At Consensus 2018 today, as it has been for the past three years, scaling was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. “SCALING, LAYER 2 AND CRYPTOGRAPHIC INNOVATIONS” was created to address just that issue. Panel participants included Alin S. Dragos of the MIT Media Lab, Amy Yin of Coinbase, Christian Decker of Blockstream, Muneeb Ali of Blockstack and Eli Ben-Sasson of StarkWave.
Amy Yin started with a talk about Coinbases’ innovations and move towards giving customers control of their funds.
This has been a sore spot for Coinbase for a long time. Often called a Bitcoin bank, that is a term they used instead to describe what Yin called Coinbase’s favorite competitor, BitPay.
Coinbase is arguably Bitcoin’s most visible company and that has required them to balance a fine line between appealing to Bitcoin’s privacy minded, cypherpunk roots, while also playing nice with the regulators that are drawn to them like gnats to a florescent light on a warm summer evening.
There have been controversies abound, most notably when Wikileaks claimed that Coinbase had blocked their account and a few years prior when customers started complaining that their accounts were blocked after using their bitcoin for online gambling.
Yin’s speech didn’t mention either controversy nor the broader complaints from the cryptocurrency community. Regardless, it was difficult not to think about these issues while Yin talked about using Heritartical Deterministic (HD) wallets to give users more autonomy over their funds.
According to Yin, there are now three different Coinbase products that allow for permissionless sending and receiving of funds. This includes Coinbase Merchants. One caveat to the permissionless aspect of it: Coinbase has to allow you to sign up. During the Q&A session, Yin revealed that banned countries (like Cuba and Iran) will not be allowed. This is likely a move
