Wyoming has something like 0.2% of the US population. I wonder if the number of Wyoming-based active accounts at Coinbase even reaches into the triple digits.
Because of recent regulatory changes, I'm thinking that as new ventures find it harder to take advantage of the double Irish Dutch sandwich arrangement, I may incorporate several project interests there. I'm far from the only one.
That said, MT businesses are hard enough in the US. Exotic ones like Coinbase would be even worse (harder).
Not really. If the purpose is draw community intention, promote a feeling of regulatory barriers as a problem, and create pressure against regulation elsewhere, they don't need either customers in WY or any actual WY government interpretation to make it worthwhile to issue a press release.
Well, unless people actually dig into the supporting facts, in which case it might seem kind of silly if there wasn't anything underneath it.
Coinbase themselves say https://www.coinbase.com/about over 2 million users.
Or take coinbase's number directly from https://www.coinbase.com/about, which says 2,200,000 users. Maybe perhaps at least 1% are active accounts?
Given the communities willingness to artificially inflate[1] any metric they can find. I have no faith those numbers are anywhere near real. When they release MAU figures I'll be impressed.
[1] reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/traffic check out the new user subscriptions chart for an idea of what happens when someone shuts off/turns down their bot(It's less easy to see now but new subscriptions were constantly around 250-300 and then they dropped to ~100 overnight)
AFAIK Coinbase hasn't been caught faking numbers like Bitpay so as far as I'm concerned the numbers are real but useless as a metric.
If it was showing anywhere near as good of numbers as their wallet or user counts you can bet it would be released tomorrow.
For a company that accidentally released something similar look at Bitpay which had staff bragging for the first half of last year about how they were doing $1m a day in processing only to release their 2014 EOY figures showing an average which was less than half of that.
If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.
Now it's recognized as basically the only useful metric for sites like this. GPlus, Instagram, Whatsapp, Tinder, Snapchat, and Twitter(well 4 years but close enough) all release MAU within that 3 year from launch timeframe.
This is why you look stupid to reject exchanges' claim of growth. Yes we know MAU is less than number_of_wallets. It's mathematical. But still, it's silly for you to reject their claims of growth as you have no basis for it. Not releasing MAU doesn't mean you are not growing, as Twitter demonstrated.
Many people did reject Twitters claims of growth and they were largely proven right when Twitter started releasing MAU.
I can use any other example to prove that not releasing MAU doesn't mean something needs to be hidden. I quoted Gmail earlier because this is a good case of a growing product whose MAU needed to be kept secret due to competitive reasons.
Why did Gmails MAU need to be kept secret?
As an aside growth at Coinbase in user accounts IS slowing quite dramatically. 350K per month for 2013, 100k per month for 2014, 50K per month for 2014.
No I am saying the exact opposite: figures where great, but they withheld MAU due to competitive reasons or business sensitivity.
> 350K per month for 2013, 100k per month for 2014, 50K per month for 2014
Ridiculous, your figures are all wrong. Growth is the same as in 2013. Here are the correct ones:
- 65k/month in 2013
- 90k/month in 2014
- 65k/month for the last 6 months (december 2014 to june 2015)
Unlike you I have sources to back it up: 30k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20130113061404/https://coinbase...., 834k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20140122052815/https://coinbase.... (note that at the time they changed the name of this metric from "users" to "consumer wallets"), 1800k user accounts as of https://web.archive.org/web/20141201063703/https://www.coinb... (at this point they split the metric, there are slightly more wallets than users), 2200k user accounts as of today (https://www.coinbase.com/about)
If you knew anything about Bitcoin, you would know there are always truckloads of people signing up on exchanges whenever the price is very high. It was above $500 per coin for the first half of 2014 so this pushed user account creation to 90k/month overall for the year. Now we are back to 65k/month which has been quite constant since 2013 with the exception of the bubble craze.
The claim that there are uncounted millions of users hiding out on exchanges only doesn't map up well with the reality of the usage in the ecosystem either and is in my mind a weak excuse for weak growth numbers.
As of today (as of block 350,000) there are 102 addresses with 10,000 BTC up to a few 100,000 BTC in each of them. They represent 2.8 million BTC! Most of these addresses belong to exchanges or online wallets and contain their customer's funds, because no one owns that many bitcoins. So these 102 addresses most certainly represent the 2 or 3 million bitcoin users worldwide that exchanges and online wallets claim they have: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-future-consequences-of-the...
Your logic is basically some addresses have lots of coins therefore wallets have lots of users. There really is no arguing against that.
You are sarcastic, but it really is the case. Some of these addresses were proven to belong to exchanges, for example these 240,000 BTC belonged to Bitstamp: https://blockchain.info/address/12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47Jist...
So of course this single address at the time represented hundreds of thousands of Bitstamp users. Ditto for the other 10,000+ BTC addresses that belong to other exchanges.
For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.
As for Bitstamp remember that they covered a 19000 coin loss with no problem. There are a lot of coins in big wallets but there are a lot more individual entities holding large numbers of coins as well that you are completely discounting. Between the major exchanges own holdings, lucky early adopters(I've heard estimates of Ver having a few hundred thousand coins, Winkeltwins have >100,000), gambling sites which seem to be extremely profitable in the Bitcoin world, etc,etc. There are a lot of entities with lots of coins. So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.
Doesn't matter. This one addresses alone represents hundreds of thousands of customers of Bitstamp that you are completely ignoring in your math in your previous posts. I am just pointing out to you that AT LEAST some of these big addresses are bound to represent other exchanges/online wallets.
> So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.
It is simplistic for you too to assume that these 2.8 million BTC are all owned by a few individuals.
If you want my estimate, since we don't have much data to rely on, I think that roughly 30-70% of this 2.8 million BTC is owned by individuals and the other 70-30% represents exchange/online wallet customer funds. It's realistic to think that even the smaller portion (30%) of 2.8 million BTC could still represent at least 1 million users. And the ~2 million addresses with smaller funds could represent another ~1 million users (as you yourself estimated, well you said 0.75 million which is close enough). So that's ~2 million users total.
However ForHackernews's idea that Coinbase barely has 4-digit active users is dubious and likely false.