17 ms·

Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

388 points by rahulshiv 9y ago

drawkbox 9y ago
With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be part of a sketchy exchange (mtgox, btc-e etc where funds were stolen or seized). Some of the rules such as 10k limits on buying/selling/transfers put a natural throttling on bitcoin that other markets don't have, since the buying is immense it should continue to go up for sometime due to this throttling and now reputable sources for buying into the market. Side note: one of the absolute killer features of crypto currency markets is finally we have an always on market. Stock markets and exchanges still operate in the old days of the hours of the day in the country they are based in, crypto currency is an always on market which is nice because it eliminates the after hours/before open games that go on with stocks.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Pretty sure forex markets are 24/7
  - wslh 9y ago
    Not for retail trading and holidays can affect pairs.
    - CamelCaseName 9y ago
      Retail trading in Forex markets is miniscule. <4% in 2013. Source: https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312z.htm https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312z.htm
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    Yeah I guess currency exchanges / futures have always been 24/7 as there is always an open market somewhere in the world. Crypto currencies are close to that I guess. I wonder if equity markets will one day move to always on, I hope they do. With more investment options such as crypto currencies, I wonder if they will eventually do it to stay competitive to investment cash. Nothing worse than pre-market and after hours shenanigans in equity markets, can't pull that in an always on market.
- malloryerik 9y ago
  Most foreign exchange and derivatives exchanges are on 23.5 hours a day, except weekends.
  - ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
    Only derivatives and forex. Stock is still office hours and out of regular hours (+-1 hour I think) is reserved for the big boys.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      Bitcoin is more akin to a Forex or Gold than Stock,
    - aaavl2821 9y ago
      Stock futures are 24 hours. I believe the vast majority of equity volume is in stock futures rather than stocks themselves. Institutional investors drive this volume
      - ucha 9y ago
        Your three statements are false.
        zeusk 9y ago
        On notional value bases, he is probably right but we all know how the derivative guys like to lever up and hide it all under layers of synthetic securities.
        aaavl2821 9y ago
        was recalling info for stock indices rather than individual stocks. stock index futures are 23 hours: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html#equityIndex http://www.cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html#equityIndex stock volume is larger than futures (347B global avg daily volume vs 280 in jan 2016, not sure about now), but futures larger than ETFs (280 vs 88) youll have to convince me that institutional investors dont drive futures volume, cant find data offhand but wont give you benefit of the doubt on that one :)
- nikolay 9y ago
  "As as safe as possible" - are you out of your mind?!
  - bob_theslob646 9y ago
    Serious, this. There is no recourse for recover in the event of securities fraud.
    - Phlarp 9y ago
      For many crypto enthusiasts this is a feature not a bug.
      - acjohnson55 9y ago
        Yeah -- the fraudsters.
        Phlarp 9y ago
        And merchants.
    - paulcole 9y ago
      The original quote is about trading/buyin/selling crypto not real securities. Does any service offer fraud protection and/or make it safer than coinbase?
      - bob_theslob646 9y ago
        Yeah, it's called the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    Safer than it was but your take also shows that it is just starting, people are still deterred by the risk. As it becomes safer the risk goes down and more enter. It is still the early days of crypto currencies for this reason. The fear you have is real, but it is slowly getting better and with that more will enter. Just like investing in early companies, it is riskier now, but as it becomes safer, those risk takers are rewarded. Funds were lost in mtgox, btc-e, many others and there is fraud abound (pre-SEC times or early), but coinbase and the coins they offer are currently safer than it was. As more players enter it will be safer still.
- fpisfun 9y ago
  Actually there was circle they were very similar to coinbase, I used them for a while. They decided to get out of Bitcoin for some reason and I have no idea why.
  - ethagnawl 9y ago
    Circle still sells BTC, just (generally) not to consumers. It's addressed in _Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots_ #250: http://giantrobots.fm/250 http://giantrobots.fm/250
- ehsankia 9y ago
  I've run into all sorts of bugs which made the site annoying to use. 1. My bank account has a 5000$ limit and my credit card has a 750$ limit. After spending 1000$ from the bank (which takes a week), I wanted a quick 50$ from my CC, but it said I was already past the 750$ limit. 2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone?? 3. If you reset Authy, it removes your Coinbase token, and tells you to contact their support. They're very slow as responding, and after a week, I was just told to use my phone number (which again, goes back to #2)...
  - pmorici 9y ago
    The limits are different for everyone and they go up as time goes on and you have successful transactions with them. To avoid waiting you can transfer USD into Coinbase ahead of time and then the buy will confirm instantly when you choose to do the transaction.
  - timjver 9y ago
    >2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone?? I did this a week ago. They ask you for your current (= old) phone number and your new phone number, but you don't actually need access to your old phone number. You just need to enter it.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    I've run into multiple bugs on their website while using firefox... but it'll work fine in chrome. Two I remember: The id+selfie didn't work in firefox. and they had a page that would calculate the max wrong in firefox. Sent an email about both. I don't think they responded to the first one; and on the second, they redesigned their site a bit to delete the page.. then sent me an email asking if I still had that problem (about 1-2 weeks later). I don't think they test very thoroughly... and they definitely don't use firefox.
  - rithvikvibhu 9y ago
- canoebuilder 9y ago
  that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling Starting at what? What is the value proposition that is actually in play here, for which there is some hard evidence of it's existence, other than a speculative frenzy? It's a bit galling how many people this go 'round are just outright saying "yeah, it's a ponzi, come on guys hop on! there's a high ceiling! hope you get your chair when the music stops!"
  - barrkel 9y ago
    If you think that some future economy will run on cryptocurrency (not totally far fetched IMO) and that currency will have network effects (I don't really see this yet, apart from deflation via speculation, which will stop eventually, it's not stable) then there's a possibility of a winner takes all outcome. But it's very easy to doubt any specific currency will be the final winner.
    - canoebuilder 9y ago
      This is what I've always thought, to find a real footing there has to be some economy to which bitcoin/some cryptocurrency is the lingua franca, the closest we've seen in that regard is silk road, et al. and ransomware, if you want to call those economies. But here's the problem with this idea as being some buoy for bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, once an economy of this sort develops with some semblance of structure, that market is going to seek out inefficiencies. First on the chopping block? A massively inefficient distributed currency system. For this reason I think any sustainable use case of a bitcoin like system is necessarily rather niche, and rather 'seedy' or worse, ransomware, etc. But if all the bitcoin dreamers fade away, it becomes much easier to counteract the use of btc-like systems for ransomware extortions and the like.
    - saalweachter 9y ago
      Even in that case the price/market cap is getting absurd. The nominal market cap of Bitcoin is like 1/10th the US money supply (M1) and 1/20th the total gold supply. And people on these threads are still saying they think it has another 100x or more in it!
  - 9y ago
- ethagnawl 9y ago
  Based on my experience* over the past ~week, "robust" is not a word I'd use in the same sentence as "coinbase". *In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    I ran into a problem using them, realized their customer support appears to have given up, and decided it was time to get my money out. That was this morning. As of now, the BTC transaction I initialized is reported as “complete” on my Coinbase account, which now has a balance of 0, and the transaction has not even registered on the blockchain. This is certainly not my definition of “robust.”
    - rexf 9y ago
      While coinbase & BTC seems to be doing well, I've anecdotally seen a bunch of people who can't get a response from coinbase support over long periods of time. Doesn't make relying on coinbase seem like a good idea.
      - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
        Other stories: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 4 years ago they had a problem with customer service and the situation does not appear to have improved: > When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        >> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither. I wonder if that applies to Google too, the most famous company for which you need to get on the HN frontpage to actually reach someone there.
- Redoubts 9y ago
  > Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. 4 Years Ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705
  - boomboomsubban 9y ago
    Four years ago a user had an issue that took over three days to rectify. Clearly the company is a scam.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      Now it takes ten days. A 3x improvement!
      - boomboomsubban 9y ago
        Again, according to one user, who is also claiming to be transferring fractions of a penny.
- njarboe 9y ago
  Coinbase does give one the sense of security and ease of use. It does not seem sketchy, is American based, has KYC procedures, etc. If they lose coins or go under, a lot of "normal" people will lose money. Not sure what regulations might be passed in Congress if that happens, but the cryptocurrency Wild West would likely be over in America at that point.
  - drawkbox 9y ago
    Agreed. Maybe one day they will be so big that they are deemed "too big to fail" like the over-extended failed big banks and the bailouts/TARP of the Great Recession.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      Sounds like a justification for seizing it. For safety and security. But the government wouldn't do that, would they?
      - drawkbox 9y ago
        If the government seized funds of Coinbase with how entrenched it is even now, there would be massive legal challenges. Ultimately that might be a good thing in terms of forfeiture reform. Coinbase (US company) is orders of magnitude different than btc-e or mtgox etc.
        Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
        drawkbox 9y ago
        Nothing like that would happen today though as that was more a reaction to the Great Depression and the wealthy hoarding during times where cash was constrained. Also, that was gold so who is to say that couldn't happen to gold today if it can happen to cryptocurrencies, any hoarding would be a target in another depression that bad much like things like offshoring might be or are in some case. Why it won't happen today you can base off the reaction during the Great Recession, we bailed out failing banks with TARP that got us into this mess by over-extending leverage instead of consumers. The FDR order helped the economy and all people at the time over the wealthy. FDR, if he was in charge during the Great Recession, probably would have made new banks and let them fail if that happened under him, a people's president. The SEC was also created during his admin which is arguably the best thing to ever happen to investing in the US, solid markets since Securities Act of 1933 and SEC inception, cryptocurrency will eventually be more closely regulated as it grows.
- _wmd 9y ago
  Forex trading happens 24/7 the world over
- csomar 9y ago
  As a heavy bitcoin/crypto trader, Coinbase and Gdax are one of the worst exchanges out there. Speaking strictly from a technical point of view. Not only their Front-End interface (Gdax) suffers from lag probably due to poor engineering but they also made terrible mistakes at the beginning. One of them being a lost deposit. The address generated by the site was wrong and thus the deposit never credited. It took a couple months for support to get on this and refund the lost amount. This happened a couple years ago. So had it happened now I'm not sure if technical support will ever get back. I also failed to contact their technical support about other issues (can't really remember) but there was no way to reach them. They don't have proper support, they just have monkeys that tries to save face on social media. Only. The best exchange so far from a technical perspective is Bitfinex. It is surprising because it is quite shady. But it is a rock solid exchange; and it is magnificently engineered. No wonder it is the top exchange out there. And Finex has handled the recent surge much better than Gdax or any other exchange out there.
  - Jommi 9y ago
    Wait you're suggesting one of the legally most robust changes out there (the one doing the most compliance) is actually slower than the shady, non-transparent exchange..?? Wow. Wonder why that might be
    - csomar 9y ago
      This has nothing to do with compliance/legality. It has to do with engineering.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Because of bitcoin's origins in a largely an-cap community - and the continual anti-Government, pro-capitalist mindset in a significant part of the community as it stands now - there's not actually as much demand as there should be for "legal" exchanges etc. As a result, there's much more competition in the "shady" exchange space, less competition in the "legal" exchange space, and two things result: people occasionally lose a significant chunk of their life savings to shady exchanges, and legal exchanges don't have as much of a drive to be technically brilliant.
- zeep 9y ago
  In my experience, Coinbase/GDAX becomes unavailable every time the cost of Bitcoin drops significantly in a really short period of time... it happened again this morning a little before 7am... Not sure if they are trying to control the drops or if their servers can't handle the load.
  - mv4 9y ago
    I was wondering the same thing about GDAX/Coinbase. I've been seeing "partial" outages both on their portal and their API side. Partial outages are the worst, as they only leave 'some' of the participants unable to act.
  - zeep 9y ago
    and here is another big drop now... and GDAX is down again...
- module0000 9y ago
  For what it's worth, you can expose yourself to BTC in the futures market later this month. That's regulated to the same degree all commodity futures are regulated(which is "a lot"). Your profits(and losses) are guaranteed by the clearinghouse(not the exchange), which mitigates your exposure to another mtgox-ish/btc-e/yadoxi event. In terms of "always on", the futures market is always on. You can trade softs, metals, currencies, bonds - you name it. The leverage available is 200:1, 50 times greater than the SEC's limit on security margins(eg the stock market). This means you can make(and lose) catastrophically larger amounts than you began with. Controlling your risk is no longer done by a broker limiting your leverage, it's done by you and involves methodical discipline. The downside: you are trading against pros with deeper pockets and more experience than you could possibly imagine. You won't be out smarting, out trading, or getting "an edge" on anyone except the other retail players.
40acres 9y ago
Coinbase seems to be the quintessential "sell shovels during a gold rush" company. Definitely provides a good case study about how to create a successful business during new industry booms.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  The giant balance up top is an incredible FOMO machine. In the best findom/gamification, you can increase your "score" simply by giving them more money. The volatility makes the game more difficult to predict than most free-to-play games, but the daily graphs going up so fast make it hard to resist.
  - zzxxddere333 9y ago
    you mean... like most banking apps? god forbid they make obvious what most users are using the app for.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    My brokerage account and bank accounts also display the balance. Sometimes at the top, sometimes in the middle. It's a UI decision, more than a FOMO game. With that mindset, capitalism itself is a FOMO and the balance at the top of your head (your net worth) the FOMO machine.
- latchkey 9y ago
  In my opinion, selling the miner hardware is more like selling the shovels. Coinbase is more like the laundry service. I'm sure someone else can poke holes in this as well. =)
  - lallysingh 9y ago
    Let's be careful when taking about any kind of laundering when discussing Bitcoin :-)
    - latchkey 9y ago
carbocation 9y ago
(Coinbase: YC S12)
Cookingboy 9y ago
Coinbase has a key difference from traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab, Scottrade, etc. It doesn't charge a flat fee for buy/sell crypto currency, but a 2-3% fee based on the transaction value. So even though I'm sure they've been making cash hand over fist this past 12 months, it makes any sort of future prediction extremely difficult. They not only have to predict customer growth (which leads to transaction volume), but also the price of those cryptocurrencies. It's akin to calculate position from nothing but a accelerometer, and that double integral would be quite a bit of margin of error. But in the end it may not even matter, as far as revenue growth and even profit wise I'm sure they are doing absolutely amazingly. Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Coinbase has higher daily revenue (definitely more profitable) than Uber at this point.
- mifeng 9y ago
  I bet Coinbase makes more money from their exchange (GDAX) which does $1 billion each day in volume. While limit orders are free, market orders cost 0.25% of transaction value.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    Why would anyone ever want to use a market order versus a limit? In any exchange, for any kind of trading? If you're really ok with e.g. selling for 0.01, set that as your limit.
    - sobani 9y ago
      Because the market could move against you. If you're ok with buying for 100, but someone else is selling for 99, you've effectively done a market order and have to pay the fees. However if the lowest sell is 101 and then the price moves up to 105, you've just screwed yourself for 4 in order to save 0.25
      - MichaelGG 9y ago
        Huh? Just set your limit to 105 or 200 or 10500. There's no reason to ever use a market order unless there's some other severe limitation on limit orders in a particular implementation.
gt_ 9y ago
I have recommended Coinbase to many people. But, a few days ago, I had a double charge on my bank account from them and have learned since that their customer support is essentially non-existent. It’s been 8 days with no response by e-mail, their posted phone number results in a busy signal, and the alternate numbers I found posted on forums go straight to hold music before hanging up after a couple of minutes. I filed a fraud report with my bank.
- c0nducktr 9y ago
  I have had a case open with them since May 6th of this year, and have not heard a thing back other than their automated replies. They froze my account, required that I pay them money to even get access to my transaction history, and then when I did (foolish, I know) the records don't show any reason for me to have owed them money. It wasn't a large amount (<$50), but I'm still pretty upset about it. I have moved to another platform. It's not a unique issue either, just look at all the posts on the Coinbase subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/
- touchofevil 9y ago
  It may be that your bank is charging you an international transaction fee and that is the second charge you are seeing. This happened to me the other day with Coinbase. If you buy from Coinbase with a credit card the transaction actually gets processed in London. Some American banks will charge you a 3% fee for this international transaction. So it will look like Coinbase has charged you twice, but actually the second charge is from your bank.
  - gt_ 9y ago
    The second charge is actually an amount identical to the first charge, only 1 minute later. It was a couple hundred dollars.
- benbreen 9y ago
  I am on my fifth month of waiting for my account to be unfrozen so I can withdraw my funds. I managed to get through once by phone (was assured that the issue was being resolved) and once via email (same) but for the past two months, nothing. I believe the CEO and probably several other employees are on HN so if any of them see this - please get your act together. Scaling is great but customer support needs to come along for the ride first. If anyone is wondering, this happened because I accidentally opened the app while on vacation in a country that the US sanctions.
JepZ 9y ago
> No company had made it simpler to sign up, link a bank account or debit card, and begin buying Bitcoin. Actually, I think it is still too difficult. I mean it is not that difficult, but if you had to send every e-commerce shop a photo of your driver license just to buy something there would be a lot fewer people buying stuff online.
- nordsieck 9y ago
  There is a certain amount of financial regulation that they (and most other exchanges) have to comply with.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  It's not an e-commerce shop, it's an online exchange dealing in financial products, one that has often been associated with illegal activities like drug dealing, tax evasion, etc. They have to play nice with the IRS because people using coinbase don't realize that any gains they make from it is taxable and/or should be auditable.
ggm 9y ago
"too big to fail" doesn't yet apply to any entity directly engaged in this space, as its entire business model. J.P. Morgan got away with a central role in the GFC because it did not suit the regulatory environment to kick one of the legs of a wobbly table. The same does not apply to this, or any other coin- centric company. Yes, in our terms, these are huge dollar sums. But if you work in fintech, this is a small pimple on the side of trades in real goods, and existing financial instruments. Look: the fintech people get this space, and they are not dissing the model entirely. But please, don't pretend that the feds could not shut this agency down tomorrow, and it would have almost no effect on the US bottom line reports for financials.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  That's a pretty good summary of a casual conversation I had with someone that works in investing about Bitcoin and Ethereum. He said blockchain is here to stay and that knowing what companies are going to try and do with it is useful but these currencies, or at the very least, their value, could go away very quickly.
  - tome 9y ago
    This is what my uneducated hunch is, so I'm glad to hear you say it, but I'm enjoying reading all the countervailing opinions too, to educate myself further!
    - JBlue42 9y ago
      I'm glad to have finally pushed myself to read and learn more about all this sense it does seem to be hitting the mainstream. Here's a shit ton of reading if you're interested: https://github.com/xel/blockchain-stuff https://github.com/xel/blockchain-stuff
zkms 9y ago
I used to use coinbase but some godawful KYC/AML thing kicked in and asked me to send them a "selfie" of myself, which creeped me the hell out. I'm a US citizen, am not on any sort of list of prohibited people, and had already given them a photo of my driver's licence and my SSN -- and have had no issues with opening other bank/bitcoin-exchange accounts online previously. I thus switched to Gemini because I do not want to support this invasive nonsense. It's literally an automated version of "put shoe on head" (the request that /b/tards would make of camgirls that they wanted to troll). Between that, and the thing where you literally have to enter your BANK'S username/password to ANOTHER WEBSITE (coinbase, in this case) to prove you have that account (of course it chokes on 2FA); the USian banking system is such a scary bad mess -- and i'm pretty sure that that's a significant driver of bitcoin adoption (and there's also the ACH clusterfuck).
- stephengillie 9y ago
  You had to provide your bank user/pass to Coinbase? I only had to provide routing and account numbers, then verify the ACH amounts (edit: and driver's license photo). But I'm only in the shallow end of the kiddie pool here.
  - asaph 9y ago
    Coinbase offers both options: bank username & password or routing & account numbers. If you choose to provide bank username & password, verification is instant. If you choose to provide routing & account numbers, verification via deposit/withdrawal of small amounts takes days.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      I must have missed the user/pass option during the sign-up flow.
  - joering2 9y ago
    ACH does not work in read or in write-only mode. Once you provide someone your ACH info, they can deposit you money.. or empty out your bank account! I had few rough service providers who tried to come up with some magical charges (technical fee of $500 per year) after agreement was signed and had to change bank numbers to make sure they wont take the money out since it would be more than $500 to fight them in court. The company is called EMS Merchants btw.. you can read horrible stories of merchants screwed by them in this way via ACH on online forums.
kvee 9y ago
Most interesting thing I learned from this article: Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technical parts of coinbase.
  - oconnor663 9y ago
    I dunno, are we happy with the status quo? Making money is nice, but I miss being able to use bitcoins to buy things.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      I have a bitcoin debit card. It works just fine thanks. I can spend it anywhere that accepts a card.
      - tdurden 9y ago
        You are spending fiat though with that debit card, like every debit card. Transactions are off-chain.
        Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        That makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. By your logic, people using coinbase to hold their coins aren't holding bitcoin. It is exactly the same. Bitcoin from my wallet is being spent. It is increasing in value while i don't spend it, because it is in bitcoin. It is no different than an American using their cc in europe.
eqmvii 9y ago
If the bubble bursts, this will be a delightful pull quote in the postmortem: "Correction: December 6, 2017 An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misidentified the place where Coinbase employees were gathered for lunch. It was the gaming room, not the cafeteria."
- travisjungroth 9y ago
  I work at Coinbase. If you want the inside scoop: "game room" is a bit of a misnomer for that room. It's a large room with a big theater screen. All day it's full of meetings and presentations. There are a bunch of games on shelves as well, and some people play them after hours.
  - kbody 9y ago
    Btw, do you have any engineers capable of working to upgrade the platform to use SegWit? I find it weird that Brian advertises open positions like there's nobody there capable of doing it.
    - travisjungroth 9y ago
      I wouldn't take any job ad copy as disparaging to the current team.
      - kbody 9y ago
        Neither am I, just in this case I know some context that lead me to this question. SegWit being pretty much the most important update to Bitcoin so far with a lot of advantages, I would expect that CB would give top priority on supporting it. But Brian when asked about it, he replied with a job ad about new positions, while I would expect they would put their most experienced engineers on it, instead of depend on new recruits for such crucial and maybe challenging project.
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      I'd treat such an advertisement not as a signal "there's nobody there capable of doing it" but rather as a signal "we'd like to do this thing, but it's not important enough to divert anyone who's working on stuff that matters to us, so someone new can tackle it".
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thisisit 9y ago
Does anyone know the hot/cold wallet address for Coinbase, like the below one for Bitfinex? https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmc...
- blhack 9y ago
  It seems likely that coinbase has many cold and hot wallets which are geographically and technically distributed across many vaults and key generators.
  - likelynew 9y ago
    Good for them that they can spend bitcoin cash without people noticing.
cellis 9y ago
So, any guesses as to top line for coinbase?
shiado 9y ago
It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the private keys, has gone out the window due to convenience and a lack of understanding of the fundamental blockchain technology by speculators. Coinbase is central in these facts.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 9y ago
  It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.
  - raducu 9y ago
    I think that's a clear sign of bubble -- I'll just buy this thing because it will just appreciate forever.
  - IkmoIkmo 9y ago
    Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate electricity with which we heat up our oceans, causing ice caps to melt and global warming to occur. It's a bit of a joke. We're now all valuing a system, above other systems, for its unique decentralised properties, while subsequently throwing that out the window, yet still expecting this system to be uniquely valuable. We're all introducing trust into a trustless system, and paying intermediaries and middlemen a cut in the process. That's fine for other investments, e.g. productive assets that are valuable for other reasons. But it's not fine for an investment into something that's valuable because it's trustless, decentralised and disintermediating. There's some nuance I'm leaving out of course, you can argue against this post, but by and large you can't ignore this massive disconnect between bitcoin's value proposition and bitcoin's reality. Nor can you argue anymore, like we used to, that it's just a phase. If anything, there's less and less regard for personally run wallets, personal nodes, personal mining, personal transactions, and an increase in use of centralised parties, with centralised wallet providers, cloud and company mining, transaction processors etc.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
I posted this earlier today, and earlier than that as an Ask HN. I promise after this I won't post it again, at least for awhile. This seems sufficiently important that it's worth a slight annoyance. What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin? There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about: 1. There is no upper bound on the price 2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong Greed is a powerful motivator. It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing. What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further. It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?" I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about. It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral. Is there a way to prevent that? Now, to add to the discussion: Several people have voiced that there is no reason to worry, both because it's impossible for BTC to hit $1M/coin and because this is all conjecture. But there is every indication that the BTC craze could in fact spread to the entire world -- literally nobody will be able to escape thinking about it, because that is what the world values. This has low probability, but just like climate change, it's worth planning for it now rather than later. Can we please try to think of something? Look at this[2] and let that graph sink in. Fiction is also worth taking seriously. Satellites were predicted by fiction long before they were deployed. Many of the most influential ideas start as works of art. The dystopian future as envisioned in [1] is a far cry from how things would turn out, but the underlying idea is that we will become subservient to a tiny few. It's only a matter of time before that money starts turning into real power. So, if we could set aside our selfishness and try to snap out of the getting-rich craze, and ask "Can we possibly stop this?" it would probably be one of the most impactful ways you could spend a few minutes. Making BTC illegal won't work. It'll just go to countries where it's not, and take the people with them. I don't think it would be possible to sneak a backdoor into BTC. People would notice by now. And even if it works, they'd just fork and preserve the wealth. Even if one were to theoretically become batshit insane and try to hunt down everyone who holds BTC, that won't work either, because it's easy to conceal. The price of mixing services will just rise to the point of taking transaction fees into account, and that's how much people will start to pay. I can't think of anything else. Ideas? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_as_predicted_by_luka_magnotta_aka_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_a...
goofed 9y ago
That "What is money" slide is pretty much brainwash
plaidfuji 9y ago
What I find most interesting about Coinbase is that they quote your selling exchange rate the moment you place a sell order. If I click "sell" right now, they lock in the $13,000 exchange rate or whatever it is. The amount that shows up in my bank days later is exactly what they quoted at the time I placed the sell order. When people start selling off, this policy is either going to drive them to bankruptcy or create a lot of unhappy customers.
- bowmessage 9y ago
  You must have never had a transaction cancelled for being ‘too risky’. Happened a lot for me in the past.
  - doug3465 9y ago
    Can you explain more about what happened?
- MarkMc 9y ago
  I don't understand why it's a problem. Coinbase received $13,000 from User A and they pay it to User B. Why will Coinbase go bankrupt or customers be unhappy?
- PeterisP 9y ago
  That's not a symptom of a problem - the time delta of settlement with you has no relation with the time delta of them balancing their position. It's just as big bank forex deals work; if a customer of a big bank sells $100m euros for dollars in their bank, the bank (most banks who don't want to play market maker) will often get a matching deal within minutes, but the deal can often be actually settled on the next business day or the day after that.
j_s 9y ago
I would love to hear more about what must be Coinbase's love/hate relationship with MongoDB. From my very uninformed perspective, the tool mostly does what it says on the tin these days, but that hasn't always been the case. I would be interested in following along with Coinbase during this transition, and hearing more about what MongoDB is used for there today.
_pdp_ 9y ago
Unless you buy with credit cards, good luck making bank transfers work on Coinbase. EDIT: Downvoting with no explanation will not change my experience. I believe that cryptocurrencies are the future but having to wait weeks for a simple bank transfer only to find out that your funds will be returned with no explanation why apart from a cryptic message that has something to do with your bank account name not matching your coinbase name is rather annoying. Match how? What do you compare? An extra dot at the end of your middle name will throw off the system without any reasonable explanation. Honestly, if Coinbase improves their messages in this situation, it may actually reduce the overhead on their customer support but I gather that this might be intentional.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Never heard anyone have that problem. You're in minority so please don't speak like this is some major problem.
  - _pdp_ 9y ago
    Do you work for Coinbase?
    - Kiro 9y ago
      Yeah, because it's entirely impossible that you may have just been unlucky or messed it up on your side?
      - _pdp_ 9y ago
        I can send customer support transcript if you want as attacking me does nothing constructive for this conversation. Also, if you do a quick web search you will find that this is not just unlucky, it is common although in the grand scheme of things it might be nothing for Coinbase or perhaps you are just not personally dealing with these types of problems. You know a minority can be a pretty large group of people. Look, my comment is not meant to bash Coinbase but there are issues with the service and it can be ironed out to make it so much better.
aloukissas 9y ago
Coinbase is getting away with murder charging outrageous fees, cashing in the bitcoin frenzy. Kinda like the shady brokerages in the 80s.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  In return they offer a simple and accessible interface - if you want low fees you can go ahead to gdax or one of the alternative, more difficult to use exchanges.
- naveen99 9y ago
  You do have gdax where you can buy for zero fees with limit orders. No harm in letting others pay more for convenience.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  Maybe, but how are they supposed to hire employees to build and run the infrastructure and rent datacenter space / cloud VPSes / etc. if they do it for free? I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious - hey, the fees seemed high to me, too. Luckily the appreciation of the coins made those icky feelings disappear quickly.
  - aloukissas 9y ago
    AFAIK, running a full-on brokerage (e.g. Schwab, Robinhood) is probably more expensive as it's highly regulated, with non-trivial compliance costs, for example. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be new, digital "securities", without the fat of the incumbents. I'm probably oversimplifying this here, but at the age of easy cloud scaling, where their main job is a secure digital wallet storage, their fees are mostly taking advantage of the BTC craze. To clarify: their % fee isn't that high - the fact that it's uncapped though is pretty outrageous. A $10K trade on Schwab costs a few dollars; on Coinbase, a couple hundred. I guess once BTC futures are out and one can speculate on BTC in the open market, they'll have to feel the pressure and adjust their pricing.
deleted 9y ago
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marcosscriven 9y ago
I bought £100 of Bitcoin in September via Coinbase, pretty much just to have a play with Bitcoin itself, and try a couple of transactions. To my horror, I discovered that transaction wasn't actually in the blockchain, and that Coinbase essentially has an internal system you just have to trust, which seemed to be contrary to the whole idea of a global ledger. I setup my own wallet and transferred it to that (thus achieving my initial goal of seeing my own transaction in the block chain). There's no way I'd put any significant amounts into Bitcoin, let alone Coinbase.
- lend000 9y ago
  Would it also horrify you to learn that when you transfer money from your savings to your checking account (at the same bank), those transactions are not cleared by the Federal Reserve?
  - tome 9y ago
    I doubt it would, firstly because that hasn't been touted as the "point" of dollars, and secondly because FDIC insures deposits.
artur_makly 9y ago
im traveling and when inattempted to join.. due to my IP u couldnt get a US based account which would allow me to buy coins. i asked support and got some automated answer which didnt work. i responded and waited again. lost huge opportunities for weeks. Their ID system keeps throwing me errors when using my US passport. i have no Us drivers license or Active Us Cel phone for auth.
ssharp 9y ago
With the wild price swings, Bitcoin has practically no value as anything other than a speculative investment. Are any of these people downloading Coinbase and buying coins really interested in transacting in Bitcoin or are they just buying Beanie Babies? Although, as someone who thought the bubble would burst at $1,000, I'm quite impressed at how much interest it has garnered. I just don't seeing it end well for many people.
- IamNotAtWork 9y ago
  Why? Most people just put money they don't need into it, like spare cash. Depending on when you bought, chances of ever going down to that level now is incredibly small.
  - ssharp 9y ago
    I'm not so sure in the middle of a buying rush that people are just putting spare cash into it. But the larger point is that even if people are investing small amounts, they're doing so to ride the rush, not because they see value in Bitcoin as anything other than an investment.
hectorr1 9y ago
I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are: 1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulation. Which ultimately gives them an advantage on the customer service front relative to their competition for retail investors. And frankly, they aren't much worse than most online brokers. These priorities were also sufficient. Amazon was competing against major incumbents and had to win on cost and service. By outcompeting an empty field on compliance, Coinbase has built a significant moat around US retail. They have relationships with Fidelity and USAA that signal legitimacy. They had cold storage while incumbents were/are still saying 'blockchain not Bitcoin'. The critical question is how they manage customer service and communications going forward. Amazon, Facebook, and Google created monopolies based on a great user experience. Uber destroyed a thousand monopolies for the same reason. Coinbase is riding the coattails of Bitcoin's awesome UX, the warm fuzzies people get from making 10x on an investment. If and when there is a correction, their core business will hinge on how well they handle a large sell-off.
- vocatus_gate 9y ago
  Agree with almost everything you've said, and unfortunately if past experience is anything to go by, they'll crash/go down during the next big price dip.
  - egeozcan 9y ago
    Maybe this is because of the immense increase in the number transactions during a dip? (really just guessing)
  - ni-hil 9y ago
    They are down right now
- ukoki 9y ago
  Yep! I contacted customer support over a month ago as I am unable to make withdrawals. Still haven't heard a thing from them.
paulpauper 9y ago
I have heard so many bad things about coinbase...as the mtgox scandal shows, sometimes the most popular exchange is not the best I would rather spread my $ in several smaller ones
kgwgk 9y ago
Slightly offtopic, but this is so funny: (From today’s “money stuff” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-shareholders-and-direct-listing https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-sha...) Happy Bitcoin 13,000 Day. I mean, that was yesterday. A few hours after I sent out Money Stuff saying Happy Bitcoin 12,000 Day, which was also yesterday. At this rate we'll have Bitcoin 25,000 before my "Bitcoin 25,000 Before Dow 25,000" hats get here. Happy Bitcoin 14,000 Day. That was also yesterday. Happy Bitcoin 15,000 Day. That was this morning. See what I mean? Happy Bitcoin 16,000 Day. That will be this afternoon, probably. Happy Bitcoin 17,000 Day. Just in case, why not. Still more bitcoin. Bitcoin futures are set to start trading next week at CBOE Global Markets Inc.'s futures exchange, with CME Group Inc. following the week after that, but some people object: The Futures Industry Association, whose members include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., detailed its concerns in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday. The association said there should have been more discussion about margin levels, trading limits, stress tests and clearing before the contracts were given a green light. For clearing members of futures exchanges, the worry is that some bitcoin futures trader will blow up, and that bitcoin is so volatile that the trader's margin won't be sufficient to cover its losses. That will leave the members of the exchanges on the hook for losses. This seems like a ... totally reasonable worry? If you collected 25 percent margin from someone who was short bitcoin on Monday, they would have blown through it by this morning. Also the standard fate of bitcoin exchanges seems to be to get hacked and lose their customers' money, so if you are a customer of a futures exchange I can see why you'd be skeptical of your futures exchange turning into a bitcoin exchange. Meanwhile, here is a nice profile of Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange that hasn't been hacked, much. (Though: "In May, the company was criticized by a customer who could not reach anyone at the company after his account was hacked.") It "runs an exchange, called GDAX, tailored to larger investors," overseen by Adam White. "A year ago, his Wall Street outreach was difficult, but 'it’s all inbound now,' Mr. White said." Indeed. Oh and another bitcoin thing was hacked: NiceHash, the marketplace for cloud-based mining of cryptocurrencies, said hackers breached its systems and stole an unknown amount of bitcoin from its virtual wallet. Some $60 million worth of bitcoins may have been affected. Elsewhere here's a guy who lost the password to his 40 bitcoins.
- PeterisP 9y ago
IamNotAtWork 9y ago
So can you actually withdraw money from coinbase, if you say had 100 coins (I don't). Everyone said back then that Mt. Gox was safe because it was the biggest. It being based in Japan was a huge red flag, but nobody cared until all of its money disappeared. Coinbase being based in the US probably won't happen because there could be consequences for them if they disappear with the coins, but having been burned by Mt. Gox fiasco is making me sit out of crypto, but with some sour grapes because each day bitcoin just go up and up. Was $13000 yesterday and it's almost $16000 today. It took a week to go from $10000 to $15000. Insane.
- econner 9y ago
  It's an exchange so if there's no one to take the other side of the trade then you wouldn't be able to sell. They probably float a little bit of coin, but likely not enough to wipe them out. The question is what they'd do in a crisis. Would they freeze everyone's coin? Would other exchanges do the same? Now, they could be hacked and lose a lot of customers' coin without realizing it as happened with Mt Gox. This is why it's advisable to hold your coin in an offline wallet, but doing so makes it harder to panic sell. But that shouldn't matter since we're all definitely here just to HODL crypto and see it actually be useful and we're definitely not just to try to speculate off of it. Right?? Right???
- jpindar 9y ago
  It was some time ago, and a much smaller amount, but when I withdrew money from them it was no problem, and reasonably prompt. (Same with Fanduel, BTW - another industry some people are skeptical about).
imartin2k 9y ago
Coinbase is down again. This seems to happen with every BTC price spike now, and since these spikes get more extreme, I guess Coinbase's infrastructure always lags behind.
seattle_spring 9y ago
> 57) Customer Service 58) Recruiting process
aussie1233 9y ago
Support is horrible, here is my story - not sure how common that problem is. Would be interested if others have the same valdation issue. I have a case open for multiple weeks to get my address validated. I was able to buy initially, but now it pops up a "quiz" (that's how support calls it), where i have to enter my address and then it says that it's not a valid permanent address. Which is funny because that is the same address the accepted when I signed up and validated my ID. There support literally tells me, "sorry your problem, but you can try the quiz again- and maybe one day it will work". To me thats an unbelievable statement. I think they have to stop onnoarding customers and solve some of their basic flows first. What if I wanted to sell? It is just not possible within Coinbase.

388 points by rahulshiv 9y ago

With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be part of a sketchy exchange (mtgox, btc-e etc where funds were stolen or seized). Some of the rules such as 10k limits on buying/selling/transfers put a natural throttling on bitcoin that other markets don't have, since the buying is immense it should continue to go up for sometime due to this throttling and now reputable sources for buying into the market. Side note: one of the absolute killer features of crypto currency markets is finally we have an always on market. Stock markets and exchanges still operate in the old days of the hours of the day in the country they are based in, crypto currency is an always on market which is nice because it eliminates the after hours/before open games that go on with stocks.

pishpash 9y ago
Pretty sure forex markets are 24/7
- wslh 9y ago
  Not for retail trading and holidays can affect pairs.
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    Retail trading in Forex markets is miniscule. <4% in 2013. Source: https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312z.htm https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312z.htm
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Yeah I guess currency exchanges / futures have always been 24/7 as there is always an open market somewhere in the world. Crypto currencies are close to that I guess. I wonder if equity markets will one day move to always on, I hope they do. With more investment options such as crypto currencies, I wonder if they will eventually do it to stay competitive to investment cash. Nothing worse than pre-market and after hours shenanigans in equity markets, can't pull that in an always on market.
malloryerik 9y ago
Most foreign exchange and derivatives exchanges are on 23.5 hours a day, except weekends.
- ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
  Only derivatives and forex. Stock is still office hours and out of regular hours (+-1 hour I think) is reserved for the big boys.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Bitcoin is more akin to a Forex or Gold than Stock,
  - aaavl2821 9y ago
    Stock futures are 24 hours. I believe the vast majority of equity volume is in stock futures rather than stocks themselves. Institutional investors drive this volume
    - ucha 9y ago
      Your three statements are false.
      - zeusk 9y ago
        On notional value bases, he is probably right but we all know how the derivative guys like to lever up and hide it all under layers of synthetic securities.
      - aaavl2821 9y ago
        was recalling info for stock indices rather than individual stocks. stock index futures are 23 hours: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html#equityIndex http://www.cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html#equityIndex stock volume is larger than futures (347B global avg daily volume vs 280 in jan 2016, not sure about now), but futures larger than ETFs (280 vs 88) youll have to convince me that institutional investors dont drive futures volume, cant find data offhand but wont give you benefit of the doubt on that one :)
nikolay 9y ago
"As as safe as possible" - are you out of your mind?!
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Serious, this. There is no recourse for recover in the event of securities fraud.
  - Phlarp 9y ago
    For many crypto enthusiasts this is a feature not a bug.
    - acjohnson55 9y ago
      Yeah -- the fraudsters.
      - Phlarp 9y ago
        And merchants.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    The original quote is about trading/buyin/selling crypto not real securities. Does any service offer fraud protection and/or make it safer than coinbase?
    - bob_theslob646 9y ago
      Yeah, it's called the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Safer than it was but your take also shows that it is just starting, people are still deterred by the risk. As it becomes safer the risk goes down and more enter. It is still the early days of crypto currencies for this reason. The fear you have is real, but it is slowly getting better and with that more will enter. Just like investing in early companies, it is riskier now, but as it becomes safer, those risk takers are rewarded. Funds were lost in mtgox, btc-e, many others and there is fraud abound (pre-SEC times or early), but coinbase and the coins they offer are currently safer than it was. As more players enter it will be safer still.
fpisfun 9y ago
Actually there was circle they were very similar to coinbase, I used them for a while. They decided to get out of Bitcoin for some reason and I have no idea why.
- ethagnawl 9y ago
  Circle still sells BTC, just (generally) not to consumers. It's addressed in _Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots_ #250: http://giantrobots.fm/250 http://giantrobots.fm/250
ehsankia 9y ago
I've run into all sorts of bugs which made the site annoying to use. 1. My bank account has a 5000$ limit and my credit card has a 750$ limit. After spending 1000$ from the bank (which takes a week), I wanted a quick 50$ from my CC, but it said I was already past the 750$ limit. 2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone?? 3. If you reset Authy, it removes your Coinbase token, and tells you to contact their support. They're very slow as responding, and after a week, I was just told to use my phone number (which again, goes back to #2)...
- pmorici 9y ago
  The limits are different for everyone and they go up as time goes on and you have successful transactions with them. To avoid waiting you can transfer USD into Coinbase ahead of time and then the buy will confirm instantly when you choose to do the transaction.
- timjver 9y ago
  >2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone?? I did this a week ago. They ask you for your current (= old) phone number and your new phone number, but you don't actually need access to your old phone number. You just need to enter it.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  I've run into multiple bugs on their website while using firefox... but it'll work fine in chrome. Two I remember: The id+selfie didn't work in firefox. and they had a page that would calculate the max wrong in firefox. Sent an email about both. I don't think they responded to the first one; and on the second, they redesigned their site a bit to delete the page.. then sent me an email asking if I still had that problem (about 1-2 weeks later). I don't think they test very thoroughly... and they definitely don't use firefox.
- rithvikvibhu 9y ago
canoebuilder 9y ago
that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling Starting at what? What is the value proposition that is actually in play here, for which there is some hard evidence of it's existence, other than a speculative frenzy? It's a bit galling how many people this go 'round are just outright saying "yeah, it's a ponzi, come on guys hop on! there's a high ceiling! hope you get your chair when the music stops!"
- barrkel 9y ago
  If you think that some future economy will run on cryptocurrency (not totally far fetched IMO) and that currency will have network effects (I don't really see this yet, apart from deflation via speculation, which will stop eventually, it's not stable) then there's a possibility of a winner takes all outcome. But it's very easy to doubt any specific currency will be the final winner.
  - canoebuilder 9y ago
    This is what I've always thought, to find a real footing there has to be some economy to which bitcoin/some cryptocurrency is the lingua franca, the closest we've seen in that regard is silk road, et al. and ransomware, if you want to call those economies. But here's the problem with this idea as being some buoy for bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, once an economy of this sort develops with some semblance of structure, that market is going to seek out inefficiencies. First on the chopping block? A massively inefficient distributed currency system. For this reason I think any sustainable use case of a bitcoin like system is necessarily rather niche, and rather 'seedy' or worse, ransomware, etc. But if all the bitcoin dreamers fade away, it becomes much easier to counteract the use of btc-like systems for ransomware extortions and the like.
  - saalweachter 9y ago
    Even in that case the price/market cap is getting absurd. The nominal market cap of Bitcoin is like 1/10th the US money supply (M1) and 1/20th the total gold supply. And people on these threads are still saying they think it has another 100x or more in it!
- 9y ago
ethagnawl 9y ago
Based on my experience* over the past ~week, "robust" is not a word I'd use in the same sentence as "coinbase". *In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.
- gt_ 9y ago
  I ran into a problem using them, realized their customer support appears to have given up, and decided it was time to get my money out. That was this morning. As of now, the BTC transaction I initialized is reported as “complete” on my Coinbase account, which now has a balance of 0, and the transaction has not even registered on the blockchain. This is certainly not my definition of “robust.”
  - rexf 9y ago
    While coinbase & BTC seems to be doing well, I've anecdotally seen a bunch of people who can't get a response from coinbase support over long periods of time. Doesn't make relying on coinbase seem like a good idea.
    - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      Other stories: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 4 years ago they had a problem with customer service and the situation does not appear to have improved: > When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        >> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither. I wonder if that applies to Google too, the most famous company for which you need to get on the HN frontpage to actually reach someone there.
Redoubts 9y ago
> Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. 4 Years Ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  Four years ago a user had an issue that took over three days to rectify. Clearly the company is a scam.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Now it takes ten days. A 3x improvement!
    - boomboomsubban 9y ago
      Again, according to one user, who is also claiming to be transferring fractions of a penny.
njarboe 9y ago
Coinbase does give one the sense of security and ease of use. It does not seem sketchy, is American based, has KYC procedures, etc. If they lose coins or go under, a lot of "normal" people will lose money. Not sure what regulations might be passed in Congress if that happens, but the cryptocurrency Wild West would likely be over in America at that point.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Agreed. Maybe one day they will be so big that they are deemed "too big to fail" like the over-extended failed big banks and the bailouts/TARP of the Great Recession.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    Sounds like a justification for seizing it. For safety and security. But the government wouldn't do that, would they?
    - drawkbox 9y ago
      If the government seized funds of Coinbase with how entrenched it is even now, there would be massive legal challenges. Ultimately that might be a good thing in terms of forfeiture reform. Coinbase (US company) is orders of magnitude different than btc-e or mtgox etc.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
        drawkbox 9y ago
        Nothing like that would happen today though as that was more a reaction to the Great Depression and the wealthy hoarding during times where cash was constrained. Also, that was gold so who is to say that couldn't happen to gold today if it can happen to cryptocurrencies, any hoarding would be a target in another depression that bad much like things like offshoring might be or are in some case. Why it won't happen today you can base off the reaction during the Great Recession, we bailed out failing banks with TARP that got us into this mess by over-extending leverage instead of consumers. The FDR order helped the economy and all people at the time over the wealthy. FDR, if he was in charge during the Great Recession, probably would have made new banks and let them fail if that happened under him, a people's president. The SEC was also created during his admin which is arguably the best thing to ever happen to investing in the US, solid markets since Securities Act of 1933 and SEC inception, cryptocurrency will eventually be more closely regulated as it grows.
_wmd 9y ago
Forex trading happens 24/7 the world over
csomar 9y ago
As a heavy bitcoin/crypto trader, Coinbase and Gdax are one of the worst exchanges out there. Speaking strictly from a technical point of view. Not only their Front-End interface (Gdax) suffers from lag probably due to poor engineering but they also made terrible mistakes at the beginning. One of them being a lost deposit. The address generated by the site was wrong and thus the deposit never credited. It took a couple months for support to get on this and refund the lost amount. This happened a couple years ago. So had it happened now I'm not sure if technical support will ever get back. I also failed to contact their technical support about other issues (can't really remember) but there was no way to reach them. They don't have proper support, they just have monkeys that tries to save face on social media. Only. The best exchange so far from a technical perspective is Bitfinex. It is surprising because it is quite shady. But it is a rock solid exchange; and it is magnificently engineered. No wonder it is the top exchange out there. And Finex has handled the recent surge much better than Gdax or any other exchange out there.
- Jommi 9y ago
  Wait you're suggesting one of the legally most robust changes out there (the one doing the most compliance) is actually slower than the shady, non-transparent exchange..?? Wow. Wonder why that might be
  - csomar 9y ago
    This has nothing to do with compliance/legality. It has to do with engineering.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Because of bitcoin's origins in a largely an-cap community - and the continual anti-Government, pro-capitalist mindset in a significant part of the community as it stands now - there's not actually as much demand as there should be for "legal" exchanges etc. As a result, there's much more competition in the "shady" exchange space, less competition in the "legal" exchange space, and two things result: people occasionally lose a significant chunk of their life savings to shady exchanges, and legal exchanges don't have as much of a drive to be technically brilliant.
zeep 9y ago
In my experience, Coinbase/GDAX becomes unavailable every time the cost of Bitcoin drops significantly in a really short period of time... it happened again this morning a little before 7am... Not sure if they are trying to control the drops or if their servers can't handle the load.
- mv4 9y ago
  I was wondering the same thing about GDAX/Coinbase. I've been seeing "partial" outages both on their portal and their API side. Partial outages are the worst, as they only leave 'some' of the participants unable to act.
- zeep 9y ago
  and here is another big drop now... and GDAX is down again...
module0000 9y ago
For what it's worth, you can expose yourself to BTC in the futures market later this month. That's regulated to the same degree all commodity futures are regulated(which is "a lot"). Your profits(and losses) are guaranteed by the clearinghouse(not the exchange), which mitigates your exposure to another mtgox-ish/btc-e/yadoxi event. In terms of "always on", the futures market is always on. You can trade softs, metals, currencies, bonds - you name it. The leverage available is 200:1, 50 times greater than the SEC's limit on security margins(eg the stock market). This means you can make(and lose) catastrophically larger amounts than you began with. Controlling your risk is no longer done by a broker limiting your leverage, it's done by you and involves methodical discipline. The downside: you are trading against pros with deeper pockets and more experience than you could possibly imagine. You won't be out smarting, out trading, or getting "an edge" on anyone except the other retail players.

40acres 9y ago

Coinbase seems to be the quintessential "sell shovels during a gold rush" company. Definitely provides a good case study about how to create a successful business during new industry booms.

stephengillie 9y ago
The giant balance up top is an incredible FOMO machine. In the best findom/gamification, you can increase your "score" simply by giving them more money. The volatility makes the game more difficult to predict than most free-to-play games, but the daily graphs going up so fast make it hard to resist.
- zzxxddere333 9y ago
  you mean... like most banking apps? god forbid they make obvious what most users are using the app for.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  My brokerage account and bank accounts also display the balance. Sometimes at the top, sometimes in the middle. It's a UI decision, more than a FOMO game. With that mindset, capitalism itself is a FOMO and the balance at the top of your head (your net worth) the FOMO machine.
latchkey 9y ago
In my opinion, selling the miner hardware is more like selling the shovels. Coinbase is more like the laundry service. I'm sure someone else can poke holes in this as well. =)
- lallysingh 9y ago
  Let's be careful when taking about any kind of laundering when discussing Bitcoin :-)
  - latchkey 9y ago

carbocation 9y ago

(Coinbase: YC S12)

Cookingboy 9y ago

Coinbase has a key difference from traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab, Scottrade, etc. It doesn't charge a flat fee for buy/sell crypto currency, but a 2-3% fee based on the transaction value. So even though I'm sure they've been making cash hand over fist this past 12 months, it makes any sort of future prediction extremely difficult. They not only have to predict customer growth (which leads to transaction volume), but also the price of those cryptocurrencies. It's akin to calculate position from nothing but a accelerometer, and that double integral would be quite a bit of margin of error. But in the end it may not even matter, as far as revenue growth and even profit wise I'm sure they are doing absolutely amazingly. Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Coinbase has higher daily revenue (definitely more profitable) than Uber at this point.

mifeng 9y ago
I bet Coinbase makes more money from their exchange (GDAX) which does $1 billion each day in volume. While limit orders are free, market orders cost 0.25% of transaction value.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Why would anyone ever want to use a market order versus a limit? In any exchange, for any kind of trading? If you're really ok with e.g. selling for 0.01, set that as your limit.
  - sobani 9y ago
    Because the market could move against you. If you're ok with buying for 100, but someone else is selling for 99, you've effectively done a market order and have to pay the fees. However if the lowest sell is 101 and then the price moves up to 105, you've just screwed yourself for 4 in order to save 0.25
    - MichaelGG 9y ago
      Huh? Just set your limit to 105 or 200 or 10500. There's no reason to ever use a market order unless there's some other severe limitation on limit orders in a particular implementation.

gt_ 9y ago

I have recommended Coinbase to many people. But, a few days ago, I had a double charge on my bank account from them and have learned since that their customer support is essentially non-existent. It’s been 8 days with no response by e-mail, their posted phone number results in a busy signal, and the alternate numbers I found posted on forums go straight to hold music before hanging up after a couple of minutes. I filed a fraud report with my bank.

c0nducktr 9y ago
I have had a case open with them since May 6th of this year, and have not heard a thing back other than their automated replies. They froze my account, required that I pay them money to even get access to my transaction history, and then when I did (foolish, I know) the records don't show any reason for me to have owed them money. It wasn't a large amount (<$50), but I'm still pretty upset about it. I have moved to another platform. It's not a unique issue either, just look at all the posts on the Coinbase subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/
touchofevil 9y ago
It may be that your bank is charging you an international transaction fee and that is the second charge you are seeing. This happened to me the other day with Coinbase. If you buy from Coinbase with a credit card the transaction actually gets processed in London. Some American banks will charge you a 3% fee for this international transaction. So it will look like Coinbase has charged you twice, but actually the second charge is from your bank.
- gt_ 9y ago
  The second charge is actually an amount identical to the first charge, only 1 minute later. It was a couple hundred dollars.
benbreen 9y ago
I am on my fifth month of waiting for my account to be unfrozen so I can withdraw my funds. I managed to get through once by phone (was assured that the issue was being resolved) and once via email (same) but for the past two months, nothing. I believe the CEO and probably several other employees are on HN so if any of them see this - please get your act together. Scaling is great but customer support needs to come along for the ride first. If anyone is wondering, this happened because I accidentally opened the app while on vacation in a country that the US sanctions.

JepZ 9y ago

> No company had made it simpler to sign up, link a bank account or debit card, and begin buying Bitcoin. Actually, I think it is still too difficult. I mean it is not that difficult, but if you had to send every e-commerce shop a photo of your driver license just to buy something there would be a lot fewer people buying stuff online.

nordsieck 9y ago
There is a certain amount of financial regulation that they (and most other exchanges) have to comply with.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
It's not an e-commerce shop, it's an online exchange dealing in financial products, one that has often been associated with illegal activities like drug dealing, tax evasion, etc. They have to play nice with the IRS because people using coinbase don't realize that any gains they make from it is taxable and/or should be auditable.

ggm 9y ago

"too big to fail" doesn't yet apply to any entity directly engaged in this space, as its entire business model. J.P. Morgan got away with a central role in the GFC because it did not suit the regulatory environment to kick one of the legs of a wobbly table. The same does not apply to this, or any other coin- centric company. Yes, in our terms, these are huge dollar sums. But if you work in fintech, this is a small pimple on the side of trades in real goods, and existing financial instruments. Look: the fintech people get this space, and they are not dissing the model entirely. But please, don't pretend that the feds could not shut this agency down tomorrow, and it would have almost no effect on the US bottom line reports for financials.

JBlue42 9y ago
That's a pretty good summary of a casual conversation I had with someone that works in investing about Bitcoin and Ethereum. He said blockchain is here to stay and that knowing what companies are going to try and do with it is useful but these currencies, or at the very least, their value, could go away very quickly.
- tome 9y ago
  This is what my uneducated hunch is, so I'm glad to hear you say it, but I'm enjoying reading all the countervailing opinions too, to educate myself further!
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    I'm glad to have finally pushed myself to read and learn more about all this sense it does seem to be hitting the mainstream. Here's a shit ton of reading if you're interested: https://github.com/xel/blockchain-stuff https://github.com/xel/blockchain-stuff

zkms 9y ago

I used to use coinbase but some godawful KYC/AML thing kicked in and asked me to send them a "selfie" of myself, which creeped me the hell out. I'm a US citizen, am not on any sort of list of prohibited people, and had already given them a photo of my driver's licence and my SSN -- and have had no issues with opening other bank/bitcoin-exchange accounts online previously. I thus switched to Gemini because I do not want to support this invasive nonsense. It's literally an automated version of "put shoe on head" (the request that /b/tards would make of camgirls that they wanted to troll). Between that, and the thing where you literally have to enter your BANK'S username/password to ANOTHER WEBSITE (coinbase, in this case) to prove you have that account (of course it chokes on 2FA); the USian banking system is such a scary bad mess -- and i'm pretty sure that that's a significant driver of bitcoin adoption (and there's also the ACH clusterfuck).

stephengillie 9y ago
You had to provide your bank user/pass to Coinbase? I only had to provide routing and account numbers, then verify the ACH amounts (edit: and driver's license photo). But I'm only in the shallow end of the kiddie pool here.
- asaph 9y ago
  Coinbase offers both options: bank username & password or routing & account numbers. If you choose to provide bank username & password, verification is instant. If you choose to provide routing & account numbers, verification via deposit/withdrawal of small amounts takes days.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    I must have missed the user/pass option during the sign-up flow.
- joering2 9y ago
  ACH does not work in read or in write-only mode. Once you provide someone your ACH info, they can deposit you money.. or empty out your bank account! I had few rough service providers who tried to come up with some magical charges (technical fee of $500 per year) after agreement was signed and had to change bank numbers to make sure they wont take the money out since it would be more than $500 to fight them in court. The company is called EMS Merchants btw.. you can read horrible stories of merchants screwed by them in this way via ACH on online forums.

kvee 9y ago

Most interesting thing I learned from this article: Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, "said he now holds more of his wealth in a Bitcoin competitor, Ether"

Frogolocalypse 9y ago
Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technical parts of coinbase.
- oconnor663 9y ago
  I dunno, are we happy with the status quo? Making money is nice, but I miss being able to use bitcoins to buy things.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    I have a bitcoin debit card. It works just fine thanks. I can spend it anywhere that accepts a card.
    - tdurden 9y ago
      You are spending fiat though with that debit card, like every debit card. Transactions are off-chain.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        That makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. By your logic, people using coinbase to hold their coins aren't holding bitcoin. It is exactly the same. Bitcoin from my wallet is being spent. It is increasing in value while i don't spend it, because it is in bitcoin. It is no different than an American using their cc in europe.

eqmvii 9y ago

If the bubble bursts, this will be a delightful pull quote in the postmortem: "Correction: December 6, 2017 An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misidentified the place where Coinbase employees were gathered for lunch. It was the gaming room, not the cafeteria."

travisjungroth 9y ago
I work at Coinbase. If you want the inside scoop: "game room" is a bit of a misnomer for that room. It's a large room with a big theater screen. All day it's full of meetings and presentations. There are a bunch of games on shelves as well, and some people play them after hours.
- kbody 9y ago
  Btw, do you have any engineers capable of working to upgrade the platform to use SegWit? I find it weird that Brian advertises open positions like there's nobody there capable of doing it.
  - travisjungroth 9y ago
    I wouldn't take any job ad copy as disparaging to the current team.
    - kbody 9y ago
      Neither am I, just in this case I know some context that lead me to this question. SegWit being pretty much the most important update to Bitcoin so far with a lot of advantages, I would expect that CB would give top priority on supporting it. But Brian when asked about it, he replied with a job ad about new positions, while I would expect they would put their most experienced engineers on it, instead of depend on new recruits for such crucial and maybe challenging project.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    I'd treat such an advertisement not as a signal "there's nobody there capable of doing it" but rather as a signal "we'd like to do this thing, but it's not important enough to divert anyone who's working on stuff that matters to us, so someone new can tackle it".

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thisisit 9y ago

Does anyone know the hot/cold wallet address for Coinbase, like the below one for Bitfinex? https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmc...

blhack 9y ago
It seems likely that coinbase has many cold and hot wallets which are geographically and technically distributed across many vaults and key generators.
- likelynew 9y ago
  Good for them that they can spend bitcoin cash without people noticing.

cellis 9y ago

So, any guesses as to top line for coinbase?

shiado 9y ago

It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the private keys, has gone out the window due to convenience and a lack of understanding of the fundamental blockchain technology by speculators. Coinbase is central in these facts.

deleted 9y ago
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skybrian 9y ago
It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.
- raducu 9y ago
  I think that's a clear sign of bubble -- I'll just buy this thing because it will just appreciate forever.
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate electricity with which we heat up our oceans, causing ice caps to melt and global warming to occur. It's a bit of a joke. We're now all valuing a system, above other systems, for its unique decentralised properties, while subsequently throwing that out the window, yet still expecting this system to be uniquely valuable. We're all introducing trust into a trustless system, and paying intermediaries and middlemen a cut in the process. That's fine for other investments, e.g. productive assets that are valuable for other reasons. But it's not fine for an investment into something that's valuable because it's trustless, decentralised and disintermediating. There's some nuance I'm leaving out of course, you can argue against this post, but by and large you can't ignore this massive disconnect between bitcoin's value proposition and bitcoin's reality. Nor can you argue anymore, like we used to, that it's just a phase. If anything, there's less and less regard for personally run wallets, personal nodes, personal mining, personal transactions, and an increase in use of centralised parties, with centralised wallet providers, cloud and company mining, transaction processors etc.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

I posted this earlier today, and earlier than that as an Ask HN. I promise after this I won't post it again, at least for awhile. This seems sufficiently important that it's worth a slight annoyance. What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin? There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about: 1. There is no upper bound on the price 2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong Greed is a powerful motivator. It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing. What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further. It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?" I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about. It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral. Is there a way to prevent that? Now, to add to the discussion: Several people have voiced that there is no reason to worry, both because it's impossible for BTC to hit $1M/coin and because this is all conjecture. But there is every indication that the BTC craze could in fact spread to the entire world -- literally nobody will be able to escape thinking about it, because that is what the world values. This has low probability, but just like climate change, it's worth planning for it now rather than later. Can we please try to think of something? Look at this[2] and let that graph sink in. Fiction is also worth taking seriously. Satellites were predicted by fiction long before they were deployed. Many of the most influential ideas start as works of art. The dystopian future as envisioned in [1] is a far cry from how things would turn out, but the underlying idea is that we will become subservient to a tiny few. It's only a matter of time before that money starts turning into real power. So, if we could set aside our selfishness and try to snap out of the getting-rich craze, and ask "Can we possibly stop this?" it would probably be one of the most impactful ways you could spend a few minutes. Making BTC illegal won't work. It'll just go to countries where it's not, and take the people with them. I don't think it would be possible to sneak a backdoor into BTC. People would notice by now. And even if it works, they'd just fork and preserve the wealth. Even if one were to theoretically become batshit insane and try to hunt down everyone who holds BTC, that won't work either, because it's easy to conceal. The price of mixing services will just rise to the point of taking transaction fees into account, and that's how much people will start to pay. I can't think of anything else. Ideas? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_as_predicted_by_luka_magnotta_aka_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7f3z8j/btc_price_a...

goofed 9y ago

That "What is money" slide is pretty much brainwash

plaidfuji 9y ago

What I find most interesting about Coinbase is that they quote your selling exchange rate the moment you place a sell order. If I click "sell" right now, they lock in the $13,000 exchange rate or whatever it is. The amount that shows up in my bank days later is exactly what they quoted at the time I placed the sell order. When people start selling off, this policy is either going to drive them to bankruptcy or create a lot of unhappy customers.

bowmessage 9y ago
You must have never had a transaction cancelled for being ‘too risky’. Happened a lot for me in the past.
- doug3465 9y ago
  Can you explain more about what happened?
MarkMc 9y ago
I don't understand why it's a problem. Coinbase received $13,000 from User A and they pay it to User B. Why will Coinbase go bankrupt or customers be unhappy?
PeterisP 9y ago
That's not a symptom of a problem - the time delta of settlement with you has no relation with the time delta of them balancing their position. It's just as big bank forex deals work; if a customer of a big bank sells $100m euros for dollars in their bank, the bank (most banks who don't want to play market maker) will often get a matching deal within minutes, but the deal can often be actually settled on the next business day or the day after that.

j_s 9y ago

I would love to hear more about what must be Coinbase's love/hate relationship with MongoDB. From my very uninformed perspective, the tool mostly does what it says on the tin these days, but that hasn't always been the case. I would be interested in following along with Coinbase during this transition, and hearing more about what MongoDB is used for there today.

_pdp_ 9y ago

Unless you buy with credit cards, good luck making bank transfers work on Coinbase. EDIT: Downvoting with no explanation will not change my experience. I believe that cryptocurrencies are the future but having to wait weeks for a simple bank transfer only to find out that your funds will be returned with no explanation why apart from a cryptic message that has something to do with your bank account name not matching your coinbase name is rather annoying. Match how? What do you compare? An extra dot at the end of your middle name will throw off the system without any reasonable explanation. Honestly, if Coinbase improves their messages in this situation, it may actually reduce the overhead on their customer support but I gather that this might be intentional.

Kiro 9y ago
Never heard anyone have that problem. You're in minority so please don't speak like this is some major problem.
- _pdp_ 9y ago
  Do you work for Coinbase?
  - Kiro 9y ago
    Yeah, because it's entirely impossible that you may have just been unlucky or messed it up on your side?
    - _pdp_ 9y ago
      I can send customer support transcript if you want as attacking me does nothing constructive for this conversation. Also, if you do a quick web search you will find that this is not just unlucky, it is common although in the grand scheme of things it might be nothing for Coinbase or perhaps you are just not personally dealing with these types of problems. You know a minority can be a pretty large group of people. Look, my comment is not meant to bash Coinbase but there are issues with the service and it can be ironed out to make it so much better.

aloukissas 9y ago

Coinbase is getting away with murder charging outrageous fees, cashing in the bitcoin frenzy. Kinda like the shady brokerages in the 80s.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
In return they offer a simple and accessible interface - if you want low fees you can go ahead to gdax or one of the alternative, more difficult to use exchanges.
naveen99 9y ago
You do have gdax where you can buy for zero fees with limit orders. No harm in letting others pay more for convenience.
mancerayder 9y ago
Maybe, but how are they supposed to hire employees to build and run the infrastructure and rent datacenter space / cloud VPSes / etc. if they do it for free? I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious - hey, the fees seemed high to me, too. Luckily the appreciation of the coins made those icky feelings disappear quickly.
- aloukissas 9y ago
  AFAIK, running a full-on brokerage (e.g. Schwab, Robinhood) is probably more expensive as it's highly regulated, with non-trivial compliance costs, for example. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be new, digital "securities", without the fat of the incumbents. I'm probably oversimplifying this here, but at the age of easy cloud scaling, where their main job is a secure digital wallet storage, their fees are mostly taking advantage of the BTC craze. To clarify: their % fee isn't that high - the fact that it's uncapped though is pretty outrageous. A $10K trade on Schwab costs a few dollars; on Coinbase, a couple hundred. I guess once BTC futures are out and one can speculate on BTC in the open market, they'll have to feel the pressure and adjust their pricing.

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marcosscriven 9y ago

I bought £100 of Bitcoin in September via Coinbase, pretty much just to have a play with Bitcoin itself, and try a couple of transactions. To my horror, I discovered that transaction wasn't actually in the blockchain, and that Coinbase essentially has an internal system you just have to trust, which seemed to be contrary to the whole idea of a global ledger. I setup my own wallet and transferred it to that (thus achieving my initial goal of seeing my own transaction in the block chain). There's no way I'd put any significant amounts into Bitcoin, let alone Coinbase.

lend000 9y ago
Would it also horrify you to learn that when you transfer money from your savings to your checking account (at the same bank), those transactions are not cleared by the Federal Reserve?
- tome 9y ago
  I doubt it would, firstly because that hasn't been touted as the "point" of dollars, and secondly because FDIC insures deposits.

artur_makly 9y ago

im traveling and when inattempted to join.. due to my IP u couldnt get a US based account which would allow me to buy coins. i asked support and got some automated answer which didnt work. i responded and waited again. lost huge opportunities for weeks. Their ID system keeps throwing me errors when using my US passport. i have no Us drivers license or Active Us Cel phone for auth.

ssharp 9y ago

With the wild price swings, Bitcoin has practically no value as anything other than a speculative investment. Are any of these people downloading Coinbase and buying coins really interested in transacting in Bitcoin or are they just buying Beanie Babies? Although, as someone who thought the bubble would burst at $1,000, I'm quite impressed at how much interest it has garnered. I just don't seeing it end well for many people.

IamNotAtWork 9y ago
Why? Most people just put money they don't need into it, like spare cash. Depending on when you bought, chances of ever going down to that level now is incredibly small.
- ssharp 9y ago
  I'm not so sure in the middle of a buying rush that people are just putting spare cash into it. But the larger point is that even if people are investing small amounts, they're doing so to ride the rush, not because they see value in Bitcoin as anything other than an investment.

hectorr1 9y ago

I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are: 1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulation. Which ultimately gives them an advantage on the customer service front relative to their competition for retail investors. And frankly, they aren't much worse than most online brokers. These priorities were also sufficient. Amazon was competing against major incumbents and had to win on cost and service. By outcompeting an empty field on compliance, Coinbase has built a significant moat around US retail. They have relationships with Fidelity and USAA that signal legitimacy. They had cold storage while incumbents were/are still saying 'blockchain not Bitcoin'. The critical question is how they manage customer service and communications going forward. Amazon, Facebook, and Google created monopolies based on a great user experience. Uber destroyed a thousand monopolies for the same reason. Coinbase is riding the coattails of Bitcoin's awesome UX, the warm fuzzies people get from making 10x on an investment. If and when there is a correction, their core business will hinge on how well they handle a large sell-off.

vocatus_gate 9y ago
Agree with almost everything you've said, and unfortunately if past experience is anything to go by, they'll crash/go down during the next big price dip.
- egeozcan 9y ago
  Maybe this is because of the immense increase in the number transactions during a dip? (really just guessing)
- ni-hil 9y ago
  They are down right now
ukoki 9y ago
Yep! I contacted customer support over a month ago as I am unable to make withdrawals. Still haven't heard a thing from them.

paulpauper 9y ago

I have heard so many bad things about coinbase...as the mtgox scandal shows, sometimes the most popular exchange is not the best I would rather spread my $ in several smaller ones

kgwgk 9y ago

Slightly offtopic, but this is so funny: (From today’s “money stuff” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-shareholders-and-direct-listing https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/shale-sha...) Happy Bitcoin 13,000 Day. I mean, that was yesterday. A few hours after I sent out Money Stuff saying Happy Bitcoin 12,000 Day, which was also yesterday. At this rate we'll have Bitcoin 25,000 before my "Bitcoin 25,000 Before Dow 25,000" hats get here. Happy Bitcoin 14,000 Day. That was also yesterday. Happy Bitcoin 15,000 Day. That was this morning. See what I mean? Happy Bitcoin 16,000 Day. That will be this afternoon, probably. Happy Bitcoin 17,000 Day. Just in case, why not. Still more bitcoin. Bitcoin futures are set to start trading next week at CBOE Global Markets Inc.'s futures exchange, with CME Group Inc. following the week after that, but some people object: The Futures Industry Association, whose members include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc., detailed its concerns in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday. The association said there should have been more discussion about margin levels, trading limits, stress tests and clearing before the contracts were given a green light. For clearing members of futures exchanges, the worry is that some bitcoin futures trader will blow up, and that bitcoin is so volatile that the trader's margin won't be sufficient to cover its losses. That will leave the members of the exchanges on the hook for losses. This seems like a ... totally reasonable worry? If you collected 25 percent margin from someone who was short bitcoin on Monday, they would have blown through it by this morning. Also the standard fate of bitcoin exchanges seems to be to get hacked and lose their customers' money, so if you are a customer of a futures exchange I can see why you'd be skeptical of your futures exchange turning into a bitcoin exchange. Meanwhile, here is a nice profile of Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange that hasn't been hacked, much. (Though: "In May, the company was criticized by a customer who could not reach anyone at the company after his account was hacked.") It "runs an exchange, called GDAX, tailored to larger investors," overseen by Adam White. "A year ago, his Wall Street outreach was difficult, but 'it’s all inbound now,' Mr. White said." Indeed. Oh and another bitcoin thing was hacked: NiceHash, the marketplace for cloud-based mining of cryptocurrencies, said hackers breached its systems and stole an unknown amount of bitcoin from its virtual wallet. Some $60 million worth of bitcoins may have been affected. Elsewhere here's a guy who lost the password to his 40 bitcoins.

PeterisP 9y ago

IamNotAtWork 9y ago

So can you actually withdraw money from coinbase, if you say had 100 coins (I don't). Everyone said back then that Mt. Gox was safe because it was the biggest. It being based in Japan was a huge red flag, but nobody cared until all of its money disappeared. Coinbase being based in the US probably won't happen because there could be consequences for them if they disappear with the coins, but having been burned by Mt. Gox fiasco is making me sit out of crypto, but with some sour grapes because each day bitcoin just go up and up. Was $13000 yesterday and it's almost $16000 today. It took a week to go from $10000 to $15000. Insane.

econner 9y ago
It's an exchange so if there's no one to take the other side of the trade then you wouldn't be able to sell. They probably float a little bit of coin, but likely not enough to wipe them out. The question is what they'd do in a crisis. Would they freeze everyone's coin? Would other exchanges do the same? Now, they could be hacked and lose a lot of customers' coin without realizing it as happened with Mt Gox. This is why it's advisable to hold your coin in an offline wallet, but doing so makes it harder to panic sell. But that shouldn't matter since we're all definitely here just to HODL crypto and see it actually be useful and we're definitely not just to try to speculate off of it. Right?? Right???
jpindar 9y ago
It was some time ago, and a much smaller amount, but when I withdrew money from them it was no problem, and reasonably prompt. (Same with Fanduel, BTW - another industry some people are skeptical about).

imartin2k 9y ago

Coinbase is down again. This seems to happen with every BTC price spike now, and since these spikes get more extreme, I guess Coinbase's infrastructure always lags behind.

seattle_spring 9y ago

> 57) Customer Service 58) Recruiting process

aussie1233 9y ago

Support is horrible, here is my story - not sure how common that problem is. Would be interested if others have the same valdation issue. I have a case open for multiple weeks to get my address validated. I was able to buy initially, but now it pops up a "quiz" (that's how support calls it), where i have to enter my address and then it says that it's not a valid permanent address. Which is funny because that is the same address the accepted when I signed up and validated my ID. There support literally tells me, "sorry your problem, but you can try the quiz again- and maybe one day it will work". To me thats an unbelievable statement. I think they have to stop onnoarding customers and solve some of their basic flows first. What if I wanted to sell? It is just not possible within Coinbase.