Notes from Brian Armstrong Coinbase CEO “Talks All Things Crypto | Good Time Show” 16–02–21 with Sriram Krishnan
Brian was driven by the interest in creating more freedom.
“Why should every country be able to make its own currency and in some cases manipulate it? There should be a global decentralized currency that everybody in the world shares. It just seems so obviously true to me.”
“I had a few thoughts going through my head at the time. One of them was you know maybe I’m crazy because most people I’m talking to either don’t get it or they think this is a dumb idea.”
“The other thought I had was frankly I went to some of those early meetups and it was kind of a weird crew, this thought going through my head like ‘Do I really want to be known as like that bitcoin guy?’”
“I wonder how many startups never get off the ground because people around them thinking that’s a crazy idea. And they don’t want to call their parents and tell them that they quit their job to work on something crazy.”
“So that’s kind of the brilliance of Y combinator: They believed in me when this thing seemed completely crazy. And that was awesome.”
“Hacker news hater comment is probably the most reliable anti-indicator of success” @sriramk
Next ten years in crypto will be about: blockchains are getting a little bit scalable, a new wave of DeFi adoption, non-fungible tokens, central bank digital currencies, and stable coins.
“Rather than quibble over details it might be fairer just to say, you know bitcoin probably doesn’t have intrinsic value, but that’s okay. The value comes from people believing that it’s useful and it has value.”
“It’s probably the best form of money ever created. It’s divisible, portable, fungible and all these properties of money that you can go lookup”
“One of the most important things that we do at Coinbase is one of our cultural tenants we say: top talents in every seat.”
One of the top-cited reasons for why they either didn’t accept or why they left Coinbase once they were already there was the commute. We decided to make the company remote first, indefinitely.
DeFi represents a crop of new protocols and startups that have gotten created in the last two years or so that have started to recreate aspects of the financial system but in a totally decentralized way.
“For anybody who is thinking crypto is a giant Ponzi, I encourage them to go check out DeFi because I think the innovation that’s happening there in the fundamental utility that’s being created is at the intersection of computer science and economics is pretty remarkable.” @avichal
“NFTs are having a moment right now, but it is really gonna take off once some of the metaverse stuff like VR starts to work or once some of the big artists or musicians starting to get on this and start wanting to have a direct relationship with their fans.”
