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Comment by vanzard | Hacker News Reader

They don't release their MAU numbers not because they want to hide things, but because it really is a sensitive business metric.

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Which they want to hide.

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.

It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.

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.

MAU was rarely used back then so I wouldn't expect to find it.

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.

So if Twitter took 4 years to release MAU, would you have accused them for 4 years that they have "something to hide"? Now you get my point. It's sensitive. Sometimes you wait years before feeling comfortable releasing this number.

Yes actually and I wouldn't be alone. Pretty much everyone was claiming Twitter was hiding numbers during that time to cover for the fact that they had mostly inactive accounts.

Yet Twitter experienced phenomenal growth, going from zero to tens of millions of MAU in their first 4 years, proving your logic wrong (paraphrasing you, you said "if growth was so great surely a company would release MAU"). So if you apply the same criticism you make against Coinbase to Twitter, you would have said in these first 4 years "Twitter's metric are all vanity metrics" and you would have rejected Twitter's claims of growth. Well you would have been misguided, as we now know for certain Twitter WAS growing during these first 4 years.

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.

The thing is while they were refusing to release the data there were strong indications that those numbers were very weak. Seriously go read up about it.

Many people did reject Twitters claims of growth and they were largely proven right when Twitter started releasing MAU.

You call growing from zero to tens of millions of MAU in 4 years "very weak"?! Ridiculous. You are wrong, nobody seriously outright rejected Twitter was growing. The worst critics said was "Twitter is not growing as fast as they claim, but they ARE growing" or "growth has slowed down, but there are still growing".

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.

So what you're saying is that Twitter withheld their MAU because the figures were poor?

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.

> So what you're saying is that Twitter withheld their MAU because the figures were poor?

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.

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