Coinbase Raises $25 Million From Andreessen Horowitz
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
For definitions here let's have Wikipedia[0] and Oxford dictionary[1]
0. "escape velocity is the speed at which the kinetic energy plus the gravitational potential energy of an object is zero. It is the speed needed to "break free" from the gravitational attraction of a massive body, without further propulsion."
1. "a speed for a particular vehicle, ship, or aircraft, usually somewhat below maximum, that is comfortable and economical"
An object travelling at escape velocity without further propulsion will just (only just) escape the gravitational pull of the contextual body. That means by the time it's distant enough from the body for the gravitational forces to be trivially weak, it's going damn slowly.
This means the company is slowing down continually, relative to that body.
In terms of whether you can "cruise" at escape velocity, I don't think so. Going at escape velocity for as much of the journey as possible would require a huge propulsion at the start, with a very high initial speed and use of fuel. I suggest cruising would actually be when you spend most of the journey below escape velocity by applying propulsion more steadily. The maximum velocity experienced in the company would be lower (comfort) and less fuel would be used.
The other downside of always being at escape velocity, unless the destination lies at a distance from the body where there's still a relatively non-trivial gravitational pull left, there's a good chance you'll die before you get there.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity
[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/cruisin...
What he said was that they are cruising...like super fast, but he wanted to make it a bit funkier.
I gave them a try and for my first purchase I received BTC at a significantly higher rate than they quoted and confirmed. To make things worse, I still have no reply on the support ticket 10 days later. Not exactly what I'd expect from a company handling significant amounts of money in a market that's struggling to gain recognition and trust.
We're trying very hard to scale our support team. We've gone from 1 to 12 support in a matter of months, and we are hiring more support staff, and it is still difficult to keep up. We are responding, but it is almost impossible to grow fast enough. That said, 10 days sounds way too long. If you send your coinbase email address to me at craig(at)coinbase, I'll get your ticket prioritized.
Also, I can't find any way to open support tickets any more. FYI.
I really wanted to like you guys, and I field a lot of questions about how to buy these days.
Is there really no faster way for coinbase to receive a payment? This doesn't seem practical, or rather it seems a bit too practical for a company that wanted to set up a one-way "pump" to profit by alternatively: immediately completing, or stretching out, transactions based on which action pulls value directly out of the customer's pocket.
EDIT: actually it would be nice if you responded to some of the many seemingly-reasonable customer complaints on this page.
It seems e.g. PayPal, Amazon, Coinstar, and Bitstamp have negotiated this particular obstacle somehow.
That being said, I personally think coinbase should burn some of that VC fuel to bring that 4 days down. They will lose money to do it but they'll gain customers like you who aren't used to a 4 day settlement period.
However, their customer service could definitely be improved. It's been over 9 days since I sent a request with no response and my transactions keep getting denied.
pretty crappy for the 2nd most interesting startup of 2013 according to time magazine.
Also, they're doing something called instant pay, which could help normalize expectations of what happens when you buy BTC. I wonder how that works with credit card charge back problems?
Finally, your API documentation is out of date and the examples don't accurately reflect the data that Coinbase sends in response.
Would you be interested in a remote (east coast) Rails engineer w/ 8 years experience?
This happens at a time when Bitstamp is several times bigger than Coinbase, also growing fast, and is covering both EU and US. Yet, because of this sort of funding (and probably more later), there will probably be yet again a US company dominating the scene.
In a post-Snowden relevations time, I'm not very eager to continue using US services, but the environment seems to be so harsh for non-US companies that want to be global companies, and they basically have to grow themselves into global companies only through bootstrapping (the vast majority of them, I'm sure there are a few exceptions).
(note: no value judgment here, I really don't know and I wonder)
Most of the major VCs do invest internationally in larger rounds. For example in the last year Greylock invested in Wrapp (SWE), Sequoia invested in 6Wunderkinder (DEU) and Skyscanner (GBR), BVP in NewVoiceMedia (GBR), USV in Hailo (GBR) and FundingCircle (GBR), IA & Valar in TransferWise (EST/GBR), etc.
The Valley VCs and investors were dismissive and incredulous that a Canadian company could achieve the success we had, and that we could find people "good enough" to make systems able to handle the kind of traffic we were running. They genuinely couldn't believe we'd done it outside of California.
New York, however, was much more interested and receptive, and ended up being the best source for our future funding.
This whole business is less about numbers and reality and more about feelings and who you know than anyone wants to admit.
"I'm sorry, but the talent shortage is a real thing... we have a really difficult time filling our open positions."
Glad to hear you've solved the problem so fast!
Also, revising the core of Bitcoin in any significant way will be prove at least as hard as replacing IPv4 with IPv6.
I've been considering buying a Litecoin or two just for the fun of it. I have greater faith in Bitcoin for sure, but unless a technical flaw destroys it, I don't see exactly why Litecoin should disappear.
Not enough money in the world to support too many networks of the necessary size.
You're talking as if multiple new currencies are not possible when it clear that they are. People who use currencies don't care about the market, they care that products are priced in that currency and are relatively stable.
The market will eventually level out as usage grows, anything new is going to be volatile but there's clearly room for more than one player as long as they're not identical and offer different value propositions then they'll be taken up if only to hedge against the weaknesses of their competitors.
Bitcoin has flaws, it's terrible wasteful of energy as if proof of work were the only possible solution to creating coins. Other coins offer different less wasteful ways of minting new coins, that's going to have a market regardless of bitcoin's success.
Note: SHA-256 and scrypt are the building blocks of most cryptocurrencies. SHA-256 is to UDP as scrypt is to TCP? Dunno.
...except that bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not the exclusive currency of anyone, and never will be.
Bitcoin doesn't affect economies.
No currency exists in a vacuum, this is a meaningless point.
> It's not the exclusive currency of anyone, and never will be.
You don't and can't know that.
> Bitcoin doesn't affect economies.
It will if it gets mass adoption, so again an irrelevant point since we're talking about its future, not its present.
This is because if only people with specialized hardware could mine, the network could be more vulnerable to 51% attack from a well-funded team, versus when every person with a graphics card can mine.
See https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoi...
Side note, check out namecoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin. It's based on SHA-256.
scrypt uses the SHA-256 algorithm for hashing the blocks, but the caveat is that it also uses a high number of read/writes to RAM. In fact, there is very nearly parity to the number of compute cycles to read/writes cycles. Here's the paper on it: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf.
In order to build an ASIC miner for Litecoin, one would have to build a circuit that had a massive number of CPUs encrusted with a fairly massive amount of fast RAM. As this more or less describes a video card, whoever designs an ASIC for Litecoin will have a nice challenge in front of them.
Edit: Working URLs
Selling shovels during the gold rush is not something much safer than drilling for gold itself. It is safer, but not a 100% certain business.
I see a parallel with Bitcoin and the financial system to Uber & Lyft with traditional taxi/limo services. In Seattle, both Uber & Lyft are being hassled by the city since they don't fall under the regulations that apply to taxis and limousines. And truth be told, I think that Uber & Lyft are going to see the regulatory matters eventually impact their operation, rather than going away.
And that's just working at a local level. Payment systems on a worldwide scale? Seems commensurately high-risk, high-reward at present, where the "high" measurement is significant.
Technically it's not. FinCEN regulates money services businesses and they have decided that people/companies who exchange virtual currencies for USD are in the money services business.
It might sound like nitpicking but it's an important distinction.
That's shocking (if true).
Recording trades at a price that's different from what the user saw on their screen when they clicked to commit to the trade is pretty fundamental fuck-up. It's a "Drop EVERYTHING! We need to fix this NOW!" kind of problem. There's a good chance that someone's head would roll if it happened in an investment banking/capital markets-type environment.
I know for certain that if it was happening with a bank's online payments service (the sort of thing where you can send EUR from your USD bank account), the service would simply be switched off until the problem was fixed. You'd have to get the legal department involved to notify the regulator and assess the company's liability. You'd have to go through the logs to find every single instance of it ever happening and write to each and every customer who was disadvantaged to inform them, apologise and reimburse them. And there'd be a significant fall-out, with very senior people asking "How the fuck could this happen?!"
I get the impression that some Bitcoin startups have a lot of growing up to do.
Things can fork as much as it wants: Any alt-coin that becomes successful will attract people trying build businesses around it.
If you want to prevent people from making money on it, find a means for people to achieve their goals without exchanging anything that can be converted into money. Good luck trying to do that without also making it pointless and/or unusable.
Happy that Bitstamp isn't US owned but not sure for how long. It's basically a repeat of what happened with the Internet. No one is stopping other regions from taking their own slice of the pie. It just appears that Americans are quicker on the innovation front and seem to understand where future value may lie and thus take appropriate risks.
The two biggest Bitcoin exchanges by far, outside China, are Mt Gox ( Japan ) and Bitstamp ( Slovenia ).
Coinbase is a little later to the game...
I would strongly suggest that Coinbase do an endorsement deal with William Devane and start buying ad spots on FOX News. The script is simple. William rides up on a horse and tells viewers:
I just feel so much more secure knowing that I own Bitcoin. And you can't print Bitcoin. Don't you just love the feel of Bitcoin?
I buy my Bitcoin from Coinbase, because I trust them. No gimmicks. Coinbase will beat any price of any Bitcoin and at any time. Just call em. And Coinbase transfers my Bitcoin in 10 days or less, faster than anyone else. So protect yourself from the problems of the world. Invest in volatility with Coinbase.
With such a compelling commercial[1], there's no reason we couldn't see BTC $1 million.
Paper wallets can get lost or stolen, A lot of online wallets get hacked, and DIY encryption doesn't seem like a great way to go either, especially for grandma.
I'd happily pay a fee to coinbase in exchange for some kind of insurance against them being hacked.
Launching soon: http://www.codeforbitcoins.com/
It is a smart way for investors to start gathering Bitcoin.
I do however think a large part of this would go towards Coinbase improving its bitcoin stash. They've been running out of stock every single week.
For sellers it is awesome and I know how bad PayPal is for sellers so I understand that.
But as a buyer if I don't care about being anonymous why would I spend a currency that is deflating and has no safeguards or way to charge back when I could just use fiat, have safety and feel better knowing the money I just spent won't be worth 10% more tomorrow.
Though I'm wondering why Bitcoin adoption in the porn industry still seems to be so slow. Usually they're the first to jump on new technology.
Also the websites that provide the type of content you're referring to like to gauge people with expensive subscription costs and I'm not sure how you can set up a subscription service with bitcoin.
Particularly when they conveniently decide to suspend the ability to immediately xfer payment out of a verified bank account, leaving you with a 3-5 day electronic check or signing up for "bill me later" as your only options for making a payment when your balance is 0. I'm sure it's all about fraud detection, and nothing to do with selling more people on "bill me later".
"has no safeguards or way to charge back when I could just use fiat, have safety and feel better knowing the money I just spent won't be worth 10% more tomorrow."
Indeed. This is what keeps me out of cryptocurrency. In spite of how crappy paypal is (or can be) for buyers.
PayPal has explicit policies against buying virtual currencies and they will cancel your payment if it's brought to their attention, screwing the seller out of their Bitcoin. Similarly, credit card transactions will be reversed if later found to be fraudulent, and there's no way for the seller to be completely sure your card isn't stolen. So the status quo is that nobody sell Bitcoin for credit, and if anyone were to start they would be a lightning rod for CC thieves, since Bitcoin is by far the best thing to buy with stolen credit if you have the option.
Coinbase (-1%) -> Gyft (+4%) -> Amazon/BurgerKing/Sears/GAP/Groupon
All transactions have a ~3% credit card tax (even if you pay with cash). With Bitcoin, you can avoid this tax and get the discount.
Try sending money to a family member in Africa, then understand why PayPal and credit card are bad.
If you have qualms with bitcoins (the unit), then hold them for less than a minute and don't expose yourself to the exchange risk as you use the Bitcoin payment network to transfer value.
Finally, Bitcoin is FAR FAR from anonymous, it is as public as it could possibly be (everybody everywhere has an index of every transaction!!).
Thank you for your comments, I hope mine helped.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/12-days-of-bitcoin-what-do-yo...
Completely intuitive - I know.