I don't talk about it much but I thought this would be a good time. So Bitcoin was the culmination of decades of work to try and create a decentralized currency that could be secured by a trust-less third party. I have talked about that before, but what separated Bitcoin was that Satoshi figured out the double spend problem. That was literally the only thing that hadn't been figured out to make it work. He made the cryptography work with the SHA256 algorithm and the rest is history.
The fight for the Bitcoin name has created 2 hard forks just this year. What people want is the name, and whatever side creates a fork, they feel that they fulfill the vision that Satoshi had. If you haven't read the
Bitcoin whitepaper and are into the game this far, I highly encourage you to do that. It's not very long for creating a hundreds of billion dollar industry thus far. What Satoshi knew early on was that there would need to be a third party that could be the buffer between fiat currency and Bitcoin. Thus this is where exchanges come into play, and the point of this post.
So exchanges have been around since the beginning, without them Bitcoin has no monetary value. It needed to be compared against a legitimate exchange of value, and since gold can't be exchanged for a totally digital asset, fiat was the only option. Without this exchange rate there would be no way to determine its worth. Herein lies the problem tho, the entire reason for a decentralized currency, one which is censorship proof, requires a value backed currency to begin with. That kind of defeats the purpose of Bitcoin altogether. However, with the end goal of having its value stabilize against a state backed currency would allow it to cross borders and maintain it's worth. With the addition of being accepted by merchants for physical and digital things gives it power as well.
I have always given Coinbase the benefit of the doubt. They have tried to make getting into the space as simple as possible for the average user. Without easy entry there is no way the average person could understand what is actually going on. There was a reason that early on the only ones who even saw the applications of Bitcoin as a big deal were tech minded people, and those who hated the big banks. It took until this year for more than just the techy people to see it as a real thing.
Coinbase has raised more than 200 million dollars in VC funding.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbaseThey have had multiple outages during extremely high volume trading this year. They had Charlie as director of engineering to build GDAX from the ground up. Maybe his departure was a bigger impact than I thought, or maybe they have only seen $$$. Regardless what happened today with the BCH roll out was an absolute disgrace. A company with this many customers, funds, financial backing, access to top quality engineers, and knowledge of the space, should never have had a roll out like they did today. They manage millions if not billions of dollars of customer assets, and for them to market manipulate today is just rough ridin' unreal. It really pisses me off.
I know how much of an investment vehicle this has been for me and others who have joined me. This ultimately is about changing the world tho and in the long term I truly believe in this technology. It is already changing many industries and will continue to do so. This kind of mismanagement has happened in the past with Mt Gox, who at the time was handling 70% of all the global Bitcoin transactions. There is a reason you don't want to keep large amounts of money on the exchanges, because you aren't in control of your own money, and Mt Gox is the reason. The term "to big to fail" has been proven that that is not a truthful statement. I just hope that Coinbase can get it together and not become a statistic.
