Coinbase $75M round is a game changer | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase $75M round is a game changer

marc.cn

18 pointsca98am796 comments

Which percentage of investments turns out to be good investments, which percentage is essentially sunken money? Drawing conclusions about the success of a technology from a single investment in one company in the field seems pretty unjustified.

That's because what people are looking for isn't proof, it's validation.

And when all you're looking for is validation, even ONE thing can seem super important.

If you believe in BitCoin as a form of currency with legitimate potential, you can turn BitCoin into a long-term investment. As people learn more about how it works, the trading volumes should increase and the volatility should decrease.

A long-term investor should realize gains as the demand for BitCoin gradually goes up and people get less scared. When PayPal first came out, people were afraid of online/digital transactions ("You mean I'm going to give this online company my payment info?"); look where we are now in 2015.

It is worth noting that most people in the world still do not know much about it (or if they do, they are misinformed).

Your judgment is based on the assumption that Bitcoin will not fail which is far from clear. On the other hand really profitable investments are usually also risky. I personally would not even bet $1000 on the success of Bitcoin.

With this investment we're closing in on a half billion invested in bitcoin-related startups. A well over 100-fold increase in 2 years. During the same period the number of transactions per day on the blockchain has... not quite doubled.

The transaction volume increased tenfold from 5 million to 50 million Dollars per day over the last two years. I would love to know how much of that are useful Dollars, i.e. people buying stuff and paying for services, as opposed to speculation, moving coins around for the sake of it or mining coins and selling them to pay the electricity bill.

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