9 ms·

Forget the difference in the exchange rates. Are you saying you have no system in place to monitor if transactions execute successfully? I'm not trying to be hy

by seldo 13y ago

Forget the difference in the exchange rates. Are you saying you have no system in place to monitor if transactions execute successfully? I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution.

slg 13y ago
>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.
- revelation 13y ago
  And a majority of the (previous) big players have been compromised on more than one occasion. It's a big kindergarden.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- seldo 13y ago
  I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out. That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day. It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?
    - jellicle 13y ago
      But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.
      - tedunangst 13y ago
        It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
        You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the business is partly illegal and bookkeeper is cooking the books. Therefore they don't even notice honest mistakes. I have seen same thing happening over and over again. People don't care about money. And this is business as usual.
        barrkel 13y ago
        Reconciliation is a fundamental operational procedure of financial entities. It's how they find system failures, process failures, fraud, etc. You take feeds from various systems and correlate them. It's not super complex, but it is fundamental. I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.
        PeterisP 13y ago
        If this is really is business as usual, then it might be acceptable for a widget selling company but completely unacceptable for financial services. In financial services the same actions that you describe are gross negligence that (depending on jurisdiction) can mean personal liability, possibly including criminal charges, for the relevant CxOs, and a lifetime ban from running any other financial companies in future. You can't entrust consumer's money to companies being run like that, it's pure nonsense.
  - locusm 13y ago
    MtGox is something like 5 months behind in withdrawls with no confirmed date of when it will occur. I'm waiting on $600 since beginning of Sept...
    - AJ007 13y ago
      If this is not some sort of error, MtGox is a ponzi scheme.
      - laichzeit0 13y ago
        I can't remember where I read this and I don't remember all the details, however: As I understand the problem is mainly with USD withdrawals to USA, and the problem is not with MtGox but rather with the bank they use having some legacy issues and that they can only process X transactions a day in batch. Or something to that effect. For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.
  - nikatwork 13y ago
    Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.
    - srdev 13y ago
      Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.
      - remon 13y ago
        Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
        srdev 13y ago
        As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.
  - joyce 13y ago
    MtGox was a URL that the original founder had, but the bitcoin site was not made originally to sell trading cards. It was made to sell bitcoins and he just used a URL he had.
- quack 13y ago
  No. The joke is that people are demanding a product so badly that theyre doing business with kiddies who dont know how to run a financial institution. This is literally an economy of "shut up and take my money," but no one wants to play ball.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    I know this is bad, but financial institutions haven't exactly been reliable, honest, faultless or good, particularly the last few years. My own experiences have been bad, but the world still hasn't pulled out of the hole that the financial industry dug, so I'm pretty well off and lucky if I'm compare myself to the average. I'd suggest a different standard to hold this company to.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      I suppose that even with this, bitcoin banks still appear to be far more reputable establishments at the moment than say, either RBS or the Co-op, unless Rob Ford has founded one recently.
    - mrmrcoleman 13y ago
      Having spent some time in financial institutions, I can only agree with lastlogin's point. It's important to remember that there are many such mistakes in large financial institutions every day. If I could post on yc and quickly get a response from my bank, I'd be a happy customer.
      - JeffL 13y ago
        One time I had almost 1 million extra dollars show up in my Waterhouse Brokerage account. I thought, "huh, that's interesting." It disappeared 4 days later.
        lem72 13y ago
        Yup, it wasn't as much, but I magically had 10k show up after I made a deposit through a bank teller that stayed there for 2 weeks before finally disappearing.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  The wild west of currency, with everything that entails.
- midas007 13y ago
  0. This is exactly why auditing (internal and external) and settlement processes exist elsewhere. But it's impossible to have a startup deploy every single control at the very beginning. There are costs (time & money) to get things done, those control don't just magically appear. Eventually, with scale, the growing pains of business process debt (like technical debt) will come due. That's a good thing, because building every single control into an experimental venture that might not survive could be a very big waste. Just like a successful venture is a series of experiments, the business side gets built incrementally. As a company gets bigger (whether $ or buzz), it's susceptibility to being targeted increases because the bulleye on its back gets larger. 1. Let's suppose I employ an old gambit: process a large transaction through CoinBase, receive the coins and say "I never received them." I'm sure they have at least enough controls in place to avoid double-credit fraud.
  - alttab 13y ago
    Giving coins for USD is their primary use case. Monitoring transactions should be the only control they have in place if they must cut corners. As a coinbase customer and someone who manages a team and large complex distributed systems, this is an oversight I would not expect from an industry leader and makes me nervous to continue doing transactions with coinbase. How can we be made comfortable that this won't happen again? $50 isn't the root cause fix and could have cost the OP $15,000 due to the delay. What if those BTC was going to be used to make a purchase? He is left holding the bag, leaving a sour taste.
    - midas007 13y ago
      Coinbase is ultimately a double-ended marketplace. But to add more complexity to the fire, one's own systems count as yet another source of truth. So what the sellers say, what buyers say and what we say have to reconciled. It's these reconciliation processes that are the hard part... I've had to deal with micropayment reconciliation for a minor handset mfgr (multiple currencies, payment processors, timezones, products, on and on). Sometimes the credit card processor up and changes the API without notice, and a whole slew of payments have to rerun. This is where fields in the local reconcilation db start to creep in and all sort of weird flags get made. What the heck is flag F? (IOTW, document the heck out of the db schema AND have lots^10 unit tests.)
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place or organizations that assess companies like this and determine whether their transactions complete and such. The downside of the Bitcoin market, pretty much.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place There may not be a well-developed specialized regulatory system in place with authority over some bitcoin firms, but in most of the places that bitcoin firms operate there is a legal system in place, and entering into a sale contract, accepting payment, and then failing to deliver the product is the kind of thing that is well within the scope of competence of most of those legal systems.
- imrehg 13y ago
  That is the same thing that shocked me when I run into a bunch of different entrepreneurs in the last few weeks, creating local exchanges here, bitcoin ATM, thinking about colored coins and interesting transactions enabled by bitcoin.... and when I talk with them about the technical side, they never even know how a transaction is verified, what are bitcoin scripts, how the network works in general.... I know that I know quite little about bitcoin and it confounds me that people honestly believe they can get away with not knowing how things work. Due diligence, man!
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  > We have no idea of their technical expertise why, we do - a team who could quickly build a rails app and connect it to third party payment processor.)
bonemachine 13y ago
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. And which just ate $25MM in Series B.
sheetjs 13y ago
There was a similar discussion with a very interesting comment regarding their use of mongodb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382 PG's reply in the thread is very telling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372
- joezydeco 13y ago
  I've been keeping my mouth shut here about Coinbase after starting that thread 9 months ago. I feel bad for someone that can't put a finger on his 30K, but I can't feel that bad if he didn't do a little research here first. Hopefully on the next bubble people will be a little more enlightened.
  - sheetjs 13y ago
    As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation. As PG wrote: > Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely Now, it's possible that other complaints on HN were nuked by PG or some other moderator, making it difficult for someone to find it.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation As PG wrote: > Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely That's not why he said that. He explains further down thread: HN is a news site, not a customer support forum for companies funded by YC, and in fact the site guidelines explicitly ask that it not be used that way
      - anonymoushn 13y ago
        This objection is pretty flimsy. HN is very frequently used as a customer support forum for large tech companies not funded by YC. A policy that it is okay to use HN as a customer support forum for Google, Amazon, and Facebook but not for Coinbase does not look very good.
yapcguy 13y ago
It might not be a computer system problem. Perhaps CoinBase (or a rogue employee) were doing some proprietary trading and screwed up badly? Maybe they were trying to quietly recover their losses and weren't expecting a customer to cause a public outcry and force their hand?
- girvo 13y ago
  ...how? This isn't stocks, there just isn't the same financial instruments that they can play with to recover from a drop in price :/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
cehlen 13y ago
Take it EASY everyone! They made a mistake, took responsibility for the error, resolved the issue, and compensated the user for his inconvenience. Good for them!
- sheetjs 13y ago
  For posterity's sake, here are the sequence of events. Coinbase: 1) stopped replying to support emails even though there was a clear issue 2) only addressed the issue when the victim decided to submit his issue to HN (and only after it sat on the front page for nearly an hour 3) blamed a server upgrade and offered $50 of BTC when the actual loss was well north of $12K 4) only made the customer whole after many HN comments pointing out that the offer was paltry compared to the loss (and that they may potentially be pocketing the difference) I applaud them for resolving the issue in a way that the victim wanted: "deliver the coins at the exact market price that they are at the moment you are crediting the account". However, this and similar issues in the past have raised red flags that haven't be adequately addressed: A) why did customer support go dark? I suspect the reaction would be different if they were more proactive B) as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930748 , why doesn't Coinbase have the infrastructure to detect these issues? This is really basic accounting, and if they can't get it right on a small scale why would anyone trust them with more money? C) what steps were taken to prevent this from happening in the future? I imagine that there will be more server upgrades as Coinbase expands. D) What is their future policy regarding similar issues? Based on their initial reaction, one should not expect much if any compensation. E) Will it take an HN post in the future to get their attention? And looking back at some of the comments in a conversation from 270 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985) it seems that Coinbase hasn't actually learned from the previous issues. I think joezydeco said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 > You have a company trying to start up in a very tough space where you need to be super-reliable and super-transparent. Coinbase's actions this entire week were neither.
  - gaadd33 13y ago
    How did you conclude the actual loss was > $12K? He got the bitcoins at today's price + $50. That seems like there was no loss?
ajsharp 13y ago
Not hyperbolic at all. This is brokerage 101. It's absolutely asinine that their system fails this hard when doing some "upgrades". A real brokerage (e.g. Fidelity, Schwab et al) would likely be subject to non-trivial fines from the FCC for this type of gross negligence. Sounds like they need some people who have actual practical experience building financial systems.
forgottenpass 13y ago
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. You're not being hyperbolic at all. You're just used to the standard Hacker News "only haters expect businesses to be competent" type of handwaving response. But this thread is about money, that makes it different.
maxmem 13y ago
I work with some of the largest financials institutions and nothing surprises me any longer.

by seldo 13y ago

slg 13y ago

>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.

revelation 13y ago
And a majority of the (previous) big players have been compromised on more than one occasion. It's a big kindergarden.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
seldo 13y ago
I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.
- tedunangst 13y ago
  But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out. That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day. It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?
  - jellicle 13y ago
    But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.
    - tedunangst 13y ago
      It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
        You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the business is partly illegal and bookkeeper is cooking the books. Therefore they don't even notice honest mistakes. I have seen same thing happening over and over again. People don't care about money. And this is business as usual.
        barrkel 13y ago
        Reconciliation is a fundamental operational procedure of financial entities. It's how they find system failures, process failures, fraud, etc. You take feeds from various systems and correlate them. It's not super complex, but it is fundamental. I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.
        PeterisP 13y ago
        If this is really is business as usual, then it might be acceptable for a widget selling company but completely unacceptable for financial services. In financial services the same actions that you describe are gross negligence that (depending on jurisdiction) can mean personal liability, possibly including criminal charges, for the relevant CxOs, and a lifetime ban from running any other financial companies in future. You can't entrust consumer's money to companies being run like that, it's pure nonsense.
- locusm 13y ago
  MtGox is something like 5 months behind in withdrawls with no confirmed date of when it will occur. I'm waiting on $600 since beginning of Sept...
  - AJ007 13y ago
    If this is not some sort of error, MtGox is a ponzi scheme.
    - laichzeit0 13y ago
      I can't remember where I read this and I don't remember all the details, however: As I understand the problem is mainly with USD withdrawals to USA, and the problem is not with MtGox but rather with the bank they use having some legacy issues and that they can only process X transactions a day in batch. Or something to that effect. For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.
- nikatwork 13y ago
  Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.
  - srdev 13y ago
    Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.
    - remon 13y ago
      Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
      - srdev 13y ago
        As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.
- joyce 13y ago
  MtGox was a URL that the original founder had, but the bitcoin site was not made originally to sell trading cards. It was made to sell bitcoins and he just used a URL he had.
quack 13y ago
No. The joke is that people are demanding a product so badly that theyre doing business with kiddies who dont know how to run a financial institution. This is literally an economy of "shut up and take my money," but no one wants to play ball.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  I know this is bad, but financial institutions haven't exactly been reliable, honest, faultless or good, particularly the last few years. My own experiences have been bad, but the world still hasn't pulled out of the hole that the financial industry dug, so I'm pretty well off and lucky if I'm compare myself to the average. I'd suggest a different standard to hold this company to.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    I suppose that even with this, bitcoin banks still appear to be far more reputable establishments at the moment than say, either RBS or the Co-op, unless Rob Ford has founded one recently.
  - mrmrcoleman 13y ago
    Having spent some time in financial institutions, I can only agree with lastlogin's point. It's important to remember that there are many such mistakes in large financial institutions every day. If I could post on yc and quickly get a response from my bank, I'd be a happy customer.
    - JeffL 13y ago
      One time I had almost 1 million extra dollars show up in my Waterhouse Brokerage account. I thought, "huh, that's interesting." It disappeared 4 days later.
      - lem72 13y ago
        Yup, it wasn't as much, but I magically had 10k show up after I made a deposit through a bank teller that stayed there for 2 weeks before finally disappearing.
sliverstorm 13y ago
The wild west of currency, with everything that entails.
midas007 13y ago
0. This is exactly why auditing (internal and external) and settlement processes exist elsewhere. But it's impossible to have a startup deploy every single control at the very beginning. There are costs (time & money) to get things done, those control don't just magically appear. Eventually, with scale, the growing pains of business process debt (like technical debt) will come due. That's a good thing, because building every single control into an experimental venture that might not survive could be a very big waste. Just like a successful venture is a series of experiments, the business side gets built incrementally. As a company gets bigger (whether $ or buzz), it's susceptibility to being targeted increases because the bulleye on its back gets larger. 1. Let's suppose I employ an old gambit: process a large transaction through CoinBase, receive the coins and say "I never received them." I'm sure they have at least enough controls in place to avoid double-credit fraud.
- alttab 13y ago
  Giving coins for USD is their primary use case. Monitoring transactions should be the only control they have in place if they must cut corners. As a coinbase customer and someone who manages a team and large complex distributed systems, this is an oversight I would not expect from an industry leader and makes me nervous to continue doing transactions with coinbase. How can we be made comfortable that this won't happen again? $50 isn't the root cause fix and could have cost the OP $15,000 due to the delay. What if those BTC was going to be used to make a purchase? He is left holding the bag, leaving a sour taste.
  - midas007 13y ago
    Coinbase is ultimately a double-ended marketplace. But to add more complexity to the fire, one's own systems count as yet another source of truth. So what the sellers say, what buyers say and what we say have to reconciled. It's these reconciliation processes that are the hard part... I've had to deal with micropayment reconciliation for a minor handset mfgr (multiple currencies, payment processors, timezones, products, on and on). Sometimes the credit card processor up and changes the API without notice, and a whole slew of payments have to rerun. This is where fields in the local reconcilation db start to creep in and all sort of weird flags get made. What the heck is flag F? (IOTW, document the heck out of the db schema AND have lots^10 unit tests.)
Cthulhu_ 13y ago
Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place or organizations that assess companies like this and determine whether their transactions complete and such. The downside of the Bitcoin market, pretty much.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place There may not be a well-developed specialized regulatory system in place with authority over some bitcoin firms, but in most of the places that bitcoin firms operate there is a legal system in place, and entering into a sale contract, accepting payment, and then failing to deliver the product is the kind of thing that is well within the scope of competence of most of those legal systems.
imrehg 13y ago
That is the same thing that shocked me when I run into a bunch of different entrepreneurs in the last few weeks, creating local exchanges here, bitcoin ATM, thinking about colored coins and interesting transactions enabled by bitcoin.... and when I talk with them about the technical side, they never even know how a transaction is verified, what are bitcoin scripts, how the network works in general.... I know that I know quite little about bitcoin and it confounds me that people honestly believe they can get away with not knowing how things work. Due diligence, man!
dschiptsov 13y ago
> We have no idea of their technical expertise why, we do - a team who could quickly build a rails app and connect it to third party payment processor.)

bonemachine 13y ago

I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. And which just ate $25MM in Series B.

sheetjs 13y ago

There was a similar discussion with a very interesting comment regarding their use of mongodb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382 PG's reply in the thread is very telling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372

joezydeco 13y ago
I've been keeping my mouth shut here about Coinbase after starting that thread 9 months ago. I feel bad for someone that can't put a finger on his 30K, but I can't feel that bad if he didn't do a little research here first. Hopefully on the next bubble people will be a little more enlightened.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation. As PG wrote: > Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely Now, it's possible that other complaints on HN were nuked by PG or some other moderator, making it difficult for someone to find it.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation As PG wrote: > Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely That's not why he said that. He explains further down thread: HN is a news site, not a customer support forum for companies funded by YC, and in fact the site guidelines explicitly ask that it not be used that way
    - anonymoushn 13y ago
      This objection is pretty flimsy. HN is very frequently used as a customer support forum for large tech companies not funded by YC. A policy that it is okay to use HN as a customer support forum for Google, Amazon, and Facebook but not for Coinbase does not look very good.

yapcguy 13y ago

It might not be a computer system problem. Perhaps CoinBase (or a rogue employee) were doing some proprietary trading and screwed up badly? Maybe they were trying to quietly recover their losses and weren't expecting a customer to cause a public outcry and force their hand?

girvo 13y ago
...how? This isn't stocks, there just isn't the same financial instruments that they can play with to recover from a drop in price :/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

cehlen 13y ago

Take it EASY everyone! They made a mistake, took responsibility for the error, resolved the issue, and compensated the user for his inconvenience. Good for them!

sheetjs 13y ago
For posterity's sake, here are the sequence of events. Coinbase: 1) stopped replying to support emails even though there was a clear issue 2) only addressed the issue when the victim decided to submit his issue to HN (and only after it sat on the front page for nearly an hour 3) blamed a server upgrade and offered $50 of BTC when the actual loss was well north of $12K 4) only made the customer whole after many HN comments pointing out that the offer was paltry compared to the loss (and that they may potentially be pocketing the difference) I applaud them for resolving the issue in a way that the victim wanted: "deliver the coins at the exact market price that they are at the moment you are crediting the account". However, this and similar issues in the past have raised red flags that haven't be adequately addressed: A) why did customer support go dark? I suspect the reaction would be different if they were more proactive B) as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930748 , why doesn't Coinbase have the infrastructure to detect these issues? This is really basic accounting, and if they can't get it right on a small scale why would anyone trust them with more money? C) what steps were taken to prevent this from happening in the future? I imagine that there will be more server upgrades as Coinbase expands. D) What is their future policy regarding similar issues? Based on their initial reaction, one should not expect much if any compensation. E) Will it take an HN post in the future to get their attention? And looking back at some of the comments in a conversation from 270 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985) it seems that Coinbase hasn't actually learned from the previous issues. I think joezydeco said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985 > You have a company trying to start up in a very tough space where you need to be super-reliable and super-transparent. Coinbase's actions this entire week were neither.
- gaadd33 13y ago
  How did you conclude the actual loss was > $12K? He got the bitcoins at today's price + $50. That seems like there was no loss?

ajsharp 13y ago

Not hyperbolic at all. This is brokerage 101. It's absolutely asinine that their system fails this hard when doing some "upgrades". A real brokerage (e.g. Fidelity, Schwab et al) would likely be subject to non-trivial fines from the FCC for this type of gross negligence. Sounds like they need some people who have actual practical experience building financial systems.

forgottenpass 13y ago

I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. You're not being hyperbolic at all. You're just used to the standard Hacker News "only haters expect businesses to be competent" type of handwaving response. But this thread is about money, that makes it different.

maxmem 13y ago

I work with some of the largest financials institutions and nothing surprises me any longer.