Coinbase didn't buy them for 100M, but the VC's at A16Z might be sitting on a billion dollars if they invested in BTC when 21.co was started.
Anyone else hear about this rumor?
This seems possible, because, as we know, the price of BTC has fallen recently from ~$16k to ~$7k. So the gains could be large if they did indeed buy BTC with some of the capital they raised, but probably not $1 billion, or at least I would guess against that. The timing and distributions would have to have been quite right.
But, I will say that at 11-50 employees[0] there should have been quite a bit of capital left over from the ~$150 million they raised, even after a few years of burn.
In June of 2015, the price of BTC was about $240 each.
If we assume half the investment went into bitcoin, it means they acquired $115m/2/($240/BTC) = ~240,000 BTC
At today's price of $8000/BTC, assuming they never sold, those coins would be worth $1.9B. So it is plausible they hold more than $1B in bitcoin.
I didn't like their $400 CPU Bitcoin miner though.
Definitely seems like some insider dealing. Especially considering Earn.com seems like a very immature (bordering on useless) product.
Also another example of a startup having more money then they know what to do with and not returning it to shareholders.
The domain is worth a chunk itself.
> And to make matters worse, all the BTC returned to shareholders by the mining operation was in danger of being completely clawed back if the company entered a messy bankruptcy.
If that's the case earn.com would own the BTC, which would mean Coinbase acquired all the BTC held by earn.com
Unless there is something I'm missing, this almost certainly did NOT happen
Remember these people don't play by the normal rules as everyone else - so while there may not hard evidence, it is entirely plausible.
According to blockchain.info the current daily transaction volume is around 870 million dollars.
Isn't it amazing how one day you're an expert in Drug and Med Device manufacturing and approvals, the next day you're building cryptocurrency miners?
Only in SV, what a town.
I'm thinking the people claiming that there are other motives behind this deal are probably right.
Does that make any sense? If I wanted to set up paid email, how does a blockchain help? It seems technically unnecessary.
And if I really wanted user adoption, why woulnd't I just pay people in their local currency instead of trying to get them to take part in something much less directly useful to them?
By accepting cryptocurrency payments, you can accept email from anyone in the world. With the traditional finance system, there are legal obstacles to where a payment system can operate.
Also, using a traditional financial intermediary would mean that all the users of the winning paid-email service would be locked into using the same financial intermediary, which would then have significant power over its users owing to its network effect.
What lead you to expect that people would want to pay to email you? The business model makes no sense; it's obvious that that wasn't going to happen.
One thing that 21.co never really figured out was a killer use case, or how to best connect buyers with highly-targeted sellers in this "attention" marketplace. It just seemed like a cool way for startup CEOs to get better quality emails and direct the money to the charity of their choice.
If you are on the site as a user it's obvious. You get a lot of paid messages if you sign up for the right lists. Not sure if it will scale, but interesting use of crypto.
This is kind of a silly site, but it's one of the few articles I can find on the topic. https://sludgefeed.com/earn-com-becoming-go-to-crypto-advert...
Instead of solving the spam problem and giving marketing/sales/recruiting people better tools, they just incentivized people to sign-up for mailing lists that they probably didn't care about.
Lately it's frequent noise from ICOs (though perhaps I deserve it because I recall opting in to a cryptocoin interest group on earn.com).
Interesting things in crypto-blockchain tech, today:
* Origin
* NuCypher (disclaimer: I'm on this team)
* Loki
* New version of web3.py / other python tooling becoming mature
* Trustless Quorums
* Distributed validation
I can go on and on. But I just don't see how anybody can think that these are uninteresting times for this tech.
This post is a glorified PR humblebrag, and the truth of the matter is that if they really did complete a turn-around, it would be stand alone business worthy of the incredible cash infusion that the VC community injected in to it. Ultimately it's likely a loss (perhaps a very large one) on the books for the investors involved, and pieces like this are just lipstick on the pig.
Ick. Who'd have thought the future of technology would look like shitty direct marketing scams?
What's the downside of just using fiat money? Why need to use Bitcoin (or any crypto)?
Fiat also means the email service couldn't be global, because Trusted-Third-Party-based payment processors can't operate globally owing to the global regulatory patchwork.
Contrast that with Bitcoin(Cash)-based international remittance, or Ethereum-based token sales, which are accessible to people in every country in the world.
Email is an open and global protocol, so cryptocurrency is a good fit for it.
Secondly it cuts out the need for middlemen (banks/payment processors).
Either way it's a huge nod towards tokenized attention economy projects by one of the biggest players in the space.
There was quite few sites with same idea 15 years ago. Back then it took me some time to understand that no serious business wants to show ads to people paid for watching them, since only people without significant income sign up for such programs and the incentive for fraud is high.
They said: "I've earned around 0.0060 BTC so far (~$50), mostly through airdrop offers -- without taking into account the airdropped crypto itself."
What I wanted to reply was, no, you earned ~$50 if you sold it off immediately, however otherwise you earned "~$50" MINUS whatever "profit" earlier adopters earned, the wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily reallocated weighted toward the earlier adopters; e.g. that could be $50 minus $30 because you're paying for/legitimizing/realizing/covering the difference of their purchase price and their sale price. They know of course they can't dump it, however they don't care if the Pyramid-Ponzi scheme takes 10-20+ years to allow them to realize $100s of billions, or even potentially trillions of dollars, worth of "profit."
'When I get my paycheck, I earn my salary MINUS whatever "profit" my employer made from my work.'
This is disingenuous by ignoring risk and presupposing that (in this case) I have the same reach/clout/contacts/sales and marketing channels as my employer.
The profit your employer makes from your work isn't coming from an increase in demand [in the use of a transactional layer] causing the perceived value of a crypto-asset [USD] to go up, and therefore they also are profiting from that increased value -- that'd be "double-dipping" profit in a sense if that's the case, if they're also making money on the increase in demand of the currency.
Profit from what someone is willing to pay above actual cost vs. "profit" derived simply from an increase in perceived value because of demand are two different things; this is why I put profit in quotes to differentiate.
If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this. It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however
If you held onto your paycheck and didn't cash it for 5 years (assuming the check is still valid then), and the USD went up by 400% -- once you cashed it, that 300% difference in your buying power that you're depositing is getting covered by everyone else now (for no more work done by you). At the surface of it, does that sound fair? And that cash they were paid, it wasn't an investment.
If you're paid in USD, USD being relatively stable and balanced with other fiat currencies, then you're not going to profit from fluctuations -- there are currency traders of course, however banks and governments try to limit this, they decide how much the other currencies are worth in comparison (the exchange rates). It would be great to have a single global currency, where everyone is aligned, however not through reallocating wealth weighted to the earliest adopters -- you're taking advantage of the majority of society then.
The issue is whether reallocating resources/wealth unreasonably/unnecessarily is acceptable or not. I argue it's not. The incentivized structure is one way to get people working together, collaborating - at least to begin with - however at a certain "tipping point", let's say it's 50% -- everyone who adopts or must adopt the incentivized crypto-asset then is covering/realizing the cost of everyone who bought before. E.g. Their buying power is shifted weighted towards the earlier adopters, and if this is allowed then there will be a point where they will be forced to adopt it (and early bad actors are heavily incentivized to reach this goal).
One problem with incentivized crypto-assets is that USD isn't destroyed, instead it's being exchanged - given to someone in return for a digital crypto-asset. If USD was actually destroyed or rather transferred into a crypto-asset blockchain, that would be solving part of the problem.
If you see problems with what I'm writing, I would greatly appreciate hearing more of your thoughts - rarely do people engage with this line of thought on here, I seem to get enough downvotes though (to counter the upvotes I initially get).
