Coinbase Wants to Be Too Big to Fail

&gt;Armstrong belongs to a generation of evangelists who view digital currencies, and the blockchain technology on which they’re based, as tools that will make investing, borrowing, and saving money faster, cheaper, and more egalitarian.<p>My main question about cryptocurrencies has always been the &quot;faster, cheaper&quot; thing. Last I heard it was pretty expensive to do a bitcoin transaction, and slow. The quote thrown around:<p>&gt;The networks that Visa and Mastercard use process, in aggregate, “more than 5,000 transactions per second with capacity to process volumes multiple times that number. Bitcoin in contrast takes 10 minutes to clear and settle a single transaction vs. Ethereum that takes 15 seconds.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;why-bitcoin-wont-displace-visa-or-mastercard-soon-2017-12-15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;why-bitcoin-wont-displace-...</a><p>I wonder what someone as heavily invested as Armstrong would say to that?

Armstrong said the Bitcoin paper came out in 2010, it actually came out in November 2008 and the first implementation of it was in January 2009 [1][2].<p>Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies correlated with the Great Recession so that added fuel to the desire to have a safe currency if a national fiat failed suddenly.<p>&gt; <i>The domain name &quot;bitcoin.org&quot; was registered on 18 August 2008. In November 2008, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list. Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open source code and released it in January 2009. The identity of Nakamoto remains unknown.</i><p>&gt; <i>In January 2009, the bitcoin network was created when Nakamoto mined the first block of the chain, known as the genesis block. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the following text:</i><p>&gt; &gt; <i>The Times 03&#x2F;Jan&#x2F;2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140320135003&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;bitcoin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140320135003&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.o...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bitcoin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bitcoin</a>

I have read nothing but bad things about coinbase: non-existent customer service, poor security against hackers (esp. sms&#x2F;phone hackers), no reimbursement for hack victims, withholding of funds for arbitrary and unfounded reasons, etc.<p>All exchanges have problems, but coverage of coinbase is so negative

I&#x27;m currently looking for a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit against Coinbase. It&#x27;s been over a year, and I still haven&#x27;t received my bitcoin cash, which was previously in a multi-signature account at the time of the split. I had tried to retrieve my bitcoin before the split, but it took several months because of a delay on Coinbase&#x27;s part. Coinbase has failed to act despite sending multiple messages over the past year, and they have recently become completely unresponsive.<p>If anybody is interested in joining the lawsuit, please message me to see if we could join efforts.

Realistically, if any alternative currency starts giving a sovereign currency any real competition inside a sovereign controlled market, it will get shut down more or less immediately.<p>If X% of Americans or [insert nation] are doing their transactions with bitcoin and the Treasury is losing a measurable percentage of income stream it&#x27;s game over. Best case, it gets nationalized and [new currency] will be mandated to be pegged to the sovereign currency and taxed appropriately.<p>The existential political aspect is what these folks seem to not understand.

That&#x27;s funny, I want Coinbase to fail to be too big. Subtle difference.

There&#x27;s nothing too big to fail. Especially something tethered to a space that is so volatile and unpredictable. Remember WorldCom?

You can send money with no fees with zelle instantly and fdic insurance is free. The dollar is going to outlive bitcoin as you have to pay utilities with the dollar and without utilities bitcoin is useless! Bitcoin has become the ultimate heist, just own the exchange and disappear! And con the public to make customers whole? Sorry charlie dodd frank forbids that happening with actual legitimate financial institutions. They will bail in instead! So nothing at all changes! The bank robs you just like bitcoin exchanges do all the time!<p>So then which would you rather have in a depression? The kind no one ever thinks will show up on their watch?

TBTF == too big to exist

Don&#x27;t we all! We all want to grow for the love of capitalism! But when we fail, we want socialism! Save me with public money!<p>I don&#x27;t want to pay insurance! But I want to be saved when I have cancer!<p>Screw the social safety net, we are millionaires! Oh, the market crashes... Can I get some of that tax-payers money please!

<i>&quot;Right now, Coinbase&#x27;s most promising project, say Johnson and others, involves a new class of investments known as security tokens&quot;</i><p>I used to think security tokens were going to be one of the useful things to come out of the crypto asset space, for the reasons in the article, e.g. it does make a lot of sense being able to automate ownership and transactions and so on so easily. But now I&#x27;m not sure - it puts the success of your company&#x2F;asset entirely in the hands of your chosen platform (which might crash and burn) and the wider crypto asset market (which again may have an uncertain future). It would be a bit like deciding to float your company on the Venezuelan stock market and price your stock in Venezualan Bolivar - even if you were one of the successful companies in the world your stock is probably going to do pretty badly. I have a suspicion that its all part of the plan by the small number of people who have accumulated almost all the wealth to draw more people into the scheme to prop up the pyramid a bit longer.