Coinbase Blog

> Okay please share what made it click to you as a "fundamental global revolution"

There's a lot going on right now in the decentralised finance space. A couple of things that interest me:

1. Payments. Stable coins (backed by collaterals) like DAI (by MakerDAO), USDC (by CENTRE aka Coinbase, CirclePay et al), Libra (by Facebook, Shopify, Uber et al) have a potential to replace the current payments system and those rent-seeking middle-men. In DAI's case, the currency is truly autonomous and decentralised, so there's a good chance it ends up uncensorable and unregulatable. USDC and Libra offer a great way for folks not in high inflation countries with weak currencies to lock up cash-in-hand in USD. Libra is poised to see a broad adoption once Facebook makes it common place on Instagram and WhatsApp, where most of the commerce is moving to. It remains to be seen how Stellar ends up doing in response to Libra.

2. Banking. Banks, like eco, dharma, and onjuno, built on top of Ethereum altcoins can offer higher interest rates than traditional banks.

Other things I'm excited about and looking forward to:

1. Anonymous assets. Monero enables truly anonymous transactions. It isn't a stable coin, so that's a bummer. MobileCoin, which I believe is built on Stellar, is private but I don't think its anonymous or stable.

2. Web3. Storage (FileCoin, Sia), Compute (Golem, ElastOS), Network (Orchid, Mysterium), Content (IPFS)... may yet emerge as a credible distributed alternative to the…

From the linked article on Coinbase's compensation ( https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-is-rethinking-its-approach-to-compensation-9aaf7d5d638e ):

> Because our standard offers are world-class, we are officially eliminating negotiations on salary and equity from our recruiting process.

> We are OK if we lose some candidates due to this decision — the best candidates for Coinbase are those who are looking for a highly competitive package and are ready to let their contributions speak for themselves.

I'm sorry but that's a self-contradiction (even oxymoron). "highly competitive package" these days is after negotiation, period. If you're 100% firm on the offer when asked, then people seeking "highly competitive package" (after balancing all other factors of course) can and will simply walk.

As for the "let their contributions speak for themselves": For (especially early stage) startups, any promise to raise the compensation later *cannot be trusted*, period. It's not written on your offer (except for maybe "guaranteed/target bonus"), and the management could always come up with "budgets" --- basically handing out far less than what would make up for the initial compensation deficit, maybe except for a few people in the "inner circle". Having been both in and out of the "inner circle" myself, this difference can be significant over time. Also as the startup goes through funding rounds, company policy will change and the people who "promised" you will inevitably leave,…

I think it would be worth understanding how Bitcoin works first. It's designed to be more robust. It doesn't change as often (some criticize it due to that), however, it could also be seen as a strength. You could read the Bitcoin white paper [1]. If you wanted to learn more about programming Bitcoin, you could also check out Mastering Bitcoin 2nd Edition - Programming the Open Blockchain by Andreas M. Antonopoulos [2].

Ethereum was created after Bitcoin. It was designed to be more of an open programming platform. It was designed to be Turing Complete and enabled the use of "smart contracts". The DeFi space runs on smart contracts and Ethereum kicked off DeFi. This is the Ethereum white paper [3]. Mastering Ethereum by Andreas M. Antonopoulos & Gavin Wood is another book you could check out [4].

Here are a couple of introductions to DeFi, as well [5][6].

The hack that everyone is discussing here was on Poly Network, which a layer 2 solution for Ethereum [7]. Layer 2 solutions were created due to lower the high gas fees on Ethereum, as well as increase transaction throughput. Ethereum itself is also working on moving to Ethereum 2.0 which would help address the issues that layer 2 solutions are trying to solve [7].

Edit: Poly Network actually appears to be more of a bridge between different networks (Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain) [9], so it's worth noting that this wasn't a direct hack on Polygon, which is a layer 2 solution for Ethereum.

[1]…

While this is a fairly balanced description of Bitcoin Cash, there are a few glaring errors that should be addressed. It's about 1000% better than most though. Kudos to the author.

> It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to distinguish itself from Bitcoin

It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to survive as a minority hard fork until it can attract enough hash power to take the network.

> This has lead to nearly 2,000 Forks of the Bitcoin network

Almost all of the 2000 "forks" referenced here are forks of the codebase. Bitcoin Cash and only a few others are forks of both the codebase AND THE BLOCKCHAIN. When the blockchain is forked, the new coin contains the same transaction history and coin distribution up until the fork point.

> However, the person most directly connected to the currency today is Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin adopter and investor.

This could not be further from the truth. When the censorship started in r/bitcoin, multiple teams started working simultaneously on separate clients to fork the network. The team that was first out of the gate is said to be affiliated with ASIC manufacturers Bitmain. It took months before Roger Ver even spoke about it. It wasn't until the Segwit2x fork failed on the Bitcoin Core network that Ver actually put his resources behind it. He was even criticized for not supporting it immediately.

> A brief history

The history goes much further back. See the following links

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> Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly.

Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]).

> ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose.

I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention.

Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads.

[0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012afc25d27

Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees."

You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.

Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821

In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.

Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.

The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.