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Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gtirloni 9y agoDoes anyone with knowledge of e-retail industry and BTC acceptance know how do business deal with the wild fluctuations in the BTC price?
- giancarlostoro 9y agoLook at posts by Steam on the matter, and in the comments on that article some mention that it is based on the price at the second the transaction occurs.
- paulmd 9y agoSteam, as with most institutions that "accept" Bitcoin, never actually handles Bitcoin themselves. They use a financial services provider who accepts Bitcoin and gives them USD and takes a cut of the transaction for themselves. Dealing with that short-term volatility is one of the things that fee pays for. Is it ridiculous that the price can fluctuate enough in 60 minutes to significantly affect a transaction? Obviously.
- kuroguro 9y agoI would imagine they exchange them to fiat as soon as received.
- dimillian 9y agoThat where it got trickier. IMO, if a big brand start to accept BTC, like Walmart or such, my strategy would be to hire 1 or 2 traders to deal exclusively with the BTC/FIAT wallet of the company. The goal being to make the BTC/FIAT ratio interest grows. I think accepting cryptocurrencies will create a lot of job in trading/finance for companies totally unrelated to the business.
- pjc50 9y agoThe easy answer appears to be "stop accepting bitcoin". Such as Steam, Microsoft and now https://news.bitcoin.com/miami-bitcoin-conference-stops-accepting-bitcoin-due-to-fees-and-congestion/ https://news.bitcoin.com/miami-bitcoin-conference-stops-acce...
- mkirklions 9y agoPeople are freaking out about this. There are 1000 other cryptos that can move money. Bitcoin is the only reliable way to hedge money against massive government inflation that we have seen after an African Coup or hyperinflation.
- pjc50 9y agoYou can't say it's a viable hedge given its extreme volatility. Africa and South America maybe, but if you're expecting dollar hyperinflation you have a very strange set of assumptions about the world.
- Dumbdo 9y agoEven if one would assume that there's a dollar hyperinflation, Bitcoin as a alternative is certainly the worst alternative as it is much more volatile than any real world currency.
- krisives 9y agoLook at something like CoinPayments.net they will let you accept any coin and if you link to a service that does exchange/banking it can auto-liquidate your coins for you.
- StavrosK 9y agoThe processor handles that by "freezing" the price for ~15 minutes and hoping it averages out. Of course, that assumes that the transaction will take less than fifteen minutes to confirm, which... good luck.
- Tepix 9y agoDepending on how much time you have you could use this for speculation purposes. If bitcoin goes up, you cancel your purchase. If bitcoin goes down you go ahead with your purchase at the outdated rate.
- StavrosK 9y agoSure, but then what do you do with the thing you bought?
- greenleafjacob 9y agoWhat if it’s a cash equivalent like Amazon gift cards?
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThis is where an exchange like Coinbase could provide a payment service, paying directly but doing the actual BTC transfer under wate.r
- blunte 9y agoThis is what Bitpay does. You, the merchant, can accept bitcoin (and other currencies) using Bitpay's payment system. Bitpay immediately credits your account with USD. No risk of long-term (more than a few seconds) price moves in BTCUSD. The downside is that Bitpay, like every other authorized cryptocurrency "bank", is crippled by KYC/AML regulations and cannot process all the applications they receive for new customers.
- xorcist 9y agoWhy would you need to wait for it to confirm? Make sure to have access to liquidity so you can set the trade the second it is likely the transaction will confirm at some point. That's how the big payment processors do it. You need liquidity to process payments on a non trivial scale, but that's par for the game for banks, credit cards companies, paypal, and everyone else in this space. Waiting for a confirmation will do you no good anyway. No exchange accepts any less than six, which would have you take the exchange risk for over an hour. That's not a very good business case.
- vthallam 9y agoRetail Industry has stopped accepting Bitcoin(latest example: Microsoft). Most of them who do now do mostly for PR or a thought that they support the industry. On the other hand, Litecoin, RaiBlocks and Ripple could be used for payments and many companies seems to have started.
- EA 9y agoMicrosoft has resumed taking Bitcoin payments: http://fortune.com/2018/01/10/microsoft-bitcoin-temporary-halt/ http://fortune.com/2018/01/10/microsoft-bitcoin-temporary-ha...
- friedButter 9y agoSomeone should open a company which provides tokens in exchange for depositing BTC with them. People can trade these tokens which are notional representations of the BTC holdings in an instantaneous manner. Then when someone actually wants the BTC, they redeem the tokens with the company and the BTC is transferred to their wallet... alternatively the company itself could act as an exchange and always send currency instead of tokens to the person receiving a payment. Since all the small transactions are happening via these tokens, the cost of Bitcoin transactions would be a much smaller issue..
- che_shirecat 9y agowhat would be the point of this? why not just use mainstream payment methods and then when someone actually wants BTC, purchase it from an exchange for fiat? The whole point of cryptocurrency is that its decentralized, creating a derivative on top of it (for payments??) issued by a centralized company subject to counterparty risk kinda ruins the purported advantages of Bitcoin don't you think?
- mkirklions 9y agoI think Ethereum might be the closest thing we have to that today. However, still things require an additional layer to get it to work in the physical world. Lets not forget that this technology only became 'accepted' by the mainstream in 2017. Before that, it was nerds volunteering to program various infrastructure. Also, between accounting, finance, and taxes, implementing cryptocurrency for any fortune 500 company will add additional layers of complexity.
- friedButter 9y agoAs long as this system is run online,it would be free of regulations,so the govt would not be able to impose it's will on your assets...
- che_shirecat 9y agoUntil this only-online "exchange" is "hacked" and suddenly you can't claim any BTC with their tokens anymore. Did you read the "counter-party risk" part of my comment?
- solatic 9y agoOne possible way of dealing with high transaction fees is to deposit more money into an account with a retailer, and then use money in that account to fund purchases over time. For example, transaction costs are too high to reasonably pay for a single cup of coffee. But if you know you buy a cup of coffee on a roughly daily basis, you could put down $1,000 worth of Bitcoin, get an anonymous gift card for that amount of money, and then use that over time to pay for individual coffees. But that really raises two questions: why do you feel the need to use a semi-anonymous, public-ledger currency to pay for coffee at a shop where your status as a regular makes you recognizable, and why is it worth foregoing interest plus the risk of not using the entire gift card for the privilege?
- stanleydrew 9y agoAlso note that when you buy the $1000 gift card you are converting back to USD, so you're not really buying with BTC anymore anyway.
- zjaffee 9y agoPayment processors traditionally would convert to USD right away, where the % they charged for the processing included the risk they held for having to hold the coins for the time it took to convert. I know back when there was the "bitcoin boulevard" in Cleveland, this was around 1% which was cheaper than processing credit cards for the businesses and is what got them onboard to accept BTC.
- vthallam 9y agoThey should not have used the similar name in the first place during the fork and the aggressive marketing on CNBC about bcash as the original Bitcoin added more confusion to the people and as I see the systems too. Though Anecdotal, none I know even talking about Bitcoin Cash. Can we not rename it already? It would be better for investors and also Bitcoin Cash team.
- gruez 9y ago>Can we not rename it already? You answered it yourself. >the aggressive marketing on CNBC about bcash as the original Bitcoin The confusing naming clearly benefits them more than it harms.
- vthallam 9y ago> The confusing naming clearly benefits them more than it harms. That's what I thought. It helped them initially, but if you see even after launching on the biggest US exchange, their price hardly moved or there's hardly news or predictions about bitcoin cash. People are reading, albeit slowly, it wouldn't help them in the longer run. If all they want is to use the name, pump and cash out, sure I think they succeeded.
- granitosaurus 9y agoIt's a fork of X why couldn't it use X in it's name? OpenBSD should have BSD in it's name either?
- vim_wannabe 9y agoBitcoin in the name is the only thing that holds the value. Other currencies have noticed and are quickly naming themselves after Bitcoin, like ZClassic renaming to Bitcoin Private.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoSounds like it's time for decentralized trademark enforcement.
- osteele 9y agoMany U.S. retail establishments near* the Canadian border treat Canadian quarters as equivalent to U.S. quarters—accepting them at a 25¢ value, including them as change if they got into the till. The US:CAD rate is only 4:5, not the 1:6 BTH:BCH ratio at the time of the article. Perhaps more importantly, one can only use Canadian coins this way in person, and therefore probably at very low volume. None the less, it’s interesting to see the parallel. * And not that near, either. I’ve seen this in Massachusetts. I never saw this growing up in North Carolina, or when I moved to California, though.
- nicksergeant 9y agoYeah this happens all the time in Western NY. I remember growing up hating getting Canadian quarters because they wouldn't work in U.S. vending machines.
- blunte 9y agoNot sure if this is still the case, but when I was a kid I loved getting the occasional Canadian quarter because it would respond to my magnets (where as US coins wouldn't). So what Canadian quarters lack in currency value, they make up for in entertainment value.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Dunan 9y agoI used to love Canadian quarters because they kept their steel/silver color all the way around, unlike the hideous copper-sandwich US coins. Was disappointed to learn as a kid that the Canadian coins were worth about 20% less than the American ones!
- soperj 9y agoJust a couple years ago they were worth 10% more. Then oil tanked.
- ditn 9y agoOne thing that'll help prevent this sort of confusion is the upcoming change in Bitcoin Cash address formats (https://gist.github.com/DesWurstes/bba4222c8b6253b940096fcede97e17a https://gist.github.com/DesWurstes/bba4222c8b6253b940096fced...). Assuming clients check that the BTC addresses are valid, they'll reject the new BECH32 BCH format.
- esseti 9y agoit reminds me a bit of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIMF8bp5-qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIMF8bp5-qg
- brndnmtthws 9y agoBcash is a hostile hardfork, and sadly Coinbase and Brian Armstrong have decided to go along for the ride. If you check Brian's personal Twitter account, and the tweets he's been 'liking', you can see this quite plainly. It's pretty sad that he's in business with the likes of Roger Ver, a convicted felon. I wonder how Coinbase employees feel about it?
- nawitus 9y agoWhat is the definition of a "hostile" hardfork?
- brndnmtthws 9y agoIt's an attempt to co-opt the Bitcoin name/brand.
- nawitus 9y agoI believe bitcoin forks have the right to use the word bitcoin. In fact, I think it's a good practice.
- DylanBohlender 9y agoAgreed. The whole idea that forking can be hostile is kind of silly. Open source is riddled with examples of successful and unsuccessful forks. If a fork is better than the original version, it usually wins. If not, it dies. Take CU Sudo, for example. A fork of sudo later became the default implementation of sudo because the original development group stopped working on it. It would have been silly for it to call itself anything other than sudo, given its function. http://sudo.miscellaneousmirror.org/sudo/history.html http://sudo.miscellaneousmirror.org/sudo/history.html
- blhack 9y agoI don't know if you already know this, but: Bcash supporters are intentionally trying to create market confusion by claiming that "bitcoin cash" isn't "bitcoin cash", it is "bitcoin", a different coin. I think that's hostile.
- oceanghost 9y agoThis isn't Overstocks first rodeo. Back when Microsoft was literally paying people to use Bing, bing had a promotion such that certain items were eligible for a 20% discount, which was paid via a rebate check from Microsoft. One day, I ordered some item then canceled it, and a couple months later I got an email informing me I had been credited for the purchase via MS, and my rebate account had, $10 or something. It took me about... 30 seconds to realize the implications of this. I ordered as many plasma TVs as I could, one at a time, and then canceled them. I got about $900 of rebate checks before someone got suspicious. They canceled my account because I was buying too many TVs. They never did figure out what was going on. Was it ethical and moral? No. But I hate MS and they've stolen thousands from me over the years. It felt great to get one over on them. Edit: I've hated MS since I saved all summer to buy MS-DOS 5 and it was complete crap.
- foobaw 9y agoApologies for asking but how does a company like MS steal thousands from you? Enterprise SW?
- tinymollusk 9y agoTime spent re-installing Windows? At least with linux, you got some command line skills (back in the day).
- oceanghost 9y agoPerhaps before your time, MS was a monopoly and you literally couldn't buy a computer without paying them, whether it ran windows or not. They sold crap at premium prices. They forced computer companies to pay a DOS/Windows license for each machine MADE, not if it ran their OS. The used dirty tricks to sink their competitors, stole ideas, products, etc. They were the original bastards of the tech industry. I have hated them since I was a kid...in the 80s. This Simpsons scene summarizes things nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE https://www.wired.com/2008/06/gates-monopoly/ https://www.wired.com/2008/06/gates-monopoly/
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- FabHK 9y agoI'm wondering who lost in this scenario, Overstock or Coinbase? The author offered to send it back to Overstock, and Coinbase presumably has a few other merchants, so presumably Overstock.
- nathan_f77 9y agoI would be really interested to know how much a black-hat hacker could have stolen. I found this on the Overstock Wikipedia page [1]: > In the first 22 hours, they received over 800 orders worth US $126,000 in bitcoin. This represents a 4.33% increase in sales from their normal income of $3 million per day. ... In mid-2014 Overstock.com announced that bitcoin sales were averaging $300,000 per month and that the company expected bitcoin sales to add 4 cents to the company's 2014 earnings per share. I can't find any recent information, but it might have slowed down since Bitcoin transactions are so expensive now. Overstock is also holding 50% of their Bitcoin revenue as an investment, but I presume that's in cold storage. If they were doing $10,000 USD per day in 2014, then I would guess they might be doing around $100,000 in 2018. So the refunds are probably coming out of some addresses that hold around $100,000 to $500,000 USD. Their Coinbase integration might have a daily buy limit of around $1M, or maybe even no limit. So a hacker could have stolen 6 or 7 figures, but probably no more than that. You could write a script to automate all of the orders and refunds. You could use Tor, or you could use Bitcoin to rent VMs and IP addresses, then connect to your VMs via Tor. I don't know if Overstock has CAPTCHAs, but that's not a big deal if you're making 4-5 figures per CAPTCHA. And finally, you just trade the stolen Bitcoin for Monero, then back to Bitcoin. The only thing you have to worry about is a guilty conscience. It's unclear if you could only use pre-fork transactions, or if you could spend the Bitcoin Cash from new blocks. If it's the latter, then you could just buy Bitcoin Cash using your refunded Bitcoin, and create/cancel orders in an infinite loop until you emptied their account. I find it very interesting that Bancsec specializes in bank security. It's probably a bit harder for JB Snyder to get away with something like this than your average software engineer, since the FBI and IRS are probably keeping an eye on him. He's also the founder of a very successful security company, so 6 or 7 figures probably isn't worth the risk. (And of course, he's probably a model citizen and a saint.) Anyway, it's not every day that you come across a virtual duffel bag with 6 or 7 figures of anonymous cash. I hope Coinbase or Overstock paid a bug bounty.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThe answer you're looking for is "Yeah, as much as people like to cry moral decay, honor is still a thing." You're right, there was no advantage to reporting the vuln. Most people would have jumped on that vuln like <edgy metaphor>. But "fuck you, got mine" mentality won't get us to Mars. And as stupid as it sounds, having a story to tell is at least partly as satisfying as doing the actual heist. Zero risk, and you get to brag how smart you were. People are also much more likely to trust you in the future (as opposed to you being an unknown quantity). Heists like that also punish the ecosystem. If Overstock lost $1m, it would forever show that moving to crypto is fundamentally a terrible idea. It would destabilize the basis of wealth you sought to acquire. But... Yeah, passing up a $1m payday would not be easy.