Coinbase Billionaire Brian Armstrong’s Plan to Make Crypto Safe for All

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/02/19/coinbase-billionaire-brian-armstrongs-plan-to-make-bitcoin-ethereum-xrp-safe-for-all/#6e8cc26345b0

by lxm • 6 years ago

58 56 6 years ago

forbes.com

artsyca2• 6 years ago

As usual it involves making questionable fashion choices

artsyca2• 6 years ago

i.e. the 'hey I'm a billionaire / bond supervillain' look

Seenso2• 6 years ago

The title is misleading. This doesn't sound like it will do anything to help make crypto safe for those people who need protection from government backdoors and key escrow.

kick2• 6 years ago

I question what these people value about cryptocurrency: with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience present in initial pitches and offerings in the space, it seems like it's mostly valueless. Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy for these people, isn't there?

admiral33• 6 years ago

It's a cash grab for many people. On the other hand it feels like a kodak moment. Digital currency just feels like a natural progression for the world. It doesn't have a military backing it though. This makes me think that the most "revolutionary" crypto currency will be tied to a social media where people pressure elections in it's favor... sort of like reddit karma where there is no buying power but there is a lot of social power.

puranjay3• 6 years ago

Maybe this is an American perspective (the American financial system is horribly outdated) but in the developing world, "digital currency" is mostly a solved problem. Your bank account integrates so seamlessly with digital payment systems that creating a separate currency seems entirely superfluous.

Here in India, we have a system called UPI. Connect it to your bank account once and you get a username like 'YourName@OkAxis'. Anyone can send money to this username and it goes straight to your bank account. You can pay establishments - online as well as offline - by simply verifying a one time password on your mobile. It's so seamless and cheap (essentially free) that I can't ever imagine needing a digital currency.

Acrobatic_Road• 6 years ago

with none of the autonomy, anonymity, or resilience

Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous.

Monero and ZCash are anonymous.

Not sure what you mean by resilience.

Surely there's more to it than a cash grab that takes a massive amount of energy

Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies.

kick2• 6 years ago

Bitcoin and Ether are autonomous.

Not when you're using Coinbase.

Monero [is] anonymous.

Sure.

ZCash [is] anonymous.

lol

Proof of work is not inherit to cryptocurrencies.

I didn't claim it was. You completely misinterpreted my comment.

optimiz35• 6 years ago

Corporate fluff article on Forbes.

Should just be renamed Big-Brotherbase, or Banned-for-Life-and-Won't-Tell-You-Whybase. Coinbase is famous for suddenly disabling accounts and refusing to give an explanation. At least a traditional bank will normally explain the circumstances.

Got one of their arbitrary sucks-for-you letters last year. No way would I ever recommend them to anyone.

In my case I'm a mining developer, so I have a huge digital currency profile. Coinbase is horrifically opaque and impossible to deal with if they flag you unlike most other organizations.

E: I'll just lump some more examples of their corporate ineptitude.

1. Recently I asked them for a dump of trades and fees executed on their exchange for audit and record keeping purposes. All they had were records of deposits and withdrawls but none of the actual trades. So no cost-basis data and now a huge accounting headache.

2. When my personal account got locked, we separately had an application out for an institutional account. 4 months go by and suddenly I get emails saying "we're ready to proceed with your institutional account". Excuse me? Told them to fix my personal account first. Never heard back.

oblongx• 6 years ago

What did they do with your crypto, sell it and pay you out?

optimiz35• 6 years ago

Coinbase closed the account; they did allow all funds to be withdrawn.

Fortunately there are tons of digital currency exchanges. Kraken, Gemini, Bittrex are all very viable alternatives that also comply with various regulations in the US.

shrimp_emoji• 6 years ago

Am I having Déjà vu?

Does anyone else remember seeing a thread about Coinbase trying something ambitious/sanctimonious and then comments calling it fluff or handwaving it away, just like this, a year or more ago?

c0nducktr• 6 years ago

Coinbase didn't just start ripping people off within the last year. I ran into the same thing in 2015(ish).

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

Corporate fluff article on Forbes.

Sometimes it's difficult to ascertain whether something in a magazine is a legitimate article or paid advertising. Or maybe it's self-serving enterprise by both sides. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

I always wonder, who decided on this article. Did coinbase call forbes to "commission" an article? Did the writer/forbes call coinbase? Did forbes have an online poll asking their readers for suggestions on an article topic?

gruez• 6 years ago

Did coinbase call forbes to "commission" an article? Did the writer/forbes call coinbase?

Well it's forbes, and based on the url you can tell it's written by one of their "contributors" (aka. glorified blogger).

opportune• 6 years ago

It’s pretty common for people at large companies to co-author or just write articles themselves that they then pass on to be published by magazines and such

manigandham• 6 years ago

Writers covering a sector will build up relationships with industry experts. Usually used for quotes and background, and sometimes they'll do features on specific companies or people.

People can also pass stories to reporters for big news or pitch their own articles, although in this case this looks to be the former.

brian-armstrong• 6 years ago

Yikes, that sounds terrible. Hopefully the US can set legislation for this kind of thing. Having people get locked out of their crypto is no good.

optimiz35• 6 years ago

To be fair, I was able to withdraw my funds - when your account gets closed you get told to withdraw everything immediately and go away.

prostoalex2• 6 years ago

My account was shut down for no apparent reason, but I was allowed to supply a "transfer out" address for my wallet.

csomar• 6 years ago

It's interesting you didn't address his two points:

- Coinbase not having records of your trades (although it's operating from a highly regulated jurisdiction)

- Coinbase not communicating why/how accounts are locked.

Having people get locked out of their crypto is no good.

Funny thing is that crypto (Bitcoin) was made so that people could hold their own monies instead of relying on a third-party.

cachvico• 6 years ago

Hopefully the US can set legislation for this kind of thing.

Surely you can see the irony in that?

logicchains• 6 years ago

This is an example of regulatory capture. Regulations make it hard to start an exchange in the US, and hard for US citizens to use overseas exchanges, so they have no alternative to shitty exchanges with poor service. This is also why they get away with charging such outrageous fees: around 50bps, when non-US exchanges like Binance and Bitmex offer around 5-10bps.

seibelj• 6 years ago

Poloniex (non-US only sadly) only charges 9bps for their most expensive tier. Also has market-maker program for big traders.

ljm• 6 years ago

The sooner that billionaire becomes a greater pejorative, the better.

The whole of society suffers from the accumulation of wealth to these few people.

On that basis, I don’t give a fuck what this person says because they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there. And he does not command respect by having so much money.

This is the aristocracy by a different measure. Back then they used agricultural output. Now it is measured in assets.

allovernow• 6 years ago

they won’t overcome the exploitation that got them there

Do the corporations that evil billionaires own not pay their employees?

You realize that this wealth is just a result of a couple percent of markup per transaction on a massive scale, right?

Yeah, Armstrong may be a scummy person, and his exchanges are trash, but he made his billions by offering a service that no one else did. There was no other way that I'm aware of to easily buy BTC or ETC with cash before coinbase popped up.

It's possible to make a billion honestly.

Ididntdothis• 6 years ago

I really wish people would stop using the title “billionaire”. Is “billionaire” the new aristocracy or priesthood?

huangc10• 6 years ago

What, you never heard of the tres comas club?

CPLX• 6 years ago

Yes

dajohnson892• 6 years ago

Agreed. I don't really see the point in the use of that adjective here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

That success comes from acting like a bank. Coinbase draws in customer funds via bank wires. It stores its assets—numerical keys that unlock coins—in vaults. It boasts of insurance coverage from Lloyd’s of London. It has a security staff of 41, including an Iraq War veteran assessing perimeter risks and a Ph.D. cryptographer doing the same for mathematical assaults.

It is a bank, that instead of storing cash, stores keys. It is centralized. It complies with regulators. It does allow you to withdraw your keys into your own wallet, but a bank also allows you to withdraw your cash to your physical wallet. It walks like a bank, and it quacks like a bank. It is a bank.

meagher• 6 years ago

“It’s like if Google made Gmail for bitcoin,” says Chris Dixon, an Andreessen partner who serves on the Coinbase board. “And that’s literally the way they described it.”

One of the most painful startup analogies I've heard.

pavlov• 6 years ago

Every startup should adopt this formula for their decks.

“Juicero: it’s like if Google made Gmail for juice”

gonehome3• 6 years ago

I've been checking in on cryptocurrencies and blockchain things every couple of years and I tend to come away with a weird mixture of confusion and admiration each time.

Confusion because I don't understand how all of this has such an immense amount of time and capital invested in it when its actual use case for anything is extremely vague (mostly about future potential) and some that have moved away from proof of work (Stellar) seem a lot less safe?

Admiration because all of the different approaches, goals, and designs are really technically interesting (Dai using market incentives to stay pegged to one dollar, Tezos proof of stake and ability to get consensus on its own updates/formal verification, Zcash using zero knowledge proofs to keep transaction history optionally private, etc.)

I can't help shake that while the ability to hold decentralized consensus is neat, most of the current value seems to come entirely from speculation on future token price from people on reddit that have no idea what they're buying. Why do these things have any real value?

I've tried to follow the reasoning of people like Balaji S. Srinivasan from what I can find, but I have a hard time modeling a future where the current value of these things makes sense.

The value of Coinbase in all this makes sense though, if you build reliable infrastructure in a market you should make money - it doesn't matter if the underlying assets are worth anything or not.

xiphias22• 6 years ago

Digital scarcity is why Bitcoin is so valuable (and why other cryptocurrencies not so much).

Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Plan B's article if you honestly want to understand why Bitcoin is so crucial in the current financial climate.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

Thanks - I’ll check them out.

Plan B: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w...

Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

aedron• 6 years ago

Bitcoin has a great use case as internet native money, which can be thrown around programmatically, without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services. Considering how much of a shitshow the payments industry is, I think this is a huge opportunity for bitcoin. Sure there are cases where regular payment methods are preferable, perhaps even most, but that doesn't mean that there is no place for true peer-to-peer permissionless money transfers.

prostoalex2• 6 years ago

without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services

Sounds good in theory until one is faced with a fraudulent vendor, a suddenly empty wallet or a transfer error due to some "fat fingers" mistake. Then people somehow get nostalgic for "how much of a shitshow the payments industry is" and how quickly it acts on chargebacks, scams or unauthorized spending.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

I don’t think it’s use case for this is very good due to its extreme price volatility. Dai - sure, maybe (if you didn’t have to always convert to USD to buy something).

This plus bitcoin’s inability to handle transactions in a timely way makes it kind of useless for this.

From the other commenter I think bitcoin as a store of value could be possible, but it’d have to stabilize in the end which remains to be seen. I’m also not sure scarcity itself guarantees value, but I probably just don’t know enough about this.

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

It's just not super clear to me that there is a huge need for this. Its been ten years and what services have btc integration? AliPay is outrageously more successful despite centralization, which seems to not bother most people.

Further, btc works precisely as well as a payment platform whether the price is $1 or $1,000,000. This makes the discussion of the price of btc suspicious to me.

shred45• 6 years ago

This to me is the real value. I'm not a huge believer in Bitcoin, but try moving > 10k USD between bank accounts (just operating a small business I run into this several times a year) and you will quickly see the appeal. High fees, multi-day settlement times, raised eyebrows. It's just a mess. With cryptocurrencies you can move millions of dollars for less than a dollar in fees and it executes in as quickly as 10 minutes. There is definitely a downside in terms of price volatility, and other cryptocurrencies offer much better settlement times (beyond the network effect, they seem to offer more long term value here than Bitcoin), but having what is essentially gold that can teleport is very appealing. Sadly the ecosystem is not quite to where I would actually operate my business in this manner, but I can definitely see the value.

psychlops• 6 years ago

I feel the same way about the dollar.

The inability to compute exactly how many there are, nor their rate of creation. Their limited use beyond a specified geographic boundary.

The confident speculation based on ever increasing underlying leveraged weakness (showing no sign of slowing) is worrisome.

ASalazarMX• 6 years ago

How kind of him to give us us all be same opportunity to be fleeced.

habosa• 6 years ago

Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account?

I have used Coinbase for lack of alternatives. It's awful. Every time I sign in (a few times a year) there's some new problem with my account. Either they need more ID verification (done it 10x) or they decided my purchases are going to be delayed 3 days or blah blah blah. I just got an email from them today saying my account is suspended if I don't take some action.

This is not the decentralized future crypto people want. It's a half-assed bank that doesn't need its customers.

optimiz35• 6 years ago

Gemini (based in NY), Bittrex (based in WA), and Kraken (based in CA, some US states not supported).

Seenso2• 6 years ago

Is there any other reputable site for a US citizen to buy crypto quickly with a credit card or bank account?

You can buy it here: https://www.axcrypt.net/ and http://www.cryptoexpert.com/.

However there's really no need to buy it anymore, as there are very good open-source implementations, like https://gnupg.org/ and https://www.veracrypt.fr/.

Coinbase Billionaire Brian Armstrong’s Plan to Make Crypto Safe for All

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