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Remember how Coinbase, the San Francisco-based startup which raised more than $200 million in venture capital, put a freeze on my money? Whether it was out of i
by poopsmithe 9y ago
Remember how Coinbase, the San Francisco-based startup which raised more than $200 million in venture capital, put a freeze on my money? Whether it was out of incompetence or an attempt to save itself from selling at an inflated price (at one point, the price of Bitcoin was $3,000 higher on Coinbase than on other exchanges), this was exactly the kind of thing Bitcoin was supposed to prevent.
Um no, I don't think so.
Coinbase.com is not the Bitcoin experience, just like Facebook is not the internet experience. Nothing in the Bitcoin whitepaper mentions Bitcoin solving problems inherent with a central currency Exchange or hosted, custodial wallets.
Use localbitcoins.com and a non-custodial wallet if you want to experience Bitcoin per it's original specification.
Exchanges != Bitcoin.
- SilverCurve 9y agoThat is the point of the article though. If most of transactions are going through exchanges, Bitcoin is not being used as it's supposed to.
- icedchai 9y agoCoinbase, and similar sites, may as well be Bitcoin for the average ("retail") investor. It's far too complicated, not to mention resource intensive, for the average Joe to set up and run his own node. My uncle wants to "invest" in Bitcoin. He wants to trade it like a stock. You seriously think he's going to mess around with private keys and wallet pass phrases? Many technical people can barely handle that. And, yes, for a lot of today's youth, Facebook is the internet experience. The Internet experience, for me, was telnet, gopher, and Usenet news. We're along way from those days.