of exponential decay from an event that wasn't related to Biden: the death of George Floyd on May 26. That's the vertical line. And then an expected exponential decay.
If you look at https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202..., for example, Election, Joe Biden, and Trump are all strongly correlated. Heck, Trump and Black Lives Matter are briefly correlated, but Election and Black Lives Matter aren't.
> Strawman fallacy.
No, you literally made an, if we want to get technical, argumentum ad antiquitatem. Pointing that out isn't a fallacy. It's what you did.
> Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment.
People who disagree with you would claim that often they do not feel the environment is safe and non-toxic. They aren't comfortable with the status quo, hence their attempts to change it. That you are unaware of the toxicity and lack of safety doesn't invalidate their experiences. In fact, its an example of the challenges they have to overcome to achieve the safety and non-toxicity you enjoy and presume.
> My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized.
No, you said, and I quote:
" It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side." Your opinion is that employers can clearly take a side sometimes, but only in cases where some norm (the constitution as it is today) dictates. If that's not what you intended, please clarify, but that's precisely the argument you made, and again, it wasn't a strawman for me to point that out.
That had absolutely nothing to do with basic dignity for marginalized groups. It was simply a grab for power and status. One of many. We who have been watching are very familiar with the game.
The framing of it as merely about basic dignity is deeply disingenuous, but is itself familiar and another part of the game. What about the dignity of customer service workers? Is it upholding their dignity to frivolously condemn them for a mildly immature in-joke that showed no racial bias and harmed no one?
Some of us, you will find, are not so easily played for fools.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position
I’ve got a timeline put together on it https://schneems.com/2021/05/12/the-room-where-it-happens-ho... the post also goes into detail about Rails governance internals from my experiences as a contributor over the last decade.
"A lot of people did something" is not a solid reason to respect what they did or why they did it.
You leave out that basecamp gave 6 months of salary to each person quitting. I'd assume that most of those would have quit under those conditions even if there wasn't an incident at all. As we can see here at the Coinbase incident where they didn't give a ton of money basically nobody quit, basecamps case would probably look similar.
I was slightly off in my memory, but I went back to some of the original blogs [1] and news reports [2] and there was indeed a specific employee demand that leadership acknowledge the customer list as something to be included in the pyramid of hate, as contributing to a colonial, genocidal culture. That this would require an apology was not explicitly stated, but it goes without saying, since there had already been apologies all around for the lesser offense, the general inappropriateness of the list.
In his blog post, DHH pointed out exactly where the dispute was: "It's still inappropriate for us to be laughing at individually named customers in our company Campfires, but not because there are any racist or colonial overtones to it." [emphasis mine] DHH simply didn't want the list spuriously connected to the serious moral offenses of bigotry and racism, with all the consequences that would open up.
This isn't to deny that a completely different sort of list, in a completely different context, could be validly cited as within the pyramid of hate. And it's fine to bring that up, so long as you note that what happened obviously wasn't that. But the angry employees didn't note that, because it wasn't part of their game. In fact, demanding that leadership frame the list as the sort of thing that contributes to colonialism and genocide, rather than merely being immature and inappropriate in the workplace, was a first step in setting off a moral panic where the instigators would call all the shots. Again, those of us who have been paying attention have seen many examples of this.
Other points of controversy, like the implicit demand that leadership take sides on the existence of white supremacy within the company precisely because an employee denied it was present [3], present even clearer examples of the Kafka-trapping and moral panic-mongering that was unfolding within the company.
Hansson and Fried were smart to nip it in the bud, and nip it in the bud publicly. They set a great example of how to show these people the door.
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...
The discourse at work in SV tech is not about, “hey, let’s not hang homosexuals”, which I am sure 99.99% of employees and employers fully agree with. It’s typically more in the vein of, “hey, why did we hire person Z, who the media has proven to be a bigot”.
As an explicit example: Antonio Garcia Martinez’s firing was, IMO, bizarre and unwarranted and a manifestation of this attitude (coming from a company that is okay with using Uyghur labor).
I actually do not want my colleagues to have a very narrow view of what’s right and wrong — or a very black and white view of the world. And surely, I don’t want to expend cycles at work having such conversations.
It's distracting, propagandist and politically charged bullshit. Just because I don't support BLM doesn't mean I don't have a problem with black people randomly being killed.
It's the exact same bullshit as shoving "support our troops or else you hate freedom" down people's throats.
Please, stop right there. If you find yourself in this line of thinking, consider for a moment that you’re being a zealot.
I can't be the only person feeling a sense of irony, here. A big argument you see a lot is that people who raise concerns around equitable treatment only do it for clout, the ever popular 'virtue signaling' phrase. Is this not, to some extent or another, similar behavior but for a different audience?
Virtual signal* for thee but not for me? Is this something we've discussed yet?
* I've never been a fan of this term, anyway. Even if someone were 100%, consciously and purposefully 'virtue signaling', it has little baring on the validity of their argument.
I like to work with companies and buy from companies that don’t make these statements but also don’t use slave labour to make their products. (Nike)
You can have your values and I can have mine.
> Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support [our political stance] simply does not belong in polite, modern society
That's extremely divisive and intolerant. Also, it's a cheap rhetorical trick to replace [political stance] with "doesn't want black people to be indiscriminately murdered". Literally no-one is arguing that black people should be indiscriminately murdered. Some people just want to do work at their workplace instead of engaging zealots in political debates that might lead to being cancelled at book burnings. That doesn't mean they want to genocide black people. You should learn to tolerate people who have political opinions different from yours.
A Christian posts on HN: merely saying "we as a company believe thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" or "we as a company believe you shall not steal" are just...basic things you need to do in 1952.
Saying people deserve to be able to live isn't the same as introducing extremely "othering" religions.
The tactics are the same, the goals are different. Comparing these is bad faith.
The Leftist's Exit Fallacy: claim the response is in bad faith because you cannot reasonably respond to the core claims, and do not have any retorts to the analogies, metaphors, etc. used.
>Saying people deserve to be able to live isn't the same as introducing extremely "othering" religions.
The fact that I can't tell if you're talking about leftism or Christianity is hilarious, and telling.
>The tactics are the same, the goals are different.
That's literally what he was highlighting here...
>Comparing these is bad faith.
"I have no response to your well thought out arguments, so I'm just going to disregard them entirely because the narrative must be preserved!"
Well, which is it? Are people speaking up too much (virtue signalling), or not enough (fear of speaking up)? Perhaps the people speaking up aren't saying what you want to hear, and you imagine a hidden majority of people who agree with you that you can convince yourself you are right, through a "invisible argument of authority" towards these abstract people who you know exist but don't speak up out of fear, but surely agree with you and outnumber the other voices.
I find the usage of the term "virtue signalling" a bit disappointing. Yes, there are a subset of opportunists who are dishonestly using social platforms for their own gain - but such people are in such a minority that pretending they should dominate the conversation is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
People are trying to organize to make society better, more inclusive, right the systematic wrongs of the past, and build a better future. Dismissing the majority of these people with a dismissive term like "virtue signalling" is not only being insensitive, it's callous and belittling.
The first thing you should realize is that the "virtue signalling" happening is due to voices being oppressed and voices not being heard for too long. There are uncomfortable conversations that need to happen and these voices should be heard.
It's all good and fair that you decided those conversations should not happen in the context of your company and to make the judgement as a leader that it serves only as a distraction, but to use a callous term like "virtue signalling" in the context of these conversations shows the true character of the person conveying this message - and personally, that is not a leader I would want to follow along with any mission.
COWEN: I’ve seen estimates that about 20 percent of bitcoin has been lost, or people don’t have their passwords, or it’s somehow abandoned or whatever. Let’s say that 20 percent were found. Those people would be better off, right? They’d have more wealth. Who is then worse off?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, I suppose you have dilution, and you have inflation if you’re increasing the money supply somehow like that.
COWEN: Then if we ask the general question that the social value of bitcoin — bitcoin in general — again, clearly a benefit to the people who bought at low prices. They in essence found bitcoin. But if someone else in the system is losing an equal amount, why think that the social value of bitcoin is positive?
ARMSTRONG: Who’s losing the equivalent amount in this case, just so I understand?
COWEN: I don’t know exactly who, but someone else has less purchasing power, right? Bitcoin isn’t apples. You can’t eat it for lunch.
ARMSTRONG: It’s not clear to me that bitcoin is a zero-sum game.
COWEN: But what is that? When do I get my apples, so to speak? Where do they come from?
ARMSTRONG: Well, anybody can participate of course. I think, now, about probably 10 percent of Americans and maybe 60 or 70 million people globally have crypto, at least. So it’s been growing a lot.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/brian-armstrong/
Bitcoin could only have been created by engineers - it misses a few fundamental tests of currency that any practicing economist would have "fixed" during the design phase. So we are left with bitcoin, which looks silly to most experts but is basically a religion to those who only see the technical merits of the project.
If we run the experiment all the way out, we end up with a ruling class based simply on time and fervor of adoption of a random piece of tech that appeared 10 years ago.
If we run it allll the way out we have a bunch of bitcoin billionaires constantly fearing for their lives because they are essentially walking piggybanks, ripe for kidnapping and torturing their wealth away via rubber hose cryptography.
Even random shitcoins have a non-zero value so long as there are participants who can use it as a proxy for risk of any sort. The the value is a function of the risk the exchange represents. If we bet 20 randocoins on tomorrow's high temperature in a city, we've created potential value. The bitcoin bet is that its value is non-zero, and an infinite number of people can trade in and out of positions in that bet and create and extract value from it.
The only real downside risk is a bunch of smart contract derivatives that hoover up bitcoin, rehypothecate and leverage it and give you some higher risk platform token/scrip instead that has a much higher likelihood of being worthless when it defaults, but with some additional personal security.
Using Cowen's analogy, bitcoin isn't apples, it's the game token you use to play the game to win the apples.
Or that is my understanding.
Kudos to the Coinbase team.
Crap like that shiba inu token are absolute scams, like most EVM tokens. They do nothing, add nothing, and trading them on chain just enriches the miners, or off chain, the exchange. Say what you like about dogecoin, at least it’s a long standing L1 blockchain with developers and history/transactions.
Why? Presumably because you're long BTC. With all due respect, you make a lot of handwavy comments about ERC-20 scams and I agree with you, but aside from a highly speculative investment, BTC is nothing.
It failed as a currency. It failed as a unit of account. Now the narrative has shifted to "store of value" which only anyone without an understanding of what that means could say.
What does BTC do that DOGE doesn't do? Or any other scam coin? It's all speculation, you have happen to find one more acceptable (and it so happens the one you're probably invested in).
Why has it failed? Works fine for me and many others…
Yes, more energy is more security in this case - which of course you can obtain in alternative ways. But so is driving a tank. So is living in bubble wrap in a missile silo in the middle of an open field. We don't do those things, though, because we have negative feedback mechanisms. Bitcoin does these things (analogous versions) because it doesn't.
And as for why it's failed as an L1, it set out to be a digital cash. 2-3tx/sec isn't enough to support a mid-sized Costco or a flea market let alone a global currency. 1 transaction per person on earth today would take over 75 years and cost 1/3 of a trillion dollars, and 100% of the remaining block reward. It's like a soviet-era phone line - better put in your order early, I guess.
I think the reality is no L1 can scale to digital cash for the everyone on planet to allow L1 txs. we need more layers and more innovation in transaction aggregation and transaction primitives, such as covenants.
L2+ don't offer the same guarantees as a L1, and once you drop any of the guarantees the whole thing becomes basically worthless.
So using the same information as you, we arrive at different conclusions: I don't think this solution is viable, good, worthwhile or should exist. I don't think if new power technology comes online a good use is making Bitcoin guzzle it like a dog at a sprinkler. I think China has the moral high ground on this one.
The goo scenario is inevitable, either build some kind of antigoo shield tech or be consumed. Complaining about the goo is irrelevant to the goo.
I very much disagree that was a moral high ground decision — it was an authoritarian move to crush opposition to its financial dystopia, the e-CNY, and prevent its people from escaping the all seeing eye.
PoW does have sheer simplicity and a proven record of working on its side, but the idea that whatever upsides to PoW over PoS that exist are and will stay worth more than 0.5% of global electricity production seems extremely biased.
Umm.. No.
"More energy = More security" is a slogan now being used to scam non-technical users to buy into the crypto ecosystem, but that does not make any sense if you are willing to think about for a second. Also very convenient that this slogan started getting popular when BTC started getting bad press for energy usage.
BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.
Btw, you are not correct. The entire history of the chain and balances is protected by the hashrate. With sufficient energy you can rewrite history. This is because every block secures the blocks before it. Yeah checkpoints can be used to force a known sync point, but this vastly undermines the decentralization of the chain.
I think you're drawing an unnecessary line here. Attacking consensus is attacking the value stored in the accounts. Attacking consensus by using your own miners to pull off a double-spend can directly take value back out of accounts. Attacking consensus by doing a perpetual 51% attack can block people from using their accounts, decreasing the real monetary value of them.
Drawing the lines so that the "security" of a cryptocurrency only refers to the security of the public-key cryptography involved in it is useless. It ignores practically all of the important design considerations and attack vectors in the system. Public-key cryptography is just one component of a cryptocurrency.
I can't think of a more hated CEO in the Cryptospace since Jihan Wu, who also spent quite a lot of time on social media/Twitter lambasting his users and detractors. A few years later he would be ousted by the CCP from his own company and was licking his wounds from his failed attempt to hi-jack Bitcoin after having loss majority hashing power and near exclusive manufacturer of miners. (Maybe Mark Karpeles, but even then he served his time in prison and after having his life ruined by the Japanese legal system and most just feel bad for the guy.)
To be honest, Strike is going to disrupt Coinbase business model sooner than later and the valuation of Coinbase is the very definition of froth.
In all seriousness, I can't wait to see Coinbase's and Armstrong's collective demise,
Unless you work at Coinbase, right?
But even more generally: Armstrong's profile on Twitter includes his (ostensible) mission of "creating more economic freedom in the world." That's a very political mission, even by milquetoast American standards!
Focus on building a successful profitable company.
Surely you just pretend to not know this?
Through what means, exactly?
We're not talking about a candy company here. This is a company that explicitly includes political messaging in both their mission and in their choice of means (i.e., cryptocurrency) towards that mission. Why the double standard?
Why do people find this so hard to understand?
The only claim is that their mission is a political one, and not even for the trivial reason of "everything is political."
Anybody who works there and disagrees with what the company is doing can quit and go work somewhere else whenever they please.
You need to pull your head out of your belly button. The navel gazing you were taught at university is going to ruin your life and make you perpetually miserable.
The farce here is in claiming that Coinbase's mission is somehow "apolitical," even beyond the standard (& correct) observation that everything is political: they are explicitly a financial services company with a political message of economic freedom. They are explicitly advocates for an explicitly political form of monetary exchange.
When Armstrong says "mission focused," he really means "consistent with Coinbase's politics." And that's okay. But it's ridiculous to dress it up as some kind of apolitical position.
This idea that because everything is touched by politics, you should be free to bring every aspect of politics into any organization is ridiculous.
Coinbase should be involved in the the political discourse surrounding crypto (and other finance-related) legislation. They should not be involved in the discourse surrounding a woman's right to abortion (just an example).
If you think crypto should be banned, you probably shouldn't work at Coinbase. On the other hand, your opinion on abortion should have no bearing on whether you work there. It has nothing to do with their company mission.
I don't agree with this, but to be clear: you're arguing for something very different than Armstrong is. Armstrong is saying that Coinbase isn't besmirched by any politics, which is patently false -- their entire mission is explicitly political.
As for why I don't agree: political positions are not hermetic. It wasn't acceptable in 1961 for lunch counters to "not be involved" in desegregation, because "not being involved" is tantamount to support for segregation in a segregated society. But again, to be very clear: this is above and beyond the claim that Armstrong is making.
There's actually no point in time where the opinions of the actual proprietors of lunch counters mattered either way. The Jim Crow laws legally mandated segregation until the Civil Rights Act legally prohibited it. The lack of personal choice in the matter is more or less exactly what makes it political in the first place.
I’m sorry, but what do you think provided the political impetus for the Civil Rights Act? It was years of concerted protesting and civil disobedience, one form of which was sit-ins at lunch counters.
Yes, they were. The Greensboro sit-ins began at Woolworth stores because they had explicit policies that went above and beyond those required by Jim Crow laws. They even sent a letter to Woolworth’s, not the state[1].
Edit: And, you’ll note: the Greensboro sit-ins didn’t provoke asymmetric police retaliation. What the students did wasn’t even illegal, it was merely against Woolworth’s store policies.
[1]: https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/greensboro-nc-stud...
But you’re right: Brian gets to decide what is and isn’t political, and he’s decided that he isn’t being political, so he isn’t. Which is an… interesting power to hold over your employees, hence my original post.
Which was the original goal of unions, something I would think would count as being "political" at work.
It's an untenable situation at best.
It's remarkable how easily we've forgotten that the very concept of "personal time" took decades of sustained political effort at the workplace.
How about people decide to take action -- regardless of the consequences to themselves instead of worrying about maintaining the scraps they're fed in the process? Why is today so much different than yesterday that people don't want to risk their standing and their lives for their principals and expect it just to happen, to be given? All the whining is just theatre as far as I'm concerned until people start actually making the hard decisions and doing something at risk to themselves for what they believe.
Why do people seem so hypocritical compared to the people during those decades you mention?
The owners of Coinbase made a stand for what they believe in, I support that. Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.
Edit: And you know I'm not sorry but I just don't feel bad for office workers bitching about their jobs. I feel bad for the front line workers, in the stores in the warehouses in logistics and shipping. They actually have real gripes to contend with being physically worn down everyday yet we lump the person sitting in their office chair reading reddit for 8 hours with these people actually killing themselves to get you a package a couple hours sooner.
Note: This isn't aimed at you directly but very much what I feel is the superficialness of many movements today.
The present-day crusaders are attacking their fellow employees (who disagree with them) as well as customers (trying to get customers who disagree with them dropped). They are most certainly not fighting management. Management gets involved in those cases where it tries to stop one of the crusading employees from harassing another employee or customer, at which point there are demonstrations to try to get the enemy coworker or employee dropped.
That is why this is not at all like the unionization efforts of the past.
"Crusaders" already belies where you stand on this, but to be clear: historical labor movements absolutely included hostility against coworkers. The coworker who didn't join you on the picket line was called a scab.
Besides, US labor law places broad restrictions on the ability of labor organizations to call for boycotts (i.e., retaliating against customers). If you take your time to read about this history of workers' rights in the US, you'll find deeper parallels to the current day than you're probably currently inclined to believe.
Edit: Here's a link[1] to a summary of the confusing rat's nest that is NLRA's rules for boycotting.
[1]: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/se...
> Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.
I don't disagree. But to be clear: collective action, broadly interpreted, is mostly illegal in the United States. You can actually be thrown in jail for it and, unlike the CEOs, you probably don't have the money to tie the courts up. The US's labor movement spent decades fighting for recognition, and it's still paltry compared to the rest of the world (and is steadily being eroded). Most workers, including office workers, have strong social and economic disincentives against anything more than talk (at-will employment, absent social services, &c).
And then the company you work for takes the profits from that effort and donates it to politicians to further the executive agenda.
You mean controls on working hours? Four day weeks? There are those who’d say that was extremely political (and they’d be right; the two day weekend was largely invented by the labour movement, surely the epitome of politics at work, back in the day).
It misses the point -- they don't need to be "oppressed" to be justified in talking about politics at work, the same way they don't need to be underpaid to be justified in unionizing. Each is a perfectly sufficient end in itself.
You don't need to be on the losing side of an unjust system to recognize the system as unjust.
"Shut up and do the work, or GTFO" is a statement that only Capital can make, and it's a statement that can only be directed at Labor.
When the topic being quelled is a conversation about fairness within the ranks of Labor, and between Capital and Labor, the picture is crystal clear: "Capital says no, and you (Labor) will comply."
I think the thing that really upsets people is that the company changed course. People who go to work at a HFT firm are probably all motivated by compensation - and would expect that, because it’s baked into the company culture and business model.
People choose to work somewhere based the reward it offers. If that changes, without their consent, it breaks an unwritten contract.
(None of this matters to the larger discussion but wanted to offer you a perspective of someone who has actually made the choice you are using as an example)
I disagree and have a much more simple explanation. Activists naturally want to involve as many people as they can in their cause/struggle. By framing everything as political, they open up opportunities to proselytize in areas traditionally not appropriate for 'politics'.
If you couple that with a cultural expectation that people must take a side, and, that simply not being a [bad thing] is not enough, you must be actively anti-[bad thing], and you've got the current climate Brian Armstrong is trying to avoid.
This line of thought is absurd. Words have definitions and boundaries for a reason.
This, but unironically.
To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical.
Silence means just that, silence. It could mean anything: I don't know. I don't care. I might care but don't have time to look into it. I care but it's not in my top 10 issues.
None of these options support the status quo.
>Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
>Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
>The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
>The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
>The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
>We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
>Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.
>Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
>The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
>In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
>He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
>History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
>Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
But I do love MLK quotes:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. The number of problems in the world are effectively infinite but our ability to take a meaningful position is finite and extremely limited. The default state of being is to not have taken a position on something.
To insinuate that someone is privileged for not getting involved is a cudgel and a guilt-tripping tool being used against someone who doesn't share the same priorities as you do. It strikes me as "if you're not with us, you're against us", a sentiment that used to be loathed in the early 2000's but is now accepted and expected.
That's not a challenge to this line of thinking, it's just another way of wording the exact same thing.
On the other hand, the fact that I can choose which struggles I engage with, and am able to avoid ones I don't want to involve myself in is absolutely a privilege. Someone who may need an abortion may not be able to avoid caring about that issue. Someone less economically secure may not be able to avoid worrying about unemployment or healthcare policy. There's countless similar examples.
You can absolutely acknowledge that you don't have the spoons/time/interest to deeply invest yourself in every social cause or issue. But you should also recognize that there are tons of people who also don't have the spoons/time/interest either, but have to anyway because the issue affects them and they can't afford to ignore it either.
Like you prioritize not hearing activists talk about their priorities, and they don't care about your priorities and thus talk about theirs.
Is griping about this going to change anything? Of course not.
You can see this that the more privileged you are the more likely you are to vote, to petition and engage yourself etc.
This is how you get "water is racist" and the entire movement of social justice becomes a thing of ridicule. The strategy harms, it doesn't help.
It's not political, it's fashion.
“Economics” and “politics” are just different lenses for viewing interactions relating to the distribution of power (equivalently, control of scarce resources.) They are the same thing; economic interactions are political and vice versa; economic power is political power and vice versa, etc.
This is also why capitalism (enabling the private accumulation of economic power) and democracy (involved the egalitarian distribution of political power), despite both initially being advanced by the same moves away from the particular structure of the monarchic/feudal concentration of both, are fundamentally in tension and ultimately incompatible.
One must remember that things can always get worse.
Just because there exist concrete problems in society does not mean that you, or activist coworkers get to assume that you're/they're automatically right nor that you/they have workable solutions.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coinbase-ceo-bitcoin-surpass-dolla...
[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/
Edit: changed terminology from "classical white" to "classical liberal" culture. It diverges from critical social justice dogma by doing this, making my attempt at communicating with a Critical Social Justice adherent less in their language, but is hopefully clearer.
No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)
> and assume same skin color has same culture.
No, we generally don’t.
>No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)
Correct, most people do not believe that skin color define them or their neighbor. The notion also generally does not make much sense, as Americans are incredibly racially mixed.
However, a very aggressive and powerful minority that believe in critical social justice are enforcing racial stereotypes.
To say you are defined by race is a bit like saying you are defined by nose size. It is an arbitrary trait amongst many.
>> and assume same skin color has same culture.
>No, we generally don’t.
That is the Coinbase CEOs experience. People generally falsify preferences in public in order to not offend any Critical Social Justice activist that may ruin their life for saying the wrong thing.
However, generally Americans are friendly and welcoming people that just want to live a good simple family life next to good neighbors of any creed.
What I meant was classical liberal culture, which by CSJ adherents is termed as white culture by perpetrating whiteness. Whiteness is not about color, although its assumed all white people by default are this, but is about you adhering to liberal western culture instead of CSJ dogma.
Bitcoin is an ancap political project designed to make exploitation of the working class, independent of skin color, easier.
Identity politics themselves are a neoliberal ploy to distract from the real struggle at hand.
Also, what even is "white culture" other than a racist dogwhistle? Whats the common denominator between Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian and English (all white) cultures?
To expand upon your point about the greater political moment: these revolutions have never been good for the working class, because those with little power in order to gain a powerful voice need to organize into powerful interest groups using voting (with little cheating) plus free speech plus a way to overthrow a corrupt regime. These groups of people may strongly disagree on other issues, but unite on work. Notice how all of these are under attack by critical social justice activists.
Identity politics is just a tool to divide the people into unchosen cuts that are too small to affect change or fight back against a corrupt elite.
In the US a minority of people comprising both sides of the “horseshoe” are uniting together to push towards a China like system. No communist (Soviet Russia), fascistic (hitler Germany), communist fascist merge (China) has ever had the means for the working class fight for themselves. In all of these systems the political elite have much greater access to wealth than any other group of people, and the working class paid the cost and lived a basic living style.
Replace "dissenters" with "capitalist robber barons" and "great" with "problematic" and I'm with you.
>these revolutions have never been good for the working class
Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US TO THIS DAY. From 1953 to 1962 their literacy rate went from 56% to 96%, one of the highest in the world. Yugoslavia had the best passport in the world and Yugoslavs were the only people who could travel freely in both Cold War blocks. You're just parroting propaganda.
The main problem is capitalist overlords trying to establish neo-feudalism (Erik Prince and his private army come to mind). The only institution that's strong enough to fight that trend is the state, and taking power over money away from it seals our neo-feudalist fate. Our only chance is to take control of the state before it gets to that, be that through peaceful democratic means like Salvador Allende or through a more direct struggle like Castro or Josip Broz Tito.
I agree that instead of the transition from a tyranny of the proletarian communist leaders, those with gnostic knowledge of communism, to communist utopia communist revolutions have a tendency to fall into feudalism. I disagree with your assertion about Cuba, your example, where the political elite and Castros family has much more access to food&resources than the people.
However, considering that communism remove all checks and balances on state power transitioning into feudalism ruled by a political elite seems like its natural outcome. I therefore disagree with your assertion that the communist process to achieve utopia could ever result in a different outcome. “Trotskyites face the wall first”, those were the communal ideologues and opportunists took over
Instead of looking back I think we should look forward and learn how to harness technology with a healthy fear in order to not “burn” ourselves again, and try something different
I think Yugoslavia is the better example fwiw - a society where there was high living standards and high degrees of freedom, arguably higher than in the West. They had greater economic freedom as all companies were worker-run coops with leadership elected by the workers competing in the marketplace; compare that to the autocracy of the modern capitalist workplace! They also had the freedom to travel both the Communist and the Capitalist blocks, but that's not as relevant today anymore.
I agree with your comment about having to look forward though. I think the ideal scenario would be fully automated space luxury communism - e.g. Star Trek, but baby steps ;) We'll have to make sure to avoid falling to deep into capitalism and its systemic descent into corporatism, then fascism though as has happened every time that system has been tried.
I know people that lived in communist Yugoslavia. It was little better than Cuba and Soviet Russia, and a small elite lived well like feudal lords. Everyone else was dead poor with basic living standards at best.
> Space luxury communists.
If we gain a healthy fear of tech and acknowledge the dual nature of humans, both evil and good, new solutions will open up like when humans stopped burning down stuff with fire by containing it and applying it with a healthy fear.
I think whatever we would have next would be best centered by the individual in the natural and human local community, with a very small central state, in order to not overwhelm the local community and the individual with the centralized tyranny communism has tended towards.
Some people argue that a centralized communist AI world economic forum style will make communist non-tyrannical. I think that is unrealistic because a centralized AI deciding stuff, like the Fabian society dreamed up (see HG Wells “things to come”), will also be tyrannical as it’s still made and maintained by people. A Stalin, Pol Pot or Mao will eventually control it.
Btw, Marcuse that formulated the woke movement thought a communist system could only fund basic living standards. He also thought that for sustainability the state needed eugenics control over reproduction. Only a commmunist fascist merge like China has supported luxury, but that system is indistinguishable from feudalism. Wokism in practice seems like a China like system achieved through communist means
I suggest that there is much activity in life that is not political.
When someone says something like "meat is political" I don't think they mean that the physical substance on the dinner plate has this property, but rather that there are decisions to make that directly involve meat which people disagree about, and that politics is the (or at least one of the) processes by which decisions get made by groups of people when individuals in the group disagree.
If we all agreed on what was not political then no one would need to argue that "everything is political" in the first place, so if you want to have any interesting discussion at all then you need to actually say something about where the boundary is between political and non-political. Because it's that boundary that's contentious and might actually lead to some insight when discussed freely.
The statement "meat is political" is a different case, because it is specific. It doesn't rely on an implicit clause that hides the actual concept of interest.
This is a non-argument because "status quo" can be construed as anything and everything. It boils down to "you're either with us or against us."
"If you don't actively support my pet cause on women's rights to own hand guns in California, it means you support the status quo. You support women being murdered and victimized without any recourse because you want to disarm them when they need guns the most! Supporting the status quo on gun rights is supporting women victimization!"
It absolutely is and this statement is either not informed enough or is being argued in bad faith. Unless your job is involved in direct politics or government you can keep the politics out and focus on the work.
I do not need my peers or coworkers bringing in politics to the workspace. Politics is a disease that seems to be seeping in everywhere because a vocal minority thinks every moment needs political involvement.
It does not.
If you are a website and you host user comments, and the government requests information about a commenter. Do you give it to them right away, or do you fight it? What if the country is a known violator of human rights? What if the request is to try to track down a pedophile? What if it is to track down a journalist?
Either decision is political. If you comply, that is a political decision. If you decline, that is a political decision. If you fight it in court, that is a political decision.
What about deciding what to do with user data. Do you sell it to the highest bidder? Do you protect privacy? Do you sell it, but only to certain people? Do you use it internally? Do you store it at all? How much effort do you put into securing your users data? Is that decision purely financial, or do you believe you have a responsibility to protect your users data even if it costs you more than you would lose in a breach?
It’s a very new thought that work should be apolitical.
Reminds me of a cryptocurrency exchange with an activist CEO who forbids dissenting political views in the workplace. Can’t remember his name.
And everything is politics. A political system could decide to outlaw computers and the internet. How would your SaaS business survive then?
> And everything is politics
And thus we arrive at Postmodernism. Postmodernism introduces the belief that everything is relative and everything is a construct. There is no base reality, no ground truth–or if there is, we can dismiss it as irrelevant given the all powerful constructs and systems of human life. Thus one can make arguments like, "Everything is always politics" and use such asinine premises as the basis of injecting noxious politics into every facet of our lives. Once again contravening the majority of people's lived experiences and desires.
Also, Postmodernism in philosophy and sociology is built against Marxism (and Freudism), so i don't really understand the association here.
Marxism: "Everything is class struggle. There is always, everywhere and in everything an oppressor and an oppressed. The only cure is revolution and ideological purification."
While the two may have been at odds at their inception, they now work together, initially in academia, but now, increasingly, everywhere in the U.S.
> now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before
Citation needed.
Having actually gone through an undergraduate philosophy program in the United States: Marx is a blip. He's barely taught in analytical programs, which are (overwhelmingly) the dominant discipline in American colleges. Postmodernism isn't even mentioned. I spent more time reading Nozick and other politically right-of-center philosophers than I did reading anything resembling left philosophy.
In that same vein, if you join Coinbase, you should know what you're getting into, maybe it's political, but it's a kind of political that you knew beforehand. The problem comes when you try to shoehorn a different set of political beliefs onto something that didn't have them in the first place.
This statement was within the context of advising organizational leaders who are trying to "keep the peace" (and thus, inadvertently enabling distraction and morale rot) instead of creating clarity and focusing the mission.
Coinbase certainly made itself more viewpoint inclusive by making it impossible to act within the company as a CSJ procelyte is required to do. An CSJ procelyte is expected to try to institutionalize the faith by enforcing the Diversity (hiring activists of all identities - a black conservative is not diverse), inclusion (censorship of people resisting CSJ DEI initiatives), and Equity (redistribution of outcomes based upon identities and adherence to CSJ) agenda.
I work at a company that has heavily institutionalized CSJ, and CSJ procelytization is quite distracting from our core mission and is actively creating a non-inclusive culture to other viewpoints&faiths. Almost every day I get emails about this faith, there are almost daily meetings (services) about it, almost every company-wide meeting spends time preaching about it, every facet of the buerocracy enforce CSJ dogma, and we are demoralizing the workforce by hiring as well as promoting based upon DEI principles instead of trying to achieve meritocracy.
US politics has become extremely draining, divisive, and aggressive - particularly in high partisan-lean areas. It's flat out exhausting talking with people about politics, even those who I agree with, and it just gets worse every year. Polling has shown people sort themselves by political ideology first and everything else in life second. I see fewer and fewer options available, but to just run from it. I don't see it getting better any time soon.
The company I previously worked for spent an enormous amount of time (and money) facilitating discussions appeasing these divides and focusing on social justice, etc. Not only is there no hope for any given company to realistically solve for societal-wide problems or find an approach that satisfies everyone in this manner, but it's painfully obvious they don't truly care about these topics either. Having people come "talk" about racism or putting on inclusion workshops doesn't result in real action. Things like "diversity" are mangled and manufactured into company metrics where data is awkwardly bucketed by "ethnicity". Are we expected to believe HR departments who group half of the world together as "Asian" as taking diversity seriously? I've come away from every company I've worked for with the cynical impression that that their "social justice" efforts are simply to minimize inner anger, strife, and liability. And for leaders, if you commit to being a "politically engaged" workplace it means everything you do is twice as vulnerable. You are walking on eggshells even if you aren't instigating any sort of animosity - what if you weren't paying attention to the news and didn't speak up about a particular political event? What if you didn't say enough? What if you were misinterpreted? I can understand why Coinbase doesn't want to go there anymore - they can achieve the same goal if nobody says anything at all.
I'm not arguing nefarious forces don't exist or aren't important. I care deeply about many of the commonly-discussed social issues that we're dealing with today. I've personally witnessed blatant racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination first-hand at work. But those things can be solved for at a company level - trying to treat our general political environment is well beyond anything any corporation can manage nor should we expect it to be their responsibility. Companies should focus on refining things that are in their control, like practicing transparent & fair hiring, enforcing anti-discrimination policies, and ensuring equal-opportunity internally. But I think you can fairly draw the line there.
One person's every day life is considered by another to be "political".
and yes, i think the members of NAACP would be pushing crypto if that's what they felt was a priority for their cause. i don't understand your logic?
edit: i believe that being apolitical is just as a political stance as being political.
Join a charity that focuses on topic Y instead.
People say everything is political, that doesn't make it so.
Crypto isn't partisan. It's not beholden to the democratic or the republican party. Saying "something is political" is meaningless.
"Political" is a meaningless buzzword at that point.
What you really mean is "partisan". Should Coinbase just be an extension of the democratic party? No according to its CEO, but that's what a lot of people here wants it to be.
Leave politics at home.
My understanding is that they started off really bad, right? They had 3/4s of their black employees resign before that post and were at 3%. I guess they could have gotten worse, but being proud to be where you were when this whole thing started is a bit awkward.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...
> One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.
Numbers aside, this thread is really difficult to take seriously due to the (hypocritical) inclusion of this tweet, which seems to undermine the rest of his thesis (that speaking up for things you believe in is a distracting waste of time that is bad for business).
> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controversial.
And also like, did anyone actually disagree that being a profit-driven company can be profitable? The tl;dr of this entire thread to me is "putting profits above people and morals was every bit as profitable as I thought it would be: thus, I'm vindicated".
I would expect to see the same thing from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Copyright, etc.... we also see this same argument from companies like Apple and Facebook: "we are making tons of money, and so our actions are not only useful, they were justified".
> While the media reports were mostly negative, and it even spawned some retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces, the reaction both from employees and people I spoke to in private was overwhelmingly positive.
Finally, the issue I have here is that the vast majority (again: we are talking 97%) of Coinbase employees are not black, which calls into question this entire metric: an "overwhelmingly positive" reaction from the overwhelming majority is... underwhemling.
Overwhelming positive reaction from subordinates (whose paychecks he signs), and peers who are also tech/finance bros. Sounds like a statistical universe to me!
Maybe it’s the font, we just don’t now. Maybe one more character can totally kill Twitter.
Better keep the changes to a minimum until you figure out what to do.
Even completely political organizations will have to control political discussions at workplace. US Government is moving into that direction and we are seeing a far less political Senate and Congress that is rarely focussed in any discussion as a joint entity. The two teams in legislative bodies rarely 'talk' to each other on political topics. Most discussions are now procedural and political debate in almost all public forums is completely dead.
The political activism gets so ridiculous that we have to cheer for looting because it is tied to BLM... for whatever strange reason.
And this is looting shops in Seattle, which overwhelmingly supports BLM. You can bet those shop owners probably won't support BLM anymore...
Even when they set that construction site on fire, the stark difference between the front of the march which went peacefully by and the trail of destruction from the end of the march; it's no wonder the people at the front were confused when the police confronted them. unless they were staring at their phones the entire time, they'd have no idea what the "pacific youth liberation front" was doing behind them.
Unless you went actively searching for both sides, the passive social media and MSM would just show you whatever half of the story aligned with your political views; any conversation was just 2 sides completely talking past each other because they only saw their echo-chamber and refused to acknowledge the other side's echo-chamber.
The best/dumbest example was video of a (dismounted) cop who rolled his bike over some guy's head. And then the time-lapse video of that guy spending 15+ mins following the cops around and laying down in front of them; only getting his head rolled over on the 5th time. The immaturity of all parties in that video is just mind-boggling to me.
Noah Trevor went on a long monologue how looting was justified because police broke social contracts first.
A lot of people applauded him for saying this.
And I would consider Noah Trevor to be an highly influential BLM leader.
It still makes absolutely no sense to me to loot random shop owners (who support BLM) because police breaks social contract.
He was correct, so was Shopify, so was Basecamp and all these businesses that told their employees to leave their partisan politics and social justice concerns at the door.
I'm not sure what HN has turned into but the litany of disingenuous comments from people claiming a tech company has the duty to mend society the way they believe is the best makes me believe that a lot of people here don't understand what running a business is about and It is not being a PAC.
I'm also amused with the people claiming that all these companies "are bleeding talent". No, a lot of us here just want to write programs or manage teams or products, nothing more. Certainly not be involved in any social justice activity.
I would absolutely love to work at Coinbase given these work conditions.
It's not even only about politics. I like being able to go to a place, work, chat a bit about superficial things with my collegues and go back home. I don't need to expose my whole self and soul when I go to work, and in fact I prefer not to. Some people are not like me, and feel the opposite. Great! I just want places to exist for both of us.
They try to make a fuzz here at HN as well but just like the real world they aren't the majority here either.
What are these clown colors, so many different ones.
BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.