Airbnb market cap is at 105 billion and Coinbase is currently at 86.
Personally I'm very sceptical that current valuation for Coinbase is justified. It is a great company for sure but there definitely arent similar network effects as with Airbnb. There's plenty of competition in the crypto exchange space.
people need shelter, they do not need crypto . There is huge demand for housing in metro areas even in spite of Covid, and regulation and other restrictions make it hard to increase supply, and landlords generally want to lock-in long-term rents with good credit scores due to difficulty of evicting, meaning more demand for short-term rentals. .
I don't think that's really true as a blanket statement. I stayed in what turned out to be a depressing, small, rental apartment in Denver for a weekend via airbnb, because it was something like $20/night. The place smelled like trash and there was no laundry on-site.
You might say that any type of travel is a luxury. Ok, I guess. This trip was for a funeral. The flight was under $100. While I'm fortunate to be able to afford such a thing, no part of the trip was "luxury travel".
Airbnb serves a wide variety of customers, via a large range of temporary housing options.
Things precede shelter in the hierarchy of needs yet shelter is still valuable. Also there are shades of shelter. Most people might not want to live in the trailer park of money.
do you really think if the sh*t hit the fan? the entire BTC network and the internet at large would still be working for you to transfer these units around?
this to me is where the comparison to gold falls off. i can hold physical gold and silver and trade it at will even without power, pricing updates, etc. this does not apply to crypto. considering cutting internet access is now a normal thing during unrest, being able to pay with anything that is not physical, probably wont work out.
If the global internet goes down and stays down, then I think it's safe to say that global civilization is permanently collapsing, in which case billions of people are going to die in the resulting famine and the survivors probably won't be able to maintain enough technology to survive long term as climate change continues to snowball.
In this scenario, yeah bitcoin is worthless. But so is gold. The only thing worth stockpiling for this scenario is brass and lead (and a strong local community of other preppers who can organize into a new micro state after the collapse). And even then, you have to ask if the reward of surviving is even worth the cost of prepping.
it wouldn't even take a global internet shortage, just your country to go offline, how you gonna pay someone to get you out(keep you safe, etc) if you cant transfer your crypto to them? A few ounces of gold on the other hand will take you anywhere you want to go. Crypto is far from a safe hedge in any type of crazy event.
you see, gold can still be traded without power and internet, as could cash or really anything physical, as the value is assigned by those trading it at that time for whatever use they have but BTC is totally useless, toilet paper would literally have more value. brass/lead(killing people) isn't the only way to survive.
just your country to go offline, how you gonna pay someone to get you out(keep you safe, etc).... A few ounces of gold on the other hand will take you anywhere you want to go
People keep using that argument about gold, but is it really realistic? If the SHTF and the USA goes dark for whatever reason, how good is gold really going to be?
First, how does someone know you're really giving them pure gold and not some worthless alloy that looks and feels like gold?
Second, how much is gold going to be worth? Will a gold bar buy you a house, or a loaf of bread? (probably not a good example, after a month or so, houses will probably be less valuable than food)
And without any government to enforce a stable market, how will you even trade safely when the guy who has all the stuff you want can just hit you over the head and take your gold and whatever other possessions you may have with you?
Eventually these things would be sorted out by forming some sort of communal groups for protection and resource gathering, and barter prices will eventually be set, but will the guy with the most gold be valuable, or the guy with real survival skills (or at least some more immediately usable possessions like weapons, farming tools, etc)?
For the short term disruptions that are far more likely (like a regional power outage), cash is probably going to be just as good or better than gold because it's got an accepted value and everyone knows what it is (product values may rise, but in a society that's not used to using gold as currency with infrastructure to do so, it's a lot easier to sell a loaf of bread for $60 than for a gram of gold)
gold was just an example used, because the BTC fans like to compare the two. but you are right, gold isnt overly tradable either, since it has very little day to day use. my point was just that BTC would still be useless as it cant be traded without an internet, miners, etc.
I don't particularly believe BTC is the messiah, but if the internet in your country goes down, how do you imagine you're going to get the money in your bank account? You might rush to an ATM before they get swarmed, but you're definitely not withdrawing all your money and transferring won't be an option.
Right, because gold is really going to help when there are no police going around arresting thieves and murderers. I'm sure the guy who tells you he can get you out is not going to take your gold and do nothing to get you out, assuming he doesn't just kill you and take your gold, shoes, weapons, and whatever other supplies you are carrying.
Get real. When governments collapse gold is not even remotely as useful as people seem to assume. There is no hedge against a failure of civilization. When things break down like that, you need to think on your feet and start organizing people (or joining up with a group someone else organized) to stand guard against the roving gangs of murderers, rapists, and thieves. "Trade" beyond the level of barter involving food, fuel, medicine, and weapons does not enter the picture until some new form of government can be established and some semblance of order is restored.
Guns, ammo, and gold aren’t bad choices to hoard for an end of the world situation, but if you want to make out like a bandit when the shit hits the fan just stockpile spices - when people start having to eat squirrels they’re going to want some pepper :-)
It doesn't need to be usable through the crisis to still have value. Holding the private keys will still help preserve some of your wealth through to the other side so you don't have to start over with nothing.
You can flee with some gold, but I'd expect that to all be taken from you by the border guards or smugglers you have to pay off to get out. They can't take your bitcoin if they don't know you have it.
Genuinely curious if you think the Bitcoin network (or any other crypto network) would be restarted after such a crisis and if anyone holding non-crypto assets would be interested in trading them for crypto post-crisis?
It doesn't take anything this drastic. All it takes is the country you are in deciding to cut off access. This has happened in various unstable countries many times over the last decade so it's not unprecedented.
The very time you would need something more stable than a currency is the time when the local telecom infrastructure would mean you can't transfer bitcoin.
The people who say that bitcoin is going to be useful when "shit hits the fan" have a very very specific definition of shit hitting the fan that is just so unrealistic.
...why would I want to accept Bitcoin in that case? Pretty sure I am going to want either some other country's currency -- because I still need to buy imported food or fuel or whatever -- or things have gotten so bad that I no longer hand reliable enough Internet service to make use of Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin has not experienced the same inflation as USD? I'm not sure what point you're trying to argue honestly.
> Pretty sure I am going to want either some other country's currency -- because I still need to buy imported food or fuel or whatever
Explain why, just saying you want Euros or something isn't a very convincing argument. Importing cash Euros is non trivial, and good luck finding banks and credit cards that let you transact in them.
You really think the entire world would shut off the internet?
It is much harder to transport gold and silver, and those can be easily confiscated. A mnemonic seed can be stored in your head, and you can add a passphrase as a salt on top of that to create an infinite number of permutations, each being their own wallet, and provide just one of those if under duress.
True, but houses burn down all the time. Or get destroyed by "acts of god" that insurance won't cover.
If you backup your private key in a redundant way, multiple storage locations can be completely destroyed without any loss. If you were really paranoid, you could distribute it around the world to mitigate geographic and geopolitical risk.
In America, there may not be tons of people ready to flee, but we do have a culture of valuing the people having checks against government power (see second amendment).
So, that's what I think is more likely the mentality of western people holding long term. A check against incompetent government.
Exactly! Airbnb is rent-seeking. Not adding any value just controlling and asset for yield. Same as Bitcoin and other crypto, pure speculation and the product of a decade of government money presses keeping inflation low.
There is 20 trillion of negative yielding debt floating around in govt bonds, luckily we can hedge against these horribly mismanaged house of cards before they fall on us. The demand is real.
You can make the same argument about any asset class. The path from Bitcoin/gold/real estate/crops to other goods or assets goes through dollars out of convenience (because your destination is purchasable in dollars). Don't confuse convenience with necessity.
Actually it is out of necessity on some level. My landlord needs me to pay rent with dollars, because my landlord needs to repay a loan to the bank and the bank will only accept dollars. The bank only accepts dollars because if my landlord defaults on said loans the bank will go to court to resolve the matter, and the courts only deal in dollars. Similarly, we all must pay taxes of one form or another, and we must do so using something the government will accept, which is dollars and not Bitcoin.
(You can adjust the currency for whatever country you might be considering if dollars are not the local currency.)
Don't kid yourself -- without exchanges of some sort (including payment processors) cryptocurrency is basically worthless.
The number of things I can exchange dollars for vastly outnumbers the number of things I can exchange Bitcoin for, by orders of magnitude.
In this case convenience is necessity, for practical, real-world definitions. Sure, in a theoretical sense, there is no reason why I couldn't use Bitcoin to buy food and clothing, make rent/mortgage payments, buy plane/train/bus tickets, buy furniture, tools, electronics, etc. But the reality is that I can't do it (with some narrow exceptions), and I don't see that materially changing within my lifetime, not to the point where using Bitcoin (or any other up-and-coming cryptocurrency) is more convenient that using fiat currency.
Yes but that would obviously no longer be true if dollars no longer "worked" (let's say 10k% inflation for the sake of argument). There would be _something_ of value that things could be exchanged for.
And yet the demand for rentals is recovering (I know someone whose Airbnb rental is already 85% booked through August), and will recover to previous levels. All that revenue will be back, and Airbnb will be more diversified in its revenue sources. Long-term (even medium-term) I think the pandemic will turn out to be a win for Airbnb.
That was a year ago. Airbnb completely recovered and then some in terms of value. A few metro area like SF and NY were hit , but the overall picture is improving, and such setbacks will imho be temporary.
Airbnb doesn't have network effects, the value to users increases pretty linearly with the number of hosts, and doesn't really increase at all with the number of other users.
That's just cross-side network effects. More users is better for hosts which means more hosts which is better for users which means more users.
What you probably have in mind is "direct network effects", more like what you'd see with a chat app or social network (though social networks also have cross-side effects between users and advertisers).
Of course it does, the date of last written review is a pretty good signal whether something shady is going on with an apartment/hotel.
Hotels have much more guest nights than apartments, so the network effects are much smaller there.
There were companies trying to compete with AirBnB, but I'm not sure if they are still used, at the same time with hotel sites I just find the cheapest one for the hotel that I like.
Coinbase is directly and indirectly threatened by regulations. The direct threat is that the SEC, China, European regulators, etc. impose much stricter regulations on cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, raising compliance costs until the business fails; indirectly, if the regulations are applied "downstream" to payment processors dealing in cryptocurrencies or to businesses accepting cryptocurrency payments. Another indirect threat is in the form of environmental regulations being more strictly applied to mining operations, which could be fatal for Bitcoin or any other PoW based system (yeah, sure, PoS, PoWhatever, but Bitcoin is half the market for cryptocurrency).
There is also an "inverse" regulatory risk for Coinbase. In the best case (where cryptocurrencies are actually being used as payment systems at any significant scale) cryptocurrencies fill a need that is not being filled by existing banks as a result of regulations on the financial industry. Instead of more stringent regulations being imposed on cryptocurrencies, less stringent regulations could be imposed on the mainstream financial system that would allow banks to create more convenient electronic payment systems. The need for a cryptocurrency exchange could implode if the relevant technologies (e.g. offline ecash) were deployed; you would "withdraw" or "deposit" money in the bank just like paper notes. There is even a case for such a system if banking regulations became stricter e.g. if banks were forced to deploy a less fraud-prone and more privacy-preserving system than the credit/debit card system in use today.
Generally speaking, regulation is most easily dealt with by the market leader. They have capital that can be used to meet requirements, and can engage with regulators to make sure the regulation can be achieved by them.
That actually improves the situation for them. (Similar to how GPDR improved Google and Facebook's position in the ad market against competitors)
Did you read what you were replying to? Regulations elsewhere in the market could threaten Coinbase, regardless of their ability to handle compliance costs in their own niche. In their own filing Coinbase admitted that the value of their company is highly correlated with the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency -- so any regulation that impacts Bitcoin will likely impact Coinbase, even if the impact is indirect.
It's more than that in my mind. Coinbase is embracing regulation and leveraging it as a differentiator. They are going to be in a better position than anyone to close the loop to regulatory capture.
I hate this meme. HSBC used their judgement about something for which the law said they had to use their judgement. Then their judgement turned out to be wrong and apparently that's now a crime. Foreign exchange has legitimate use cases, it's not remotely comparable to cryptocurrencies.
Turning a blind eye to money laundering especially when given chances to fix it, and given that money laundering is enabling criminal enterprise that fucks up everyones life, from a household name bank that used to be my high school bank (point is how they market themselves as a nice bank) well I don’t know what to say. Not a meme though.
It's a meme in the sense that it's propagated virally and the story has mutated as it goes. There's no evidence that HSBC were wilfully blind to anything.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. It causes threads to go to repetitive (and often inflammatory) places, which is a failure mode for HN.
Personally I'm very sceptical that current valuation for Coinbase is justified. It is a great company for sure but there definitely arent similar network effects as with Airbnb. There's plenty of competition in the crypto exchange space.