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Coinbase is getting away with murder charging outrageous fees, cashing in the bitcoin frenzy. Kinda like the shady brokerages in the 80s.
by 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 agoIn 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 agoYou do have gdax where you can buy for zero fees with limit orders. No harm in letting others pay more for convenience.
- mancerayder 9y agoMaybe, 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 agoAFAIK, 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.