21.co, now named Earn.com raised 100M dollars, but the rumor is A16Z used that money to directly buy BTC for their VC fund without making too much noise.<p>Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started.<p>Anyone else hear about this rumor?
I signed up for earn.com with the expectation that anyone wanting to message me would have to pay first. Then they sent me spam from ICOs without paying me. Worse than useless. Their previous hardware mining ASIC product was also poorly thought out and ultimately a colossal waste of money.<p>I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.
I been following 21.co since the early days, when they pivoted into Earn.com I lost trust in the whole company. Then they started spamming me about someone trying to pay me to read some message, which I never did lol.
Honestly this has been one of the shadiest investment of the a16z group, to my knowledge, as a "spectator". Not sure exactly how they went from 21.co's mission to Coinbase, I must be living in a dream-world.
This is too bad. I remember learning about 21.co (later earn.com) and being excited about the idea of using a pricing mechanism to eliminate spam and increase the quality of my inbox. This core idea is a big part of what I'm working on right now [1].<p>One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fizbuz.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.fizbuz.com</a>
I thought earn.com (formerly 21.co) was a clever idea and I signed up. Once or twice a quarter I would get an item incoming and I'd usually read and/or fill out a survey.<p>Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).
At first they were 21.co and they invited developers, startup CEOS and investors under the premise of much larger per-response rewards ($100 for investors, $20 for CEOs, etc). Since then, they've been sending mostly $1-$2 spam from Tokens and ICOs. The payment is in Bitcoin, so cashing out also takes a big chunk of the earnings. Coinbase sounds like a nice landing spot for a team that likely dreamt bigger than that.
Here is Balaji's own writeup of the company's trajectory: <a href="https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@balajis/the-turnaround-2d145589d814</a>
> Over the last several years, the primary way most people have obtained cryptocurrency is through buying it, with many of these transactions facilitated by Coinbase. With this acquisition, we allow users to also earn crypto by doing things they already know how to do — like replying to emails and filling out surveys.<p>Ick. Who'd have thought the future of technology would look like shitty direct marketing scams?
I get spammed by ICO offers every day almost from these people. Stopped logging in to claim my dollars since it is too much hassle to complete that captcha every time. Endless pictures of road signs and busses and roads...
Just curious about Earn and the use of Bitcoin (questions are not related to Coinbase nor the announcement):<p>What's the downside of just using fiat money? Why need to use Bitcoin (or any crypto)?
I signed up for this platform early on but never felt like it was anything more than a convoluted engine for getting me to transact with spurious ICOs.
Earn.com has become a glorified airdrop platform, but even so they've got a good team there that are good additions to Coinbase. Maybe the most expensive acqui-hire?<p>Either way it's a huge nod towards tokenized attention economy projects by one of the biggest players in the space.
The coolest part about Earn.com is you could send a message for $100 to VCs like Marc Andreessen, when I finally finish my app I will be using Earn.com to find testers that have blogs that can spread the word
Interesting how there is no keywords for 'security' and 'privacy'. Seems like a good acquisition to implement tracking of people's financial activity.
As someone with an formal education in Art despite a background in Tech, I'm growing more and more disillusioned with currencies beyond actual Legal Tender... I almost agree with the 1792 Mint Act's attachment of a death sentence to the devaluing of our coins (silver and gold in particular). Money is at best Artwork and even then it's only by devaluing it that it gets passed around like it's nothing. What is Bitcoin's value other than a secure means of Bank transfer again? It just seems like a means of reinforcing what from a religious context would be called Simony. Show me the Money.
So I'm copying and pasting part of someone's comment I saw on mobile - which has since been flagged and removed for including their referral URL - because I wanted to reply to it.<p>They said:
"I've earned around 0.0060 BTC so far (~$50), mostly through airdrop offers -- without taking into account the airdropped crypto itself."<p>What I wanted to reply was, no, you earned ~$50 if you sold it off immediately, however otherwise you earned "~$50" MINUS whatever "profit" earlier adopters earned, the wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted toward the earlier adopters; e.g. that could be $50 minus $30 because you're paying for/legitimizing/realizing/covering the difference of their purchase price and their sale price. They know of course they can't dump it, however they don't care if the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme takes 10-20+ years to allow them to realize $100s of billions, or even potentially trillions of dollars, worth of "profit."