Hacker News Reader

Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

I see this as strategically genius whether you agree with it or not. He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances within the company going forward and he's made it clear where the company stands in away that makes it very hard for people to come back later and defend staying if they were interested in these kinds of politics.

If you want to stay focused on building a company and not on debating the subjective merits of sociopolitical systems, this is a winning move.

View on HN

I agree. Further, I think this is a giant signal to what I suspect is a majority of the industry who are really exhausted about the politicization of everything, and simply want to work toward a goal they find interesting. Those of us who want to focus on actual work and not solving the totality of global problems (or at least those problems visible to wealthy, highly-educated knowledge workers concentrated in a handful of American metro areas) will have a strong incentive to look at companies like Coinbase.

I'm curious to see if Spotify management might copy this.

Whether it is a strategically genius move or not will depend on the eventual outcome. No tech company, especially one in the bitcoin/fintech sector, can pretend to be completely apolitical. So putting out public blog posts and setting strict policies that apply to employees may not fly well when the company or its leadership/executives themselves don't follow them down the line.

> No tech company, especially one in the bitcoin/fintech sector, can pretend to be completely apolitical

Especially when the company in question makes significant political donations[1].

[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

Interesting, all of the transactions with Coinbase as contributor have memo fields like

    x.yyyzzz BITCOIN SOLD VIA COINBASE - PURCHASER UNKNOWN

and are followed subsequently by transactions with an (apparent) natural person as contributor with memo fields like

    x.yyyzzz Bitcoins, Contributions Previously Disclosed

So it looks like those PACs reported contributions twice, once naming the actual contributor, and once naming Coinbase. I'm not sure why they'd do that - perhaps to head off FEC questions about deposits from Coinbase?

Regardless, those don't seem to be contributions directly from Coinbase, but rather artifacts of campaign finance reporting.

On an aside, there are some transactions that jump out e.g. line B of [1] where the PAC appears to have netted $5665 for 7.49 BTC in the closing days of 2017(!).

Looking further, it seems like their reporting occasionally exchanged BTC for ETH, and the contribution reported makes sense for latter. Still, for a moment it was fun to imagine that someone got a screaming deal on a heap of BTC the day after Christmas 2017

[1]: https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?201801319091289865

That's most likely from donations in Bitcoin. The PACs actually want real-world dollars, so sell any cryptocurrency recieved immediately. i that case, there's an entry for the "x.yyyzzz bitcoins were donated" part, and then one for "we sold x.yyyzzz via Coinbase for $n dollars". Overall, that translates to "we received $n dollars from $blah in the form of x.yyyzzz bitcoins", which presumably keeps the regulators happy.

Of course only time will tell. I'm simply predicting that it was a wise move.

Also the company is not claiming to be apolitical. They are saying they don't want employees individually engaging in politics while acting on behalf of the company.

I'm sure coinbase has plenty of political objectives. On some level business is politics. Especially a crypto company, which makes it even more important not to have your employees politically organizing in a way that could appear represents your companies politics with out any executive oversight.

The company just extended a massive bonus and exercise extension to any employee that thinks they can get a better job. This is basically an invitation for the most talented people to exit the building ASAP even if they agree strongly with the Founders’ politics. This isn’t genius: it’s a mass layoff.

I guess we'll see what happens.

Makes me wish I had the skillset necessary to apply. Sounds like a phenomenal place to work.

Meh it's not strategically genius. The crypto community is hugely political and right-libertarian leaning. He's just signalling that he's not going against that trend.

> He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances

He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.

"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days."

- Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago

Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.

That the world is full of underserved people who should be helped by...this for-profit corporation?

You're projecting an exclusiveness that is just not there in the quote. Nowhere does it argue that this corporation should be the only one helping.

If anything, "this kind of technology" means the opposite of exclusivity, namely that Coinbase is part of a larger system than themselves, made of multiple corporations and other entities, and the people themselves, using this kind of technology, which it is claimed together help the underserved.

Or are you trying to argue that this for-profit corporation, or all for-profit corporations, should not be aiming to help underserved people?

Nope just that there’s nothing at all incongruous with that quote identifying an underserved market and libertarian politics.

I agree it's not incongruous, but it can be seen through different lenses.

Just because something doesn't contradict your idea of a hard right-libertarian, doesn't mean that it is a hard right-libertarian view.

You may read it as "identifying an underserved market", but you have start from seeing the underserved as being a market to think that way.

Another reading is to think there are people currently deprived of basic rights to low levels of personal property and interactions that most folk already have and enjoy, and the corporation says it exists to make those rights available to more people in a more egalitarian fashion than the currently broken system permits. That would make it left-libertarian, albeit the market-oriented variety.

Good reminder that non-profits, rather than, say, pharmaceutical companies, auto manufacturers, agro-chemical companies, logistics companies, etc. etc. have been the source of the leaps and bounds improvement in human welfare over the past two centuries.

There's nothing about this statement that's incompatible with right libertarianism. Right libertarians themselves do believe that their ideas would improve the world over time, as do adherents of most political ideologies in general.

With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxation, and so providing the ability to circumvent both is beneficial. It's definitely a libertarian stance, although it could be either left or right libertarian by itself. But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.

> But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.

Perhaps so.

But this isn't about cryptocurrency adepts in general. Is there other context that shows Coinbase and/or Brian Armstrong have a problem with fiat money, and/or that they advocate for a limited money supply, or even that they advocate to reduce or avoid taxation?

Seems to me the corporation's activity is literally integrating fiat systems with cryptocurrency, including tax reporting, so it's not clear if Coinbase's longer term direction is towards cryptocurrency being its own separate system of ordinary transactions in the end, or towards it being just another option alongside and integrated with fiat for more options in ordinary life. Regardless of what cryptocurrency adepts out in the world would like it to be.

I mean, it's not really not libertarian. It's not a particularly partisan stance at all, more of a business direction.

I don't think you are quite following this. The company isnt aiming to limit its own ability to achieve its political goals, it's limiting the ability of employees to promote political views while acting officially as employees.

Also I have never in my lifetime of working with many libertarian programmers heard anyone aggressively push their libertarian views in a way aimed at changing a companies internal politics. Also never heard a conservative or even really a traditional Democrat do this.

This is almost strictly a leftist thing.

You will build a less diverse and necessarily worse company this way.

Really? I'd say it would be more diverse since people wouldn't feel like their opinions were verboten or that they had to "play along" in order to get along.

I'm not sure if you're deliberately being obtuse. But if you're not: the currently accepted meaning of diversity in the workplace is :

> Cultural diversity means that a group contains people of different races, religions, ages, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, nationalities, and more.

Their agreements or disagreements on political viewpoints are not what makes a pool of employees culturally diverse.

As the other poster already mentioned, I would posit the exact opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com