I think having healthy reservations about trusting central services is a good thing (read: don't hold all your money in a single place), but I also don't see centralized services going away. We can talk about "decentralizing exchanges" all we want, but at the end of the day, you need direct access to the ACH/banking networks to streamline transfers between the system everybody uses today, and the only way to do that is with a centralized service. Anybody that thinks the banking system is going to let a decentralized service pull money out of people's bank accounts needs to stop grinding up their copy of Atlas Shrugged and smoking it.
I have my concerns about some of their tech choices (NONE of which involve security, except the simple fact of control of private keys), and I wasn't happy with the way they handled their tech interviews (I'm not going there, everybody learned from it, it's not relevant anymore).
But I also see them doing a pretty good job overall, and I see all the other exchanges screwing up really badly. This move makes sense. They need a stable exchange service, they have the capacity to build one, and there's demand. So why not? I would have done the exact same thing.
This also adds a lot of context to the recent raise, of course. Another less obvious thing that adds context is that Coinbase is now a very programmable fiat bank account, which is something that could, with a little work, put a serious dent into Paypal and the rest of the banking industry, which still does not provide good APIs for their banking services.
Coinbase might not be a Bitcoin wallet (the provider not being able to read the private key is my personal standard for this), but Coinbase is becoming one hell of a Bitcoin/fiat bank account. And we need those, too.
Even if Bitcoin fell apart, a pivot to a highly programmable fiat bank would be a cake walk for them, and there's plenty of money to be made. Probably worth the investment at this point in the game.
> Anybody that thinks the banking system is going to let a decentralized service pull money out of people's bank accounts...
I don't think that's completely clear. There will certainly be co-ordinated resistance from many entrenched interests, but that resistance also creates a profit-opportunity to break ranks to provide the service to customers who want it. It's more likely we'll see a split amongst banks and their policies to digital/alternative banking services.
I have my concerns about some of their tech choices (NONE of which involve security, except the simple fact of control of private keys), and I wasn't happy with the way they handled their tech interviews (I'm not going there, everybody learned from it, it's not relevant anymore).
But I also see them doing a pretty good job overall, and I see all the other exchanges screwing up really badly. This move makes sense. They need a stable exchange service, they have the capacity to build one, and there's demand. So why not? I would have done the exact same thing.
This also adds a lot of context to the recent raise, of course. Another less obvious thing that adds context is that Coinbase is now a very programmable fiat bank account, which is something that could, with a little work, put a serious dent into Paypal and the rest of the banking industry, which still does not provide good APIs for their banking services.
Coinbase might not be a Bitcoin wallet (the provider not being able to read the private key is my personal standard for this), but Coinbase is becoming one hell of a Bitcoin/fiat bank account. And we need those, too.
Even if Bitcoin fell apart, a pivot to a highly programmable fiat bank would be a cake walk for them, and there's plenty of money to be made. Probably worth the investment at this point in the game.