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I'm not familiar with how any of this works, but I kind of thought coinbase was less like a bank—paying interest on deposits—and more like a user friendly web ui for managing your assets, because dealing with private keys is hard for a user.

If, for example, Dropbox declares bankruptcy I'd be shocked if creditors could search through the user data for things of value.

It seems like there would be plenty of money to be made just charging transaction fees and holding assets 1-1 for the users, but what do I know.



> I'd be shocked if creditors could search through the user data for things of value.

dropbox don't own any copyright to the content from the user's uploads. So even if the creditors find any valuable IP or content, there's no way they can claim ownership over it.

Coinbase, on the other hand, is given custody of actual assets (the cryptos).


Check your cloud storage user agreements. A lot of them involve handing a perpetual irrevocable right to the data to the company storing it.


For purposes of operating the service. Not for commercializing IP.

If I on Titanic and upload it to Dropbox. A creditor during bankruptcy couldn’t use those rights to sell streams of Titanic.

For coinbase, a creditor could sell the crypto stored.


A while back Facebook was accused of requiring users to give them copyright “ownership.”

They said they wanted to be able to sue someone who scraped it. And that required ownership.

Suing people for violating the copyright goes well beyond simple cloud operations.

It means they can reach settlements, etc.

It was less clear whether they could sue the author.


> Not for commercializing IP.

Last time I checked it included commercializing IP, in at least Facebook and Twitter.


The entire point of Twitter and FB is to commercialise the user content, IMO.

While I wouldn’t a priori assume any given cloud storage user agreement includes a perpetual IP license to anything the user uploads, I also wouldn’t assume it to be free of such a clause.

Either way, read closely. And get legal advice if it matters, because jargon doesn’t mean what outsiders think it means.


they do both, you can earn interest on some things within coinbase, e.g. 4% interest on USDC (their stablecoin)




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