I'm sure that everyone who uses Steemit is familiar with Coinbase. It is after all - by far - the largest exchange in the crypto world, as well the main entity the masses at large are familiar with. There's a multitude of unsavory things which can be said about the way they run their operation... particularly regarding their customer support. However as we've recently come to realize, there's a much bigger issue at hand. One which they're seriously profiting off the back of. What am I referring to? The insane level of influence they have on the market of course...
To see evidence of this, one has to look no further than what happened with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) earlier today. The second the coin was available on Coinbase, the price completely skyrocketed. By a seriously unreal amount too. It saw such an astronomical increase in value that it made a lot of it's holders a lot of money, much to the chagrin of BCH opponents. Which is what leads me to my issue with Coinbase. They have no competition....
The second they add a new currency to their network it will undoubtedly triple in value - and that's a conservative estimate - because all eyes are on them. There's not a single player in the game which even comes close to the level they're on. Do you really think the teams behind Coinbase and Gdax weren't aware of BCH being listed today? Of course they were, and they absolutely knew the effect it would have on it's worth. This strikes me as borderline unethical for them to have just this much sway on things. As these people could have gotten only a day or two notice and made millions of dollars based on the strength of their brand alone, and that doesn't sit well with me. In fact it's downright dangerous for one entity to have the market as cornered as they currently do.
At this point, if someone can somehow find out what the next coin they'll be listing will be before everyone else. They'd stand to make a serious profit from their initial investment. I can't be the only person who see's something wrong here? They can literally manipulate the market at will. I wonder what would happen if one day they decided to try and kill LTC or ETH by removing it from their site...
This could be a great thing for many people if they're fortunate enough to predict what the next big coin they endorse will be, or if they just purchase an abundance of whatever's next by chance. However I think we need to look at the bigger picture here...