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Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answer

by colept 9y ago

Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.

wmf 9y ago
Maybe Gemini; it seems to be the "most legal".
- Taek 9y ago
  Support on Gemini is also fantastic
Pieman103021 9y ago
Similar experience, locked out of my account and was asked to reply to the ticket I submitted to keep it open before I even got a response. Of course I can't reply because I don't have access to the account associated with the email.
blazamos 9y ago
VP Ops at Coinbase We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e72876 https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e... If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).
- will_brown 9y ago
  I saw your 3 month remote support contract position, I'm a lawyer in Miami working on my own tech projects, and would be interested in this type of temporary remote work with Coinbase while I hopefully get ramen profitable. if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
  - reefoctopus 9y ago
    There is an application and short quiz here: https://www.coinbase.com/careers/6848?locale=en-US https://www.coinbase.com/careers/6848?locale=en-US
  - simonebrunozzi 9y ago
    If you are a lawyer, you should line up tens of unhappy Coinbase customers and start a class action.
    - untog 9y ago
      That doesn't sound like something you do while you're concentrating on bootstrapping your own project.
      - lightedman 9y ago
        That's generally not an allowed behavior by lawyers in the first place. First they must be approached by someone else who has been wronged, or the lawyer themselves must approach another firm. Otherwise, he is still free to represent himself and only himself.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- ilaksh 9y ago
  VP eh. Awesome that I get a chance to write to an executive. Were you in the meeting where they decided they could roll out the Bitcoin Cash updates in 4 months? If so, did you actually think that customers would not sue within a month, or did you realize that and just were too scared to say anything to the boss? LOL. Soo many lawsuits coming. It will affect Ops. I would have helped my CEO and explained it had to get pushed out faster.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    Posts like this one are amazing in their lack of awareness. Let us know when you find the contingency lawyer willing to represent the thin slice of people who (1) desire decentralized currency, but (2) choose a centralized exchange to store their currency, then (3) ignore that exchange's warning to withdraw if they cared about a specific, then-unknown outcome, and finally (4) appeal to the very same centralized authority in #1 to rescue them from the consequences of their own inexplicable laziness. Especially if BCH goes up in value by the time Coinbase adds support. Will you pay them a management/performance fee for the money they made you by protecting you from yourself? (Or are you just a rabble-rouser who never had any funds on Coinbase to begin with?)
    - ilaksh 9y ago
      The average fee for a large class action is about 10%. Coinbase could be holding on to more than a billion USD (right now BCH is around $375) worth of assets for 'safe keeping' until next year. Am I really so naive to think that there aren't lawyers out there that might want to try to get 100 million dollars? LOL. The situation changed. Many were convinced BCH would go no where. Now its worth quite a bit. Also, some may not have had time or got the message. 4 months is obviously an unacceptable delay. The truth hurts. My comment made me look like a rabble-rouser or something, and made me look bad -- maybe it will get me banned from Hacker News. But just maybe that executive will take the hint and help them to push the update out faster. In which case, Coinbase could save itself a lot of hassle in terms of lawsuits and angry customers, and customers (those who did not get the warning or did not have time or were convinced it was going nowhere) could avoid losing a ton of money. Go ahead, shoot the messenger. Sometimes the truth sounds dickish. In this case, they deserve to get comments like this and should pray that someone in their organization heeds them.
- wastedbrains 9y ago
  biggest thing you need to do to improve support is stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address. Replying should create a support ticket automatically if the email it came from is associated with an account. Further verification could be required depending on the request.
  - tehwebguy 9y ago
    > stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address This should be a general rule for the whole internet.
    - twohlix_ 9y ago
      I think sending from a no-reply with a reply-to defined works though.
  - 97s 9y ago
    Thank you for saying this. I feel like this is a major problem with a lot of services. If they care that little to send me an email from a no-reply then how do they expect to keep customers who want to reply to the same person. There is absolutely nothing more frustrating then having 5 different people work on a similar ticket and repeat yourself over and over.
- tombot 9y ago
  A lot of the issues I've encountered (which were simple card verification errors due to addresses change) could have been easily solved with better Error messages, FAQs and staff training. Instead tickets go into a black hole, you wait 6 hours and get a boilerplate response.
- tmat 9y ago
  your team is to dumb to be in charge of other peoples money.. Bought cannabis seeds(in a legal state) with coins I bought at coinbase(sent to another wallet, then purchased..) 3 years later I get an email saying my account has been closed due to purchases I've made... LOL coinbase can go to hell.
  - pc86 9y ago
    > to dumb Okay
    - tmat 9y ago
      yes because the measure of someones intelligence is their grammar on the internet.
evbots 9y ago
yes their support is really terrible. No longer a customer
Yhippa 9y ago
"move fast and break things"
- nebabyte 9y ago
  When you've been sitting for months with the same broken infra, you're not exactly moving fast.
barefoot 9y ago
I've had a similar experience with coinbase - likely the worst customer experience of my lifetime.
thephyber 9y ago
Speed of Government << speed of business << speed of BitCoin forks "viable alternative" seems pretty subjective. CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e. Choose your exchange carefully.
bostonvaulter2 9y ago
Yeah, a while ago I was trying to send some money to them but I wasn't able to validate my address because I had an apartment number but their form didn't include a space for an apartment number so I got a "non-matching address" error. I even contacted their support but they weren't helpful. I'm probably better off.
kornish 9y ago
Seconded. I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found. No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue. Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
- blazamos 9y ago
  VP Ops at Coinbase. Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
  - pc86 9y ago
    Kornish's email is in his profile. Perhaps you should email him.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mcherm 9y ago
  > I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found. I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem. Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
sputknick 9y ago
In the process of switching to Gemini. Coinbase limits are too low. I've been waiting for two months for them to raise my limit to half of what Gemini will give me from the start.
- colept 9y ago
  The only thing that keeps me from switching to Gemini is instant buy. I only buy the amount of Bitcoin I need to send payments immediately.
sowbug 9y ago
Before you declare an exception to Hanlon's Razor, hear my story. Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on. Years later I still have that BTC. I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
- colept 9y ago
  Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees." You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing. Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821 https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff... In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it. Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account. The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
  - thanksgiving 9y ago
    Slightly off topic but I think transaction fees should be as close to zero. No, I am not talking about lightning. If we need to start fresh and design a new system that allows it, I am all for ditching Bitcoin altogether as well. It will have served a purpose in that we have learned a lot. To me, low transaction fees is more important than even anonymity or decentralization. My understanding of the problem is that we need to somehow encourage everyone to run a full node. We've decided a transaction fee that goes to "miners" is a good way to do that. Well, my problem is that now miners want higher transaction fees. We have inherently opposite goals and as such I cannot be allied with miners at all.
mrb 9y ago
Gemini. I have been a customer of Coinbase for 4 years and Gemini for 6 months. Gemini's withdrawal to bank accounts are faster (same day). Support is more responsive. That said, both companies are licensed, 100% legit/trustworthy, and I like both honestly, but sightly prefer Gemini overall. Each company is a decent alternative to the other IMHO.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  In what regard do you consider coinbase a "good alternative" to anything, let alone gemini? The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
  - mrb 9y ago
    I stated merely my personal experience. I recognize others have different experiences... usually because of Coinbase's fraud detection false positives. Use Coinbase for a while, building a history of buying or selling, and it will help.
    - nebabyte 9y ago
      Still, in your personal experience, there would/could be examples of things it "does better" than gemini. I was wondering what those were.
- csorrell 9y ago
  Gemini's identification process is a bit ridiculous imo. After sending them a copy of my drivers license to prove my identity, they emailed me back asking for copy of my most recent pay stub. Ah, no. That's farther than I'm willing to go. A quick google search leads me to stories about Gemini calling employers after receiving paystubs...
runeks 9y ago
I’m not sure how Bitstamp works for people in the US, but as a European I’ve had good experience with it in the past. I used both Bitfinex and Bitstamp before Bitfinex got hacked, and have been using Bitstamp exclusively for the last couple of years without any issues. I use SEPA for EUR withdrawals, which arrive in my bank account the same day. The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_streaming_api_and_exploitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched). To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
blubb-fish 9y ago
bitcoin.de - have no complaints

by colept 9y ago

wmf 9y ago

Maybe Gemini; it seems to be the "most legal".

Taek 9y ago
Support on Gemini is also fantastic

Pieman103021 9y ago

Similar experience, locked out of my account and was asked to reply to the ticket I submitted to keep it open before I even got a response. Of course I can't reply because I don't have access to the account associated with the email.

blazamos 9y ago

VP Ops at Coinbase We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e72876 https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e... If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).

will_brown 9y ago
I saw your 3 month remote support contract position, I'm a lawyer in Miami working on my own tech projects, and would be interested in this type of temporary remote work with Coinbase while I hopefully get ramen profitable. if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
- reefoctopus 9y ago
  There is an application and short quiz here: https://www.coinbase.com/careers/6848?locale=en-US https://www.coinbase.com/careers/6848?locale=en-US
- simonebrunozzi 9y ago
  If you are a lawyer, you should line up tens of unhappy Coinbase customers and start a class action.
  - untog 9y ago
    That doesn't sound like something you do while you're concentrating on bootstrapping your own project.
    - lightedman 9y ago
      That's generally not an allowed behavior by lawyers in the first place. First they must be approached by someone else who has been wronged, or the lawyer themselves must approach another firm. Otherwise, he is still free to represent himself and only himself.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
ilaksh 9y ago
VP eh. Awesome that I get a chance to write to an executive. Were you in the meeting where they decided they could roll out the Bitcoin Cash updates in 4 months? If so, did you actually think that customers would not sue within a month, or did you realize that and just were too scared to say anything to the boss? LOL. Soo many lawsuits coming. It will affect Ops. I would have helped my CEO and explained it had to get pushed out faster.
- sowbug 9y ago
  Posts like this one are amazing in their lack of awareness. Let us know when you find the contingency lawyer willing to represent the thin slice of people who (1) desire decentralized currency, but (2) choose a centralized exchange to store their currency, then (3) ignore that exchange's warning to withdraw if they cared about a specific, then-unknown outcome, and finally (4) appeal to the very same centralized authority in #1 to rescue them from the consequences of their own inexplicable laziness. Especially if BCH goes up in value by the time Coinbase adds support. Will you pay them a management/performance fee for the money they made you by protecting you from yourself? (Or are you just a rabble-rouser who never had any funds on Coinbase to begin with?)
  - ilaksh 9y ago
    The average fee for a large class action is about 10%. Coinbase could be holding on to more than a billion USD (right now BCH is around $375) worth of assets for 'safe keeping' until next year. Am I really so naive to think that there aren't lawyers out there that might want to try to get 100 million dollars? LOL. The situation changed. Many were convinced BCH would go no where. Now its worth quite a bit. Also, some may not have had time or got the message. 4 months is obviously an unacceptable delay. The truth hurts. My comment made me look like a rabble-rouser or something, and made me look bad -- maybe it will get me banned from Hacker News. But just maybe that executive will take the hint and help them to push the update out faster. In which case, Coinbase could save itself a lot of hassle in terms of lawsuits and angry customers, and customers (those who did not get the warning or did not have time or were convinced it was going nowhere) could avoid losing a ton of money. Go ahead, shoot the messenger. Sometimes the truth sounds dickish. In this case, they deserve to get comments like this and should pray that someone in their organization heeds them.
wastedbrains 9y ago
biggest thing you need to do to improve support is stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address. Replying should create a support ticket automatically if the email it came from is associated with an account. Further verification could be required depending on the request.
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  > stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address This should be a general rule for the whole internet.
  - twohlix_ 9y ago
    I think sending from a no-reply with a reply-to defined works though.
- 97s 9y ago
  Thank you for saying this. I feel like this is a major problem with a lot of services. If they care that little to send me an email from a no-reply then how do they expect to keep customers who want to reply to the same person. There is absolutely nothing more frustrating then having 5 different people work on a similar ticket and repeat yourself over and over.
tombot 9y ago
A lot of the issues I've encountered (which were simple card verification errors due to addresses change) could have been easily solved with better Error messages, FAQs and staff training. Instead tickets go into a black hole, you wait 6 hours and get a boilerplate response.
tmat 9y ago
your team is to dumb to be in charge of other peoples money.. Bought cannabis seeds(in a legal state) with coins I bought at coinbase(sent to another wallet, then purchased..) 3 years later I get an email saying my account has been closed due to purchases I've made... LOL coinbase can go to hell.
- pc86 9y ago
  > to dumb Okay
  - tmat 9y ago
    yes because the measure of someones intelligence is their grammar on the internet.

evbots 9y ago

yes their support is really terrible. No longer a customer

Yhippa 9y ago

"move fast and break things"

nebabyte 9y ago
When you've been sitting for months with the same broken infra, you're not exactly moving fast.

barefoot 9y ago

I've had a similar experience with coinbase - likely the worst customer experience of my lifetime.

thephyber 9y ago

Speed of Government << speed of business << speed of BitCoin forks "viable alternative" seems pretty subjective. CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e. Choose your exchange carefully.

bostonvaulter2 9y ago

Yeah, a while ago I was trying to send some money to them but I wasn't able to validate my address because I had an apartment number but their form didn't include a space for an apartment number so I got a "non-matching address" error. I even contacted their support but they weren't helpful. I'm probably better off.

kornish 9y ago

Seconded. I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found. No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue. Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.

blazamos 9y ago
VP Ops at Coinbase. Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
- pc86 9y ago
  Kornish's email is in his profile. Perhaps you should email him.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mcherm 9y ago
> I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found. I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem. Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.

sputknick 9y ago

In the process of switching to Gemini. Coinbase limits are too low. I've been waiting for two months for them to raise my limit to half of what Gemini will give me from the start.

colept 9y ago
The only thing that keeps me from switching to Gemini is instant buy. I only buy the amount of Bitcoin I need to send payments immediately.

sowbug 9y ago

Before you declare an exception to Hanlon's Razor, hear my story. Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on. Years later I still have that BTC. I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.

colept 9y ago
Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees." You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing. Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821 https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff... In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it. Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account. The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  Slightly off topic but I think transaction fees should be as close to zero. No, I am not talking about lightning. If we need to start fresh and design a new system that allows it, I am all for ditching Bitcoin altogether as well. It will have served a purpose in that we have learned a lot. To me, low transaction fees is more important than even anonymity or decentralization. My understanding of the problem is that we need to somehow encourage everyone to run a full node. We've decided a transaction fee that goes to "miners" is a good way to do that. Well, my problem is that now miners want higher transaction fees. We have inherently opposite goals and as such I cannot be allied with miners at all.

mrb 9y ago

Gemini. I have been a customer of Coinbase for 4 years and Gemini for 6 months. Gemini's withdrawal to bank accounts are faster (same day). Support is more responsive. That said, both companies are licensed, 100% legit/trustworthy, and I like both honestly, but sightly prefer Gemini overall. Each company is a decent alternative to the other IMHO.

nebabyte 9y ago
In what regard do you consider coinbase a "good alternative" to anything, let alone gemini? The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
- mrb 9y ago
  I stated merely my personal experience. I recognize others have different experiences... usually because of Coinbase's fraud detection false positives. Use Coinbase for a while, building a history of buying or selling, and it will help.
  - nebabyte 9y ago
    Still, in your personal experience, there would/could be examples of things it "does better" than gemini. I was wondering what those were.
csorrell 9y ago
Gemini's identification process is a bit ridiculous imo. After sending them a copy of my drivers license to prove my identity, they emailed me back asking for copy of my most recent pay stub. Ah, no. That's farther than I'm willing to go. A quick google search leads me to stories about Gemini calling employers after receiving paystubs...

runeks 9y ago

I’m not sure how Bitstamp works for people in the US, but as a European I’ve had good experience with it in the past. I used both Bitfinex and Bitstamp before Bitfinex got hacked, and have been using Bitstamp exclusively for the last couple of years without any issues. I use SEPA for EUR withdrawals, which arrive in my bank account the same day. The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_streaming_api_and_exploitation/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched). To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).

blubb-fish 9y ago

bitcoin.de - have no complaints