Why day 2 of "12 Days of Coinbase" was a disappointment

Before I start, I want to acknowledge that what they have done is a nice thing, but considering the way they started it out and the fact that Coinbase is evaluated at $8b, this 2nd day has disappointed a lot of users over the internet.

At first glance it looks like a very charitable thing to do and it's going to a location where they are in dire need of other payment solutions considering the inflation and the way things run there. What is bothering people is that after the 1st announcement of "12 days of Coinbase" this isn't as big of a move and Coinbase might be shooting itself in the foot instead. If you run through the numbers, they are going to donate $1 to 100 families for 3 months, which totals $9000 USD.

Now bear in mind that Coinbase is a $8b company, if you were to compare it to Steem's marketcap currently laying at ~$70 million and then looking further into how much users from Venezuela are making on our blockchain, it makes the donation amount from Coinbase a considerably minimal amount. Now I'm not saying that it's not a great thing they are doing, of course any donation is welcome for the people in need, but others are taking this as a cheap shot at marketing and especially considering it was one of the 12 days of Coinbase following a very powerful first announcement this has annoyed quite a few people. The bar has been lowered on what they can expect as the next days of announcements and a question that has been flying around as to "why ZCash?" following their recent listing of the currency to coinbase.pro.

Now of course this isn't the best course of action to compare "donations" with Steem rewards, but let's just for fun do it. In a post 2 months ago I wrote about how much users that have disclosed their location to be Venezuela on their Steem accounts were earning. At the time of writing that Steem's market cap was at $220 million and the 1735 active users that openly were from Venezuela were earning 8240 SBD and 8140 SP per month. At the time that was approximately $15k a month, so that'll be $45k for 3 months and bear in mind there may be more users from that location that have not disclosed it due to their strict laws and bans of cryptocurrencies.

45000/220000000=0.0002% while 9000/8000000000 equals 0.0000011%, 0.0002/0.0000011= 181.81, not sure if my math here is completely correct as its early in the morning but it seems as if Steem is rewarding users 181x more than Coinbase's donation. Again, while these are not numbers we should be comparing it is something we should be proud of as a community and the people we are helping on a day to day basis. Considering traffic stats and how distributed we are in developing countries, there is another factor which could explain the low price of Steem. Unfortunately we live in a world with great imbalance of wealth and the price of Steem in some countries will never drop low enough for the users to consider "not selling cause it's too low" as they will be pressured to sell anything to survive either way.

Lastly, great for Coinbase donating but in retrospect I understand some users were underwhelmed by this 2nd day announcement. Coinbase is a company though and their main priorities are profits for the shareholders and bringing adoption to Crypto will continue to be one of their main priorities to not just make the world a better place, but at the same time enrich the early investors of the company.

One thing I personally am looking forward to is decentralized exchanges. Not just for the security, but one thing that attracted me to crypto was that anyone could invest any amount into a project which was very different from how people were investing in companies or projects before. Sadly Coinbase chose the old ways but there are competitors in the horizon and they have a shot at reclaiming dominance in the space as much as the next guy.