His 'excuse' was posted 35 minutes after Kristen posted her comment, as tweet 12 in a thread, when tweet 11 in that thread was posted 12 hours earlier.

Pro tip: Ninja edits don't work on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956369442897756... https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517... https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...

If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.

Just imagine the vast set of use cases for such a data structure! Why it's enough to make one indiscriminately spam various web forums to tirelessly enumerated through all of them.

> If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.

The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.

The whole point of threading is to group Tweets in order as posted by the author and put replies below them. It wouldn't make sense to throw a bunch of Tweets and replies in chronological order and force the users to try to figure out which Tweet was in response to which parent Tweet.

> If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.

Every time I talk with a blockchain enthusiast, they seriously pull similar ideas and every time I tirelessly try to convince them there are better/simplier/more effective/etc. solutions to the same problems they try to apply blockchain.

> The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.

The best "stop your blockchain bs" answer!

This is so obvious to me that I'm having trouble reading their post as anything but tongue-in-cheek.

But perhaps they were indeed being sincere?

EDIT: On review of their prior posts, it looks like they were.

There's a "blockchain solves everything" mentality that's prevalent in certain web3 communities.

It's fueled by the fact that there really aren't many, or perhaps any, usable web3 platforms that do anything beyond distributed ledger or NFT type stuff. Obviously nothing in web3 even resembles the scale and speed and ease of use of Twitter.

This has left the door wide open for futurists to paint the most idealistic picture possible of what web3 will look like. Blockchain technology is largely irrelevant to the projections (because it's boring). Instead, the projections suggest to solve all of the various social and legal problems in unspecified ways, with "web3" used as the excuse. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that big corporations are evil and bad for users, but democratizing ownership will change all of that. Nevermind the fact that the big corporations are already publicly traded and you can buy a share of them today if you want, which isn't actually very different than buying governance tokens of a web3 system. The people with the most money and insider connections (to get early coins at a steep discount) are still going to be the ones calling the shots and shaping the systems to derive profits for themselves. There's nothing magical about web3 that stops people with money from buying outsized influence.

In addition, blockchain tech reduces the friction of obscuring money and data flows. This is good for unaccountable power. Government is not perfect, but it at least pretends to be accountable power.

It's a shitpost-- blockchain wouldn't even have helped him here because he posted number 12 after hers.

But now I'm wondering who exactly is upvoting the comment.

To be clear-- Bitcoin is an energy-gobbling database sync party trick. We would have been better off wildly exaggerating the potential of sleep sort for the past decade and a half.

I believe that the comment you are replying to is sarcastic.

"Believe"? That comment broke my sarcasm detector.

The timestamps can be changed by Twitter

If you are saying that Twitter adjusts the timestamps to the viewer's local time zone, that's not exactly a secret. Or are you accusing Twitter of retroactively changing timestamps to alter the narrative? That would be a bold claim in need of some proof.

They don't, although they can. Say if, the secret service sends them a request in order to protect some higher-up, they would have to comply.

Yet somehow the human race survived for 200,000 years without a block chain.

Not really a valid argument. We survived millennia without a lot of things. The Industrial Revolution was only two centuries ago. It doesn't mean life was necessarily better before then.

True. What I’m trying to say is that Twitter in a block chain would probably be an awful user experience.

OTOH -- Twitter (on the blockchain) supporting only ~10 tweets per second is a blessing in disguise that would drastically help improve the user experience by imposing a high cost on junk :P

Imagine a platform where tweets were so expensive only the rich could speak!

~$0.001 USD is the current cost for gas on Polygon for a transaction. If people have to pay credits to tweet (even this little), I would expect the quality to increase.

How will being attached to something as valuable as speech change the value of that?

Or similarly a world where one pays to read tweets.

People would get into bidding wars for the next tweet

Twitter could be improved by requiring a proof of work effort before posting any tweets. The effort could be computational, or just proof of fact checking and basic proofreading would go a long way.

"Proof of thought"

A pretty short blockchain that would be.

Twitter + proof-of-thought would be awesome :-).

Twitter is already an awful user experience.

Exactly my point: just imagine how fascinating the next 200,000 years will be with blockchain!

When you think in those terms you realize how shameful it is that, say, HN isn't getting in on the ground floor and spawning a worker in every reader's browser to mine crypto. The energy expended to mine Bitcoin pales in comparison to the early mover opportunities lost each day from lack of action.

If only we could spend megawatts of energy and hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware costs to be able to solve a twitter spat between a braggart tech boss and a copywriter feeling not appreciated enough. The humanity could then feel finally its existence amounts to something, some monumental goal is finally achieved.

The situation seems a bit more complex.

The Martin Agency’s proposal was rejected, but the idea of the QR code that they suggested remained in some minds.

The creative firm they did the ad with was Accenture Interactive, see this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6898989...

More complex but still deceitful. Coinbase's own CMO gave credit to that ads agency, which the CEO of Coinbase did not acknowledge until he was criticized: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6899028...

It's also possible the CEO didn't know that the idea was pitched months earlier to people on his marketing team by another agency because his marketing team told him they came up with the idea internally.

Hogging credit is, sadly, pretty common in corporate gamesmanship.

Yeah, I don’t feel a ton of sympathy here. He wanted to seem a “tech cool kid” who disrupts traditional media and is above normal corporate stuff, and he either wasn’t willing to let the facts get in the way of that narrative, or just assumed that narrative must be true and that the facts would back him up. He’s either deceitful or sloppy, and both are bad looks.

That’s plausible but makes him look rather gullible at not only having bought into that lie but using the example as evidence of the supposed inferiority of ad agencies.

I’m not a politically adept person but even I can see that it puts into question his decision making skills as a CEO of a crypto firm. People in leadership positions generally need to be really good at calling bullshit otherwise they get surrounded by pliant yes-men.

> decision making skills as a CEO of a crypto firm

> really good at calling bullshit

Maybe one of those things can tell us about the other?

I mean, he is CEO of a crypto firm.

His actual excuse (tweet 12) was that the ad agency did such a good job that he just assumed Coinbase owned them. Because he's just that entitled.

Ah, so The Martin Agency was not the entity he called "an outside agency" which "pitched us a bunch of standard super bowl ad ideas" in the second tweet of the thread?

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956361148243804...

My guess, which may be a tad speculative, is that there is an ongoing, but previously-confidential, dispute between Coinbase and the agency over whether and how much the former owes the latter for the work they did.

Coinbase hired a new CMO. When that CMO joined, she decided to go with a different agency.

A QR Code in a commercial is not novel, making the entire commercial a QR code is. Sounds like Martin Agency presented a commercial with QR codes, not a QR code commercial. Unless Martin Agency shares the slide, It’s impossible to claim it was MA’s idea.

It sounds like her reply is the result of the Coinbase CMO cutting ties with her company.

Haha okay, her tweet says: “It was actually inspired by presentations our agency showed your team on 8/18 (pages 19-24) and 10/7 (pages 11-18) with ad concepts for the Super Bowl with floating QR codes on a blank screen.”

https://twitter.com/cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517...

Right but did it say mimic a DVD screensaver? I really think she should show the goods if she wants to make light of the situation. BTW I'm kind of on her side, but don't make us take her word for it.

I want to see the receipts too. But floating QR codes on a blank screen is pretty close to the end product.

They should have made it bounce to the exact corner at end of the ad for any Office crazies

It did bounce into the corner at the end.

damn i missed it!!! sorry i did watch it but didn't notice

Is Martin Agency really dissimilar from the agencies that make other superbowl ads? What is a "traditional ad agency" anymore, even? And what's with the weaselly "I'd be remiss"? At this point, many hours after he failed to acknowledge them, he pretty clearly is remiss. Just apologize already!

I don't know the ad space particularly well, but the fact that Adweek named the Martin Agency its Agency of the Year for 2020 and 2021 suggests that it's not especially far removed from a "traditional ad agency", no?