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Comment by blintz | Hacker News Reader

> Those insiders include venture capital firms like a16z and, incredibly, Coinbase’s own venture arm, which has a number of investments listed on Coinbase.

As someone who is not as familiar with the day-to-day machinations of this field, this really surprised me. Does anyone at Coinbase care that there might be this massive conflict of interest? How can this be legal/ethical?

At a more basic level, don't they at least feel kinda slimy about it? I thought there would at least be some kind of hamfisted "we keep these departments separate" statement w.r.t who gets listed, but I don't even think they claim that. In fact at the launch for Coinbase Ventures, they said "You can expect that we’ll enthusiastically invest in ideas from our own alumni network."

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Basically all of crypto is strategems that would be illegal in conventional finance, but all participants pretend they’re legal due to crypto

I can't keep standing by as this continues to be parroted here.

You see the same machinations by some percentage of bad actors to take advantage of regulation not existing yet in any and every industry, from fruit, to paper manufacturing.

Yes, in many cases Coinbase doesn't list coins they don't like, and rushes to list ones it does.

This just further highlights the important of knowing, to every depth possible, whose code you're running and who you're doing business with, because the buck stops with you,

and governments can only continue to try to protect from an after-the-fact, further-harm-reduction viewpoint.

Many industries, including the fruit and financial industries, are regulated to try to prevent this sort of abuse. The parent is merely pointing out that, absent regulation, abuse and corruption are inevitable.

And regulation creates burden for 3rd party actors who were not part of the abuse so they are forced to cryto.

Frontrunning is a common practice wherever it is not explictly banned. most exchanges, opensea etc all have significant amount of insider activity.

The comment is about the financial industry. And it's right. What happens in the fruit industry isn't relevant. The financial industry is heavily regulated (many say for good reason), and much of crypto seems to be created to avoid this regulation, or to claim that the thing created isn't subject to regulation.

Crypto is just a fancy distributed linked list and people get tied up over it for no reason (gross oversimplification, I know).

The issue is the lack of regulation in the intersection of fiat/traditional finance.

EVERY time there's been a gap like this, it's it's exploited.

That seems to be the whole point of “crypto” (I.e. selling facsimile securities to avoid regulation)

Usually during a bull market no one squeals. When the party ends, everyone looks for someone to blame.

I would imagine that slimy-ness feeling might wash away, at least a little bit, after you buy your $133 million (cash deal) Bel Air mansion: https://archive.fo/UugwG

Coinbase got a slap on the wrist for their Litecoin adventure so there's no reason to stop now.

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