Coinbase is exploring the addition of new currencies

Let&#x27;s call a spade a spade.<p>This market is a bust, and there&#x27;s no value-driven economic model to justify cryptos collectively being worth $50B-$100B.<p>With any startup, there is an expected future value of the company discounted back to the present. It then just becomes a risk-weighted probability question of whether that startup will achieve that expected future value in the expected timeframe.<p>Conversely, the valuations of the crypto market are driven mostly by momentum and prayers. It&#x27;s ultimately a case study of what happens when you mix unsophisticated investors, no regulation, frictionless market entry, memes as an investment philosophy (&quot;HODL&quot;) and the psychological highs of winning a lot of money. It&#x27;s gambling, not investing.<p>In terms of Coinbase - sure, they&#x27;re selling pickaxes during a gold rush, but gold rushes end and the pickaxe salesmen go out of business too.

“Coinbase Abandons Cautious Approach” seems a bit hyperbolic as a title. In fact, it sounds like they&#x27;re still being cautious. They aren&#x27;t saying they will list a ton of new “currencies”, they just listed a number they might want to explore, and they are going to take their time deciding which are reasonable:<p>&gt; Coinbase recently revamped its policy on new token listings. [… Coinbase] now goes public with its intention to “explore” the potential to list new assets in order to lower the impact of a listing. It also doesn’t guarantee which, if any, will make it through and be listed.<p>&gt; “Adding new assets requires significant exploratory work from both a technical and compliance standpoint, and we cannot guarantee that all the assets we are evaluating will ultimately be listed for trading,” the company said.

If you ever want a fun simple math problem. Calculate how much hashing power you need to accumulate in order to 51% attack some of the lesser quality cryptocurrencies. It is very feasible for the right actor.

Many coin projects hope for a Coinbase listing as a way to boost exchange rate. Broader markets mean more liquidity, which in turn means more investor interest.<p>I&#x27;d like to offer a counterpoint: that Coinbase listing is likely to kill the tokens that get listed.<p>Shitcoin speculators are attracted to volatility, not technical merit. The wilder the swings, the more engaged they become. By adding liqudiity to a token, Coinbase dampens volatility. Projects must then compete on technical merit, which means most will fade away as new tokens not listed on Coinbase emerge.<p>Second, shitcoin speculators trade with the understanding that they can evade taxes by trading on unregulated exchanges. By muscling out competitors, Coinbase will drive middle tier exchanges out of business. Given its strict guidelines around AML&#x2F;KYC, Coinbase will make it very difficult for speculators to conceal their tax liabilities. This in turn will drive out most speculators who will see little advantage of cryptocurrency over traditional forex or penny stocks.<p>Bottom line, this move will not increase demand for trading more mature tokens, but dry it up. Speculation will instead take place on thinly traded, unregulated exchanges.

Crypto may have its usage but the coins themselves aren’t worth very much and the market does not value them very much. Why? Only maybe 3% of crypto buyers understand the technology, understand the boom&#x2F;bust cycles, and essentially understand what exactly it is they are buying. The other 97% are irrational actors. They are common people who hopped onto the craze after the wild media frenzy, heard from their colleagues about a magic coin that exponentially increases in value, poor and lower middle class from other countries who really don’t understand it, and the tech pseudo crypto literate community who repeat the similar phrases: the technology is legit, but some coins are overvalued, alt coins are useless but etherum and btc are useful, crypto is like the dot com bubble and a few coins will survive and turn into the next tech behemoths. I belong to this latter group though my ego might think otherwise.<p>In my eyes the valuation is due to the volatility from the 97% of irrational actors, many who pump and dump, and the big players who can do sketch actions with little oversight. This is not an investment class I feel confident in purchasing if it’s almost completely irrational. I am at the mercy of others and chaos and long term these factors will likely converge to a significant loss for me. The one hope being that there comes to be significant value unknown to us now but comes in the future.

Maybe previously they could survive off BTC alone, and it benefited them to focus on the healthiest currency, but now BTC isn&#x27;t doing too hot, so they feel the need to cast a wider net so they can get a head-start on the next craze, should it come?

The recent market crash is partly the exchanges’ fault. Listing every possible coin out there exposes people to unfinished and shady products. Just looking at that list things like Storj and Tezos, or even Eos and Cardano are very questionable choices.<p>No one seems to take a stance against this garbage. While Coinbase is currently more selective, with this type of move they’d probably join the rest of the pack.<p>Also I’m not sure why they don’t include Nano in that list, which is one of the few cryptocurrencies that can actually be used as a currency.

I wonder, how low does crypto need to fall before coinbase becomes non-viable?

they&#x27;re doing so so that their same investors who have investments in these garbage tokens, can off load them - and leave retail people holding those bags full of non-sense.<p>Ethereum and 1000 other coins have simply created too much hype first and then bad reputation for the original cryptocurrency i.e. Bitcoin. There are people who think Ethereum is Bitcoin 2.0 but they don&#x27;t understand that Bitcoin is built with the strongest fundamentals.<p>First of before making guesses, if you really want to know about this industry - try the applications, try to play with it (even if you put $10) - run full nodes, try wallets, try sending transactions. Trust me it is fun and you understand the basics then.<p>Secondly, separate out the financial markets side from the technology and it&#x27;s potential itself. Even gold use-case initiated at some point in history. Not everyone started thinking of gold as store of value, so initially it price must have fluctuated quite a bit as well.<p>Third, try to understand how Bitcoin actually works - what is proof of work and why it is such an innovative idea to implement a decentralized network. I mean this is a very large network with almost 100% uptime, close to 10 years of history, storing Billions of dollars of worth of value and that people have moved 100s of millions of dollars worth Bitcoin with very little tx cost and time. I mean this alone requires a lot of credit as technology - no one needs an affirmation from someone like Jamie Dimon to know it is valuable or not - he doesn&#x27;t know, no one does at this point. Statistically speaking, most experiments fail so it is a risk-averse position for someone in that position to say it will fail IMO. But opinions don&#x27;t matter. Rome was not built in a day. Even the central banks and modern banks were not built in a day. Whatever these cryptocurrencies can replace or improve, let them take their due course or even if they fail. People are too much stuck on the financial market side of it, it is important to bootstrap it and take it mainstream but what happened in 2017 was a unsustainable and hack-ish way of bringing hype to this industry.<p>Please read if you&#x27;re really interested : book:Bitcoin standard, please read works of Nick Szabo, read upon origins of digital money and cypherpunks behind Bitcoin

The crypto market is going bust. Quick! Toss in everything you can!

They seem to be in a rush to make as much commission as possible before the bust.

Bitcoin is losing its luster isn’t it? They’re thinking it’s time to diversify.

Strange timing. Most of the cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin look terrible right now. Why get into the lower-tier ones?

Many comments here about investing in crypto is same as gambling. So what if it is? (and it is in my opinion). I buy a little bit of crypto each month and are just leaving them for a couple of years to see what happens. Why? Because the odds in the crypto lottery is better than any other lottery that I know of.

That&#x27;s quite the url TechCrunch chose for the story.

Is this Coinbase throwing a Hail Mary on the way down?<p>What happens to the wallets if they go under? Is it hard to disentangle the coins?

More emotionally charged anti-crypto commentary that will not age well. If you&#x27;ve ever spent time as a quant, you&#x27;d know everything about crypto is about it being a trading vehicle with global public market exposure. Capital is raised from the capital markets and if it swells, ride it.

How come they don&#x27;t list Monero? They added a bunch of less popular coins, I wonder what&#x27;s going on with that.

In an ideal world, initiatives like this one would be properly regulated to protect consumers from exploitation.<p>I don&#x27;t know if Coinbase is to blame or not; certainly, lots of people will lose money in the crypto game. They might deserve it (because of greed!), but still...

Seems odd they didn&#x27;t include Dash

seems like with the collapse of crypto prices they see no room for growth in the near future except to open the flood gates to any coin with even a bit of value. It seems kind of desperate, but is there a downside in this for them? Apart from their own infrastructure costs to implement.

This is an agony. An attempt to support falling volume.

Google, Microsoft, and AWS together have enough spare compute to 51% even BitCoin.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

And yet they don&#x27;t support Bitcoin SV, the only coin that&#x27;s still Bitcoin (the idea) at this point, and gives their company its name. How ironic.