Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nwhatt 1908 days ago
If I were to invest $100 in some allocation of Coinbase stock and Bitcoin - what should the ratio be?
7 comments

Crypto is the gold rush. Coinbase is selling shovels. If you believe in crypto, they're both solid bets. I'd just diversify and go 50/50.

This is not financial advice.

Good analogy. Think Cloudflare (shovels for tech) versus AirBnB (end user facing bet).

Either way it’s a very specific bet. Diversification is your friend.

I wish they were doing an ICO instead (but i guess they can't?). $BNB has been the equivalent of shovels in past years.
$100 BTC : $0 CB.
Funny. If you believe in bitcoin, then you would already have invested.

Otherwise what you (and many others, but not all) believe in as an investor is the possibility of a return from storing your dollars in bitcoin and retrieving the value later.

If you think this announcement would affect the price, look at price history data for the time of the announcement up to the date of going public. That could serve as some kind of signal given some model assumptions. Avoid confirming your own biases and establish your margin of risk as damage tolerance.

As I see it, betting on coinbase is betting on the volume of transactions increasing over time.

Just my personal opinion....

Normies will be buying their bitcoin on cash app, paypal, etc. In this way I feel CoinBase is a niche product with limited growth capabilities long term. The more CoinBase makes, the more the big names in tech/finance will expand their efforts to compete. CoinBase is a decent short to medium term play imo, whereas bitcoin itself is a longer term play.

This is an interesting outlook, not sure why it got downvoted.
$60 BTC, $20 Coinbase, and $20 ETH is what I'm considering moving to, from previously $100 BTC.
$80 ETH $10 BTC $10 COIN
why is this downvoted? going all in on the ETH ecosystem seems like a decent strategy.
If you believe in crypto, you can't go wrong with either one, one advantage of their stock is that you can invest through traditional means.
The best way to get into Crypto from a traditional brokerage account is GBTC. It tracks mainly BTC and Ethereum. It is not a perfect match though, sometimes you pay a premium and sometimes you get a discount to the underlying cryptos. Currently it is at nearly a 18% discount where earlier in the year it was at a 10% premium (GBTC is currently 50.87, BTC is $59,515).

This is by no means a GREAT way to do it, just the best option currently if you are looking at crypto from a US based brokerage account.

Wow, I figured it always traded at a premium. 18% discount is huge, am I missing some downside of this arb opportunity (buy GBTC sell short BTC or BTC futures)?
GBTC has no redemption mechanism, you can wrap more BTC into GBTC but not the other way around. For ETFs this is what solves the arb. You can do your arb but you still need to offload GBTC at some point and the only option is to another buyer of GBTC.
>The best way to get into Crypto from a traditional brokerage account is GBTC

So this is basically 100% speculation, because you can't even use the crypto you "purchase"? You're just hoping for prices to go up. How does that make sense for a purported currency? If people aren't using it, what is the value?

That isn't a very good argument. You might as well ask why do people invest in ETF's and mutual funds. The answer is because they view them as assets that will increase in value.
>If you believe in crypto

If you believe in crypto, why would you invest in a centralized exchange? Seems antithetical to the principles of cryptocurrencies.

There are many degrees of "crypto-ness".

For me the most important aspect of decentralized assets is separation between money and state; challenging government monopoly power over money.

That said, there are conveniences and advantages to centralization. Centralized exchanges help supply and demand meet quickly and efficiently.

I think its possible for those systems to live together productively. There is freedom when I choose to trust and consent to other willing parties to take control of my assets. The problem arises when we are compelled to give up control by force of law.