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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.
    - gaadd33 13y ago
      You think that Goldman Sachs, for example, had exactly 263,674,000,000.00 of cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2012? You don't think that's likely rounded to at least the million? In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        Auditing standards at large banks have a materiality threshold. At a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, that threshold approaches half a billion. But that's at the top layer, on top of many other layers of accounting. At the level of individual customer accounts, even small discrepancies would be caught.
  - AJ007 13y ago
    Any sort of financial account should be ACID safe. You can't just receive money on one end, and then it magically doesn't enter a client's account. Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.
    - davedx 13y ago
      Except things like ATMs are not. They use eventual consistency.
    - remon 13y ago
      Very few financial systems are ACID. Why do people still think banks run on bloody MySQL?
      - lotsofcows 13y ago
        I love a non-sequitur as much as the next giraffe, but what does banks using MySQL have to do with banks choosing not to go ACID?
        remon 13y ago
        Nothing at all other than the ever surfacing assumption by a lot of people that financial traffic is done on ACID like principles (rather than eventual consistency which it actually is). MySQL was a random example as should have been somewhat obvious.
        lotsofcows 13y ago
        MySQL is a random example of financial traffic not following ACID principles? I still don't understand. Is this a reference to MySQL, pre-InnoDB, not being ACID compliant? InnoDB's been around for a decade and has been the default database engine for years.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. No way. Not on fin-co ops. That's like a car tire store without a pressure guage in shop.
kaoD 13y ago
That makes no sense. It is self-regulation. Balancing the books is in their best interest.
PKop 13y ago
You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.
- specialist 13y ago
  I'm keen to learn more about self regulating free markets. Please provide an example.

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.
  - gaadd33 13y ago
    You think that Goldman Sachs, for example, had exactly 263,674,000,000.00 of cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2012? You don't think that's likely rounded to at least the million? In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Auditing standards at large banks have a materiality threshold. At a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, that threshold approaches half a billion. But that's at the top layer, on top of many other layers of accounting. At the level of individual customer accounts, even small discrepancies would be caught.
- AJ007 13y ago
  Any sort of financial account should be ACID safe. You can't just receive money on one end, and then it magically doesn't enter a client's account. Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.
  - davedx 13y ago
    Except things like ATMs are not. They use eventual consistency.
  - remon 13y ago
    Very few financial systems are ACID. Why do people still think banks run on bloody MySQL?
    - lotsofcows 13y ago
      I love a non-sequitur as much as the next giraffe, but what does banks using MySQL have to do with banks choosing not to go ACID?
      - remon 13y ago
        Nothing at all other than the ever surfacing assumption by a lot of people that financial traffic is done on ACID like principles (rather than eventual consistency which it actually is). MySQL was a random example as should have been somewhat obvious.
        lotsofcows 13y ago
        MySQL is a random example of financial traffic not following ACID principles? I still don't understand. Is this a reference to MySQL, pre-InnoDB, not being ACID compliant? InnoDB's been around for a decade and has been the default database engine for years.
- 001sky 13y ago
  You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. No way. Not on fin-co ops. That's like a car tire store without a pressure guage in shop.

kaoD 13y ago

That makes no sense. It is self-regulation. Balancing the books is in their best interest.

PKop 13y ago

You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.

specialist 13y ago
I'm keen to learn more about self regulating free markets. Please provide an example.