How Coinbase gave away BTC to get its first users

Plus he’d already tried and failed to do it. Back in May 2018, in Berkeley, Sam had asked Gary Wang to write the code for a bitcoin exchange, and within a month Gary had done it. CryptonBTC, it was called. They put it out on the web without any idea how to attract attention to it. No one showed up to trade on it. It was as if it had never happened.

Paying more early on attracts people when the platform has the least value. The reward structure effectively borrows value from the future (when an established Bitcoin currency will have value) to finance the infrastructure building of the nascent and risky idea (when there is very little value). This is genius.

Which is why, when Sam took in the situation, he decided that Binance’s strategy was unsustainable. That the smart thing to do was to be the world’s most law-abiding and regulator-loving exchange. FTX could use the law, and the regulators, to drive crypto trading from Binance and onto FTX. If countries did not…

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When I bought my first Bitcoin through Coinbase.com, the checkout process prompted me to tweet “I just bought 1 Bitcoin @Coinbase! https://coinbase.com.” Though it seems to me that they could have easily coded a solution so the message included the price at which I’d bought it, which would have had the effect of advertising the rising (or falling)

Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a luxury brand, manufacturing coolness and tasteful