Coinbase Earn, the new Coinbase-built education platform that rewards learnin’ about crypto with crypto, is now live. Or rather, “Coinbase Earn 0x” is live, since 0x—currently worth a whopping $0.35—is the only token the program currently offers.
Needless to say, we at Debrief, extraordinarily busy as we are, didn’t bother with the “Earn” part of the 0x training course—$0.35 profit, anyone? But still, we binge-watched all six thrilling minutes of the educational content currently on offer, which explores such wide-ranging and non-branded material as 0x tokenization, the 0x decentralized exchange, and how 0x’s ZRX token works. (Conflict of interest alert! Here’s our sister site, Litepaper’s, explainer.)
Our review: Debrief had a great time with Earn, even without the $0.35.
Economically irrelevant
Oh dear! Only 127 million (37 percent) of bitcoin’s 460 million public addresses are “economically relevant”—i.e. hold any amount of bitcoin—according to a report by blockchain monitoring firm Chainalysis. And a further 110.5 million (87 percent) of those addresses are held not by real people but by exchanges and “darknet markets.” So that leaves...16.5 million actual human bitcoin users. BulLisH.
Then there’s the transactions. Though roughly $41 billion worth of bitcoin was transacted between August and October 2018, only $9 billion worth of bitcoin was ever actually spent:
“We estimate that on average only 20% of the bitcoin transaction value is economic, in that it is a final transfer between different people via economically relevant addresses. The remaining 80% is returned as change.”
No whimsical “keep the change” in Cryptoland, then.
Daily Express switches gears, like our hearts
A relatable one for those intoxicated by bitcoin’s recent price resurgence. A pithy split-photo posted to Reddit illustrates how British tabloid and “rollercoaster of shit” the Daily Express managed to change its editorial position on bitcoin from “Bitcoin WARNING: BTC will be ‘WORTHLESS and have ZERO VALUE’ in 2019” to “Bitcoin SOARS: BTC climbs above $3,400 as it ROCKETS to biggest daily rise in three weeks” within...five hours.
Sure, the actual reason the Express undermined itself so thoroughly was that Bitcoin SV evangelist Calvin Ayre had said some things to it, and the Express is nothing if not impressionable. (Remember, this is the paper that sensationalizes mild weather forecasts.)
Yet doesn’t the tabloid’s fickleness speak to the rollercoaster of shit within our own hearts? How much, we wonder, is our own optimism driven by market prices and Calvin Ayre saying things?
Would, perhaps, even Nouriel be bullish if he won big?
No.