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CoinBase is one of the last exchanges which still allow sending and receiving crypto. Others like RobinHood only allow trading, while LocalBitcoins and Kraken d

CoinBase is one of the last exchanges which still allow sending and receiving crypto. Others like RobinHood only allow trading, while LocalBitcoins and Kraken disabled sending/receiving for NY and WA this year. I really hope they survive. I don't know what's the future for crypto if we can no longer send or receive actual coins anymore. It becomes meaningless to just buy and sell without ever being able to "own" the coins.

kolbe 6y ago
What good is Coinbase other than as a way to exchange crypto for dollars? If crypto is to ever have any meaning, then it shouldn't need to interface with the financial system that it aims to upend.
- sn_master 6y ago
  How else would you obtain crypto if it wasn't by exchanging it with other fiat currency? Mining hasn't been realistic for many years now. It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware. Buying and selling 'assets' on the Darkweb and amongst people you know in other countries with restricted foreign money transfer is one main use case of CoinBase. In fact, I doubt BTC would have thrived as much as it did if it wasn't for SilkRoad/DarkMarket/EmpireMarket/WhiteHouseMarket etc. Not to mention the hundreds of millions that went into worse endeavors like ransomeware and funding terror organizations. BTC didn't become what it is without the billions of dollars in demand for those very real use cases. Each drug dealer exchanges tens and hundreds of thousands of USD in crypt, much more than the average regular crypto enthusiast. BTC investors are investing in blood money, like it or not. It's not just a magic computer token thingy, and it hasn't been for a decade now since the SilkRoad inception.
  - louloulou 6y ago
    > It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware. You just described how to buy bitcoin privately with electricity. Why is it unrealistic?
    - sn_master 6y ago
      I don't have the hardware to mine BitCoins. You need expensive ASICs or at least very powerful GPUs, running 24/7, and you can't mine partial BitCoins. i.e. I won't get 200$ worth of BTC by investing 200$ in electricity. Even if its possible, it would take days or weeks to get that much BTC. What if you want 2,000$ of BTC right now? Would you want to wait months before you get it? And electricity cost varies widely between regions. Many areas in the US and China outright ban crypto mining. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=347208.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=347208.0 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m... https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-wants-ban-mining/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-want...
      - louloulou 6y ago
        You can buy an older generation ASIC on the secondary market for pretty cheap (usually), and probably mine ~$10 worth of bitcoin/day (by joining a pool). I agree it's not much, but it is permissionless. If you want to buy large amounts, you would use the P2P markets for fiat to bitcoin trades https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
        sn_master 6y ago
        10$ a day isn't practical at all for investment or online purchases. It's only good if you have a big rig of those to get at least 1,000$/month, but at what electricity and noise cost? I don't think I can run that in a single bedroom apartment with neighbors around. Bisq sounds interesting, but I have my doubts about them, since there is no escrow system and I don't think there is enough liquidity either. I'll check it out anyway.
        louloulou 6y ago
        Yeah, I would say mining may not be practical primarily due to the noise. You would need a garage or similar to put the miners in.
  - tracedddd 6y ago
    How about good old working for it. I’ve received payment in Bitcoin and paid employees in cryptocurrency. The thing about fungible assets is that they are neutral money. They aren’t “blood money”, they are simply blind to whatever they are used for. At least they aren’t finding wars like the dollar.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      > At least they aren’t finding wars like the dollar. Plenty of the drug trade BTCs goes to funding the cartels in Columbia and Mexico actually. Source: Tried buying BTC on LocalBitcoins once and 9/10 of the US sellers were asking to send Western Union to Columbia. Meanwhile, we know from the government that a lot of the BTC payments on dark markets end up in the drug dealer hands in Columbia. So, apparently they sell the drug BTC back to us at the higher exchange rate for USD so we can give it back to them for drugs, back and forth....
      - d110af5ccf 6y ago
        > cartels in Columbia and Mexico Which are only economically viable due to the US "war on drugs" and draconian prohibitions, which we've managed to export across the world via our foreign policy. Which brings us full circle back to the US dollar funding wars. It's as though unethical people exist who are willing to do bad things with whatever they have to hand if it turns a profit.
      - Shorel 6y ago
        You write like illicit drugs is the only product made in Colombia. What about coffee, flowers, chocolate, bananas, palm oil, unrefined oil, and carbon? I feel personally offended. However, just for clarification, BTC has been in the news very often during the last year. And many people are investing heavily in BTC since then. People who would otherwise never hear of BTC before.
  - johanneskanybal 6y ago
    Maybe in 2014. Criminals do not use strict us KYC exchanges and trackable bitcoin, that doesn't make much sense. If the onramp isn't anonymous (mining/a bag of cash) you'd be screwed. This one is a bit old my guess is the anonymous cash narrative is even smaller than in this graph: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd24c https://medium.com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd...
louloulou 6y ago
There are P2P alternatives: https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/. Low liquidity atm, but that would change if centralised services prevented withdrawals.
- knocte 6y ago
  My fav P2P exchange is localcryptos.com which, unlike Bisq, doesn't require downloading/installing software locally.
- lima 6y ago
  The real competition to Coinbase are liquidity pools like Uniswap and on-chain order book exchanges like Serum. Coinbase is only needed to get fiat in/out.
artursapek 6y ago
You can thank local bureaucrats and their heavy handed regulations (like the Bitlicense) for that.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
What is the point of an exchange that doesn't let users deposit and withdraw coins? Their only purpose is trading. All assets should be stored in hardware wallets when not being traded.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Yes. If all exchanges were only for trading, crypto will go bust since you won't be able to use them to buy anything from the real world.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Do people buy real world things with cryptocurrency now? Is this even a requirement? People aren't buying anything with GameStop stock, but it seems to be doing fine.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them. GameStop won't keep increasing for ten years, like crypto did, without some real world fundamentals. Even in GME case, you have the short sellers as a backbone for its rise, not just buying and selling for the sake of it. Without the short sellers, GME wouldn't have risen up that much.
      - meowface 6y ago
        >Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them. Any decent one is using Monero, which isn't necessarily the target of a ton of speculation, I think.
        rocqua 6y ago
        The on-ramp to monero is usually through bitcoin.
bdcravens 6y ago
I regularly send and receive on Gemini. Cash App as well, though it's more of a vendor than an exchange.
ur-whale 6y ago
Bitstamp, one (if not THE) oldest surviving exchanges does allow crypto send and receive. And they're way cheaper than Coinbase.
- jcpham2 6y ago
  Stamp isn’t Amore-ica
hahahahe 6y ago
You do realize they are facilitating money laundering right?
- logicchains 6y ago
  You do realise that the creation of the crime of "money laundering" and government attempts to crack down on it have been completely and utterly ineffective, with the illicit drug market being larger than ever (and money laundering laws failing completely to stop the creation of terrorist groups like Isis)? What they have achieved is facilitating unpredecented violation of citizens' financial privacy and massively inconveniencing small businesses, while having zero impact on the ability of the elites to engage in corruption.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    It will never be possible to completely stem the flow of profits from crime to clean money, or from clean money to terrorist groups. But I think the best metric of how well the efforts are working is to listen to the market and look at how much it costs to launder money. IIRC the book Lying for Money by Dan Davies had the figure as high as 50%, which is a pretty darn high transaction cost; if AML efforts didn’t work nobody would be paying it.
logicchains 6y ago
>CoinBase is one of the last exchanges which still allow sending and receiving crypto You should prefix this with "in America". In Asia excluding China the industry's quite healthy, with a bunch of exchanges available. The "future of crypto" in America will just be to use a good VPN.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Ex China and India soon
- sn_master 6y ago
  Even if we use a VPN, how to make the payments? Don't those exchanges require Asian bank accounts?
anonymoushn 6y ago
FTX.us surely has crypto deposits and withdrawals
intotheabyss 6y ago
Payment networks are being built on Ethereum that will allow much more than just sending / receiving in a peer to peer decentralized way at low cost https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/ https://optimism.io/ https://optimism.io/ https://www.immutable.com/ https://www.immutable.com/
runeks 6y ago
If you can’t withdraw a cryptocurrency from an exchange you’re trading a “cryptocurrency index”, not the currency itself.
- carstenhag 6y ago
  Not always (in some countries like Germany trading an index would be pretty bad for taxation reasons) - they really just don't give you an option to withdraw. Likely it's just way easier and cheaper to secure their wallets that way.

kolbe 6y ago

What good is Coinbase other than as a way to exchange crypto for dollars? If crypto is to ever have any meaning, then it shouldn't need to interface with the financial system that it aims to upend.

sn_master 6y ago
How else would you obtain crypto if it wasn't by exchanging it with other fiat currency? Mining hasn't been realistic for many years now. It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware. Buying and selling 'assets' on the Darkweb and amongst people you know in other countries with restricted foreign money transfer is one main use case of CoinBase. In fact, I doubt BTC would have thrived as much as it did if it wasn't for SilkRoad/DarkMarket/EmpireMarket/WhiteHouseMarket etc. Not to mention the hundreds of millions that went into worse endeavors like ransomeware and funding terror organizations. BTC didn't become what it is without the billions of dollars in demand for those very real use cases. Each drug dealer exchanges tens and hundreds of thousands of USD in crypt, much more than the average regular crypto enthusiast. BTC investors are investing in blood money, like it or not. It's not just a magic computer token thingy, and it hasn't been for a decade now since the SilkRoad inception.
- louloulou 6y ago
  > It costs the same as a single BTC in electricity cost to mine one, assuming you have the mining hardware. You just described how to buy bitcoin privately with electricity. Why is it unrealistic?
  - sn_master 6y ago
    I don't have the hardware to mine BitCoins. You need expensive ASICs or at least very powerful GPUs, running 24/7, and you can't mine partial BitCoins. i.e. I won't get 200$ worth of BTC by investing 200$ in electricity. Even if its possible, it would take days or weeks to get that much BTC. What if you want 2,000$ of BTC right now? Would you want to wait months before you get it? And electricity cost varies widely between regions. Many areas in the US and China outright ban crypto mining. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=347208.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=347208.0 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m... https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-wants-ban-mining/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-says-bitcoin-wasteful-want...
    - louloulou 6y ago
      You can buy an older generation ASIC on the secondary market for pretty cheap (usually), and probably mine ~$10 worth of bitcoin/day (by joining a pool). I agree it's not much, but it is permissionless. If you want to buy large amounts, you would use the P2P markets for fiat to bitcoin trades https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/
      - sn_master 6y ago
        10$ a day isn't practical at all for investment or online purchases. It's only good if you have a big rig of those to get at least 1,000$/month, but at what electricity and noise cost? I don't think I can run that in a single bedroom apartment with neighbors around. Bisq sounds interesting, but I have my doubts about them, since there is no escrow system and I don't think there is enough liquidity either. I'll check it out anyway.
        louloulou 6y ago
        Yeah, I would say mining may not be practical primarily due to the noise. You would need a garage or similar to put the miners in.
- tracedddd 6y ago
  How about good old working for it. I’ve received payment in Bitcoin and paid employees in cryptocurrency. The thing about fungible assets is that they are neutral money. They aren’t “blood money”, they are simply blind to whatever they are used for. At least they aren’t finding wars like the dollar.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    > At least they aren’t finding wars like the dollar. Plenty of the drug trade BTCs goes to funding the cartels in Columbia and Mexico actually. Source: Tried buying BTC on LocalBitcoins once and 9/10 of the US sellers were asking to send Western Union to Columbia. Meanwhile, we know from the government that a lot of the BTC payments on dark markets end up in the drug dealer hands in Columbia. So, apparently they sell the drug BTC back to us at the higher exchange rate for USD so we can give it back to them for drugs, back and forth....
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      > cartels in Columbia and Mexico Which are only economically viable due to the US "war on drugs" and draconian prohibitions, which we've managed to export across the world via our foreign policy. Which brings us full circle back to the US dollar funding wars. It's as though unethical people exist who are willing to do bad things with whatever they have to hand if it turns a profit.
    - Shorel 6y ago
      You write like illicit drugs is the only product made in Colombia. What about coffee, flowers, chocolate, bananas, palm oil, unrefined oil, and carbon? I feel personally offended. However, just for clarification, BTC has been in the news very often during the last year. And many people are investing heavily in BTC since then. People who would otherwise never hear of BTC before.
- johanneskanybal 6y ago
  Maybe in 2014. Criminals do not use strict us KYC exchanges and trackable bitcoin, that doesn't make much sense. If the onramp isn't anonymous (mining/a bag of cash) you'd be screwed. This one is a bit old my guess is the anonymous cash narrative is even smaller than in this graph: https://medium.com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd24c https://medium.com/@nic__carter/visions-of-bitcoin-4b7b7cbcd...

louloulou 6y ago

There are P2P alternatives: https://bisq.network/ https://bisq.network/. Low liquidity atm, but that would change if centralised services prevented withdrawals.

knocte 6y ago
My fav P2P exchange is localcryptos.com which, unlike Bisq, doesn't require downloading/installing software locally.
lima 6y ago
The real competition to Coinbase are liquidity pools like Uniswap and on-chain order book exchanges like Serum. Coinbase is only needed to get fiat in/out.

artursapek 6y ago

You can thank local bureaucrats and their heavy handed regulations (like the Bitlicense) for that.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

What is the point of an exchange that doesn't let users deposit and withdraw coins? Their only purpose is trading. All assets should be stored in hardware wallets when not being traded.

sn_master 6y ago
Yes. If all exchanges were only for trading, crypto will go bust since you won't be able to use them to buy anything from the real world.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Do people buy real world things with cryptocurrency now? Is this even a requirement? People aren't buying anything with GameStop stock, but it seems to be doing fine.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them. GameStop won't keep increasing for ten years, like crypto did, without some real world fundamentals. Even in GME case, you have the short sellers as a backbone for its rise, not just buying and selling for the sake of it. Without the short sellers, GME wouldn't have risen up that much.
    - meowface 6y ago
      >Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them. Any decent one is using Monero, which isn't necessarily the target of a ton of speculation, I think.
      - rocqua 6y ago
        The on-ramp to monero is usually through bitcoin.

bdcravens 6y ago

I regularly send and receive on Gemini. Cash App as well, though it's more of a vendor than an exchange.

ur-whale 6y ago

Bitstamp, one (if not THE) oldest surviving exchanges does allow crypto send and receive. And they're way cheaper than Coinbase.

jcpham2 6y ago
Stamp isn’t Amore-ica

hahahahe 6y ago

You do realize they are facilitating money laundering right?

logicchains 6y ago
You do realise that the creation of the crime of "money laundering" and government attempts to crack down on it have been completely and utterly ineffective, with the illicit drug market being larger than ever (and money laundering laws failing completely to stop the creation of terrorist groups like Isis)? What they have achieved is facilitating unpredecented violation of citizens' financial privacy and massively inconveniencing small businesses, while having zero impact on the ability of the elites to engage in corruption.
- paulgb 6y ago
  It will never be possible to completely stem the flow of profits from crime to clean money, or from clean money to terrorist groups. But I think the best metric of how well the efforts are working is to listen to the market and look at how much it costs to launder money. IIRC the book Lying for Money by Dan Davies had the figure as high as 50%, which is a pretty darn high transaction cost; if AML efforts didn’t work nobody would be paying it.

logicchains 6y ago

>CoinBase is one of the last exchanges which still allow sending and receiving crypto You should prefix this with "in America". In Asia excluding China the industry's quite healthy, with a bunch of exchanges available. The "future of crypto" in America will just be to use a good VPN.

fakedang 6y ago
Ex China and India soon
sn_master 6y ago
Even if we use a VPN, how to make the payments? Don't those exchanges require Asian bank accounts?

anonymoushn 6y ago

FTX.us surely has crypto deposits and withdrawals

intotheabyss 6y ago

Payment networks are being built on Ethereum that will allow much more than just sending / receiving in a peer to peer decentralized way at low cost https://starkware.co/ https://starkware.co/ https://optimism.io/ https://optimism.io/ https://www.immutable.com/ https://www.immutable.com/

runeks 6y ago

If you can’t withdraw a cryptocurrency from an exchange you’re trading a “cryptocurrency index”, not the currency itself.

carstenhag 6y ago
Not always (in some countries like Germany trading an index would be pretty bad for taxation reasons) - they really just don't give you an option to withdraw. Likely it's just way easier and cheaper to secure their wallets that way.