Does Coinbase ruin the philosophy of BTC?

Feb 15 15 Comments

You're talking to a server to buy/sell BTC instead of a true p2p.

You're not truly anonymous as Coinbase has to listen to warrants and would give up your identifying info attached to your Public key.

This isn't part of the original crypto currency philosophy. It's just stock trading with extra steps

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TOP 15 Comments
  • Amazon
    piptherip

    Go to company page Amazon

    piptherip
    Calling Coinbase a “BTC company” shows your ignorance to be blunt. It’s an exchange, albeit a publicly traded one. It brings high levels of crypto adoption from the general population.
    Feb 15 2
    • Ok I'm ignorant in calling them that. But they are still middleman making cryptocurrency not truly peer to peer
      Feb 15
    • Amazon
      piptherip

      Go to company page Amazon

      piptherip
      You use Coinbase typically to buy crypto at which point you can transfer it, for example Bitcoin, to your hard wallet like a ledger. There is nothing inherently wrong with that from a peer-to-peer perspective.
      Feb 15
  • UiPath
    weBI82

    Go to company page UiPath

    weBI82
    BTC is utter dogshit for direct p2p transactions, it only supports ~3000 transactions per 10min block generation. Without middlemen it would be useless for most use cases of the general population.
    Feb 15 5
    • @Stripe my understanding of lightning is there is a concept of a channel between two parties which is essentially a signed Bitcoin transaction that has not been submitted to the Blockchain.

      When one party is no longer happy with the situation, the channel is closed by submitting it to the Blockchain.

      The magic is that to send someone money, you don't need a direct channel with them, it just needs to find a path of channels between you and whomever you're paying. Hence lightning.

      I only understand it at the high level though, so if anyone else has corrections to my description feel free to weigh in.
      Feb 15
    • I guess more specifically, to prevent double spend attacks, to open a channel I believe you do lock up some Bitcoin on chain, and the signed channel transaction represents how much of that locked up value belongs to each person.
      Feb 15
  • Google
    a4lyf

    Go to company page Google

    a4lyf
    The more you learn about what the crypto folks claim and what these companies are doing the more dumb all of this sounds
    Feb 15 1
  • I think there will always be a place for centralized exchanges in a decentralized ecosystem.

    They allow for an "on ramp" from fiat to crypto for those who need it.

    They can reduce fees for transactions that are small relative to gas fees. There are L2 solutions or other Blockchain scaling projects that can also help with this.

    It also creates a space between blockchains, when a bridge doesn't exist. For example, trading DOGE for BTC isn't supported by the chains themselves, so they rely on third parties to facilitate those trades.

    There are projects in the crypto space solving cross chain functionality, but it's a work in progress.

    Centralized entities provide value to a decentralized ecosystem by supporting behavior that is unsupported, difficult, or expensive to accomplish within that ecosystem.

    If everyone in the world just bought crypto on Coinbase and only exchanged it exclusively on Coinbase, then yeah, I think that would undermine crypto philosophy.

    However, I think it speaks to the power of crypto that you can use it entirely decentralized when needed, and you can integrate with centralized services to bridge the gaps when you need to.
    Feb 15 1
    • Rebaca Technologies / Eng
      xiao_main

      Rebaca Technologies Eng

      xiao_main
      Hi @Coinbase, Can I DM you for a referral?
      Feb 17
  • Microsoft / Eng
    good_boy

    Go to company page Microsoft Eng

    PRE
    Amazon
    good_boy
    Yep, earlier it used to be banks that were the middlemen. Now, it is these big exchanges, that came to remove those middlemen but instead ended up taking their position
    Feb 15 0