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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

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SQueeeeeL

The literal collapse of an institution is a pretty A+ indicator of failure of leadership

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Not necessarily. If your market evaporates, you can't really blame it on product.

>If your market evaporates, you can't really blame it on product.

Come again?

It means that nobody could have prevented the crypto market collapse from the position of a Coinbase Chief Product Officer.

I mean...we've seen these massive boom and bust cycles over and over again. So yeah I do sort of expect the Chief Product Officer to have some clue how to handle them. It's not like it was out of the blue.

Handling them is not the same as preventing them.

Fair enough. Don't personally agree but seems I've kicked a hornet's nest here.

Handling them means preventing the company from being harmed by them.

To simplify, if you depend on market X then hedging your bet means also profiting if market X collapses.

There are plenty of situations where that is impossible, and the best you can do is minimizing harm.

1. He tried to sell a product

2. This product turns out to be a scam

3. His fault for trying to sell a scam

That this crook extracts $100 million for this is a symptom of a broken society.

Coinbase is not a scam - the service they provide is the buying and selling of cryptocurrency which they do just fine. I don't like crypto either but calling everything related to it a scam is just intellectually lazy.

The marketplace for a scam is still participating in the scam. A bank knowingly laundering money for a criminal organization is still an accomplice.

I think that's the best place to prevent collapse. They were industry leaders, for some time at least. They funded a bunch of things which turned out to be scams, biggest one being FTX. If internet collapses, I think google will be a bit to blame, no?

> you can't really blame it on product

indeed you can

If there's no more gold in the gold mines, you would blame that on the shovel manufacturer?

The shovel manufacturer made a bad product decision to not pivot when the mines were becoming empty.

Should Charles Schwab start selling dildos every time there's a recession?

I don't know what your point here is but if they're lucrative in economic downturns then, yea, sure they should.

If that's the only choice when the other option is going out of business, sure?

At the same time, if you're the leader of a product that's going to succeed no matter what, maybe you shouldn't get paid $105 million.

Maybe, and this might be a controversial take, nobody should be paid $105 million - because maybe nobody is actually generating that much value on their own.

Or if they are paid, $105 million, it should be taxed at like a 90%+ rate and have that go towards the 30 million+ hungry people in the US.

If it is extremely hard to attribute outcomes to individual contribution, maybe no one should get the $105m?

Coinbase didn’t do enough to thwart the massive fraud and youtube-deepfake-powered-heists going on. Lots of sheep lost lots of money and look where we are now. The crypto winter will last 50 years.

"Crypto winter" as a term of art assumes that any other season is reasonable.

It's not about reasonable, it's about reality, right? Like crypto in it's short history has seen summers and winters.

Yeah but that's not what Coinbase was. It was a industry leader. I think we can blame industry leaders if the industry evaporates like this.

This is like saying banks should not manage risk. I am sure that if you put your bucks in a bank account you want to seem them there when you check your balances otherwise you know who you will be blaming.

Also, ask CEOs and Chief Risk Officers from financial institutions if they worry about evaporations. I am not surprised though about him walking away with the money and your comment in the crypto world.

Dang is Coinbase collapsing?

Collapsing is a strong word, but their very tightly tied to whatever the crypto market is doing..which is not good at the moment.

eh. BTC is up 40% year to date. FTX may have been the bottom of this cycle.

YTD is like 25 days… what’s the TTM?

parent comment said "not good at the moment" so just responding to "at the moment" its actually not as bad as the haters would imagine (e.g. its well above the 2020-era ceiling of $16k despite much tighter monetary policy and crypto institutions failing all over the place)

I meant like crypto as a whole. The 2020 shininess has worn off. NFTs are all dead. Web3 is being forgotten. The main news stories are about fraud and hacks.

the price of BTC != the crypto market

Are they? They’re tied to people putting money in and out of their platform, not to how much Bitcoin is worth.

Yes, trading volume has fallen off a cliff in the last couple quarters.

What would dang know about it?

No, he's saying dang _is_ the collapse of Coinbase. Clearly he has insider information.

I think GP accidentally some punctuation. It probably ought to be read as "Dang! Is Coinbase collapsing?"

In another place where "dang" couldn't be mistaken for a person, "Dang, is Coinbase collapsing?" would also be acceptable.

Remember folks: Punctuation is the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma".

(And capitalization is the difference between "I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse" and something else entirely...)

bitcoin is up 25% in a month : https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD?p=BTC-USD

I've been hit up by cryptobro's on LinkedIn more in that last month than at anytime previous. Clearly the ponzi scheme needs more victims to keep the pyramid intact...

LOL… typical HN tying a market being in a downturn to a company for trading securities “collapsing.”

Probably the same type that associates tech debt with “company is on the decline” despite strong revenue.

From a quick glance at their financials, they lost about a billion dollars in the past year but still have $7 billion in working capital. I think they'll be fine.

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