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Coinbase To Go Public With $100 Billion Valuation, No Address
Coinbase is going public in a direct listing. And why wouldn't it?
I'm a simple man (in some ways), so I view the crypto world with trepidation. To the extent I acknowledge its possibilities, it's from a historical, sociological perspective.
Last week, for instance, I spent some time reviewing what, exactly, money really is. The point was to say that while I'm not personally inclined to own any Bitcoin (let alone any other cryptocurrencies), at the most basic level, there's nothing that's any
I would characterize you as “straightforward”, definitely not “simple”.
(Based on reading your posts over the past few years, but not knowing you, personally).
I just took the 10 minutes to read through an Amazon S-1 filing from May 1997 on secinfo.com. I read the risk factors section. Amazing.
Seems any longer that there ends up being one winner in new spaces. Many super smart people have commented on this. Think about the company that ends up being the first to make a dense-enough battery, at the right price, that it is widely adopted by EV manufacturers. Priceless and unassailable into the foreseeable future.
Coinbase may or may not be that winner in the space they are in. But, they are in the race to be that winner.
Incidentally, and not at all related to the topic of this article, there is this statement in the Amazon S-1 re their dividend policy:
The Company has never declared or paid any cash dividends on its capital
stock. The Company currently intends to retain any future earnings of its
business, and therefore does not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the
foreseeable future.
This quote is in order:
A new scientific (cryptocurrency) truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific (cryptocurrency) innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
—?Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
Informally, this is often paraphrased as “Science ( (cryptocurrency)) progresses one funeral at a time”
You’re saying cryptocurrencies are what Max Planck refers to as “scientific truths”, like how the Earth revolves around the Sun and matter is energy.
Putting the word “cryptocurrencies” in the quote of a great physicist doesn’t make Bitcoin and Tether less scammy.
ML,
I’m just implying that younger people who invested in the Ford tech craze, back around 1900 ended up with greater future value, than the generation that was enamored by buggy whips, horse shoes, saddles, spittoons, wagon wheels and a long list of great technologies from that era. There’s also a tsunami of Baby Boom investors that are in love with dividend stocks, low P/E ratios, REITs, shopping malls and cool stuff from the 60’s — but, as with buggy whips, investments progress, one funeral at a time.
That analogy to generational trends wasn’t clear, to me at least, from the quote.
Blockchain as the future way to track gift card (wallet) balances (Bitcoins) is far from being a scientific truth whose mass adoption only depends on the death of the older generations.
I wonder how the tulip traders of the past convinced others of the prospect of even higher prices for the flowers in the future.
Paying 51K to buy a portion of an algorithm located in a server somewhere, tethered to a plug connected to a power grid, confounds me. At the very worst, I will get back 50 cents on my US dollar…..who will reimburse me when my crypto vanishes.
They should have put this at the top of the risks: they’ll sell their stock to baghodlers [intentional misspelling] as soon as they have a chance.
“None of our stockholders are party to any contractual lock-up agreement or other contractual restrictions on transfer. Following our listing, the sales or distribution of substantial amounts of our Class A common stock, or the perception that such sales or distributions might occur, could cause the market price of our Class A common stock to decline.”
2001 Tech bubble crashed because every Tom Dick and Harry dot.com was IPOing and coming to market. Case of supply overwhelming the demand.
So will be the case with all these cryptocurrencies – I lost count as to how many are trying to get a piece of the action….we may be at a tipping point of too much supply and not enough demand for crypto. Not sure if network effect works for bitcoin, if it doesn’t, pick your flavour, its like religion, they are all fundamentally wrong despite their strong beliefs.
What may emerge from the ashes is some version of block chain technology officially sanctioned by the government, accepted as payment by the IRS and supported by banks and financial institutions. But first we need more energy efficient computers to compute the block chain lest we bump into the ESG crowd and they nix it in favor of low carbon natural money like Rai stones.
Banks already keep track of transactions and people’s balances securely. It’s hard to imagine a State would wish to issue a currency whose transfer is hard to trace. The main value added from distributed transaction records is that no one has the full picture; that serves to, sure, prevent the system from going offline due to a local calamity, but also makes enforcement of transaction restrictions impossible.
It’ll just solidify as the mode of wealth transfer of criminals (tax dodgers and organized crime).
This claim has been debunked countless times but, like gold bugs with hyperinflation, it just won’t die.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/why-criminals-cant-hide-behind-bitcoin . That’s in 2016
https://thenextweb.com/news/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-criminals-law-enforcement
Unlike cash, which is completely traceless and anonymous, blockchain technology is pseudo-anonymous and behaves like an infinite, immutable, data ledger that houses every single cryptocurrency transaction ever made — but it also lets law enforcement agents trace and follow the money.
So, lesson clear? If you want to sell drugs or blackmail someone, ask for dollars, the paper based types. Otherwise, you’re uselessly putting yourself at risk.