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I both love and hate Coinbase! So far, they've cost me hundreds of dollars. Some may consider it stolen money. I understand the technical issue, but I'm sure wh

by kolev 13y ago

I both love and hate Coinbase! So far, they've cost me hundreds of dollars. Some may consider it stolen money. I understand the technical issue, but I'm sure when they get adopted by a wider and not-so-technical audience, they may become a target of a nasty class action lawsuit. For example, I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing. Again, I understand why this is happening, but they make enough (1%) to honor the price. As I suspect, sometimes they sell from their own inventory of Bitcoins, so, they don't depend on the market order.

jackgavigan 13y ago
> ..I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing. That's shocking (if true). Recording trades at a price that's different from what the user saw on their screen when they clicked to commit to the trade is pretty fundamental fuck-up. It's a "Drop EVERYTHING! We need to fix this NOW!" kind of problem. There's a good chance that someone's head would roll if it happened in an investment banking/capital markets-type environment. I know for certain that if it was happening with a bank's online payments service (the sort of thing where you can send EUR from your USD bank account), the service would simply be switched off until the problem was fixed. You'd have to get the legal department involved to notify the regulator and assess the company's liability. You'd have to go through the logs to find every single instance of it ever happening and write to each and every customer who was disadvantaged to inform them, apologise and reimburse them. And there'd be a significant fall-out, with very senior people asking "How the fuck could this happen?!" I get the impression that some Bitcoin startups have a lot of growing up to do.
- kolev 13y ago
  Unfortunately, it's true. It hasn't happened just once or twice. They may have some excuse in the ToS, I can't read legalese, but, again, they will have huge issues when non-technical people who are used to the penny-level precision and honesty of banking and stock trading. Same with Bitcoin exchanges. I had Bitstamp incorrectly execute orders twice, which cost me even more than the few dollar rate difference with Coinbase. I won't mention the situation where you have an open position during big movements and their service gets offline and you cannot react. When it comes to money, regulation doesn't seem like a bad idea! All these things added to widespread Bitcoin theft and marketplaces created just to steal bitcoin en masse hurt pretty badly the reputation of Bitcoin!

by kolev 13y ago

jackgavigan 13y ago

> ..I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing. That's shocking (if true). Recording trades at a price that's different from what the user saw on their screen when they clicked to commit to the trade is pretty fundamental fuck-up. It's a "Drop EVERYTHING! We need to fix this NOW!" kind of problem. There's a good chance that someone's head would roll if it happened in an investment banking/capital markets-type environment. I know for certain that if it was happening with a bank's online payments service (the sort of thing where you can send EUR from your USD bank account), the service would simply be switched off until the problem was fixed. You'd have to get the legal department involved to notify the regulator and assess the company's liability. You'd have to go through the logs to find every single instance of it ever happening and write to each and every customer who was disadvantaged to inform them, apologise and reimburse them. And there'd be a significant fall-out, with very senior people asking "How the fuck could this happen?!" I get the impression that some Bitcoin startups have a lot of growing up to do.

kolev 13y ago
Unfortunately, it's true. It hasn't happened just once or twice. They may have some excuse in the ToS, I can't read legalese, but, again, they will have huge issues when non-technical people who are used to the penny-level precision and honesty of banking and stock trading. Same with Bitcoin exchanges. I had Bitstamp incorrectly execute orders twice, which cost me even more than the few dollar rate difference with Coinbase. I won't mention the situation where you have an open position during big movements and their service gets offline and you cannot react. When it comes to money, regulation doesn't seem like a bad idea! All these things added to widespread Bitcoin theft and marketplaces created just to steal bitcoin en masse hurt pretty badly the reputation of Bitcoin!