Coinbase should solve it's coinbase trust issue. I bought a small amount of litecoin almost 2 weeks ago, i'm well past my "delivery by" date, my funds left my bank account over 10 days ago, yet I still don't have my coins in my account.
To counter anecdote with anecdote, I've had no issues with coinbase and have found them pleasant to use. That includes transferring to gdax/selling/withdrawing, etc.
Agreed. I sold some ETH and deposited the funds into a USD wallet, which Coinbase decided to close due to eligibility restrictions once the funds were already in it.
I've had a ticket open for about a month w/o access to those funds.
After I read on Hacker News by a number of commenters that Coinbase Customer Support had given up -- seemed fairly dodgy to give them money as you've no reason to think you'll get recourse should something go wrong.
I went with BitPanda. I should leave my referral link here but rather my own words carry the recommendation.
Same. Coinbase are in over their heads. There is so much room for competition here.
At times I’ve been unable to access my accounts or have transactions complete in a reasonable amount of time. Coinbase closed my account without notice with no explanation other than a mention of their desire to comply with FinCEN. I never got an answer from them as-to what I did “wrong”. I sure as hell wasnt selling heroin or babies on Silk Road. Imagine if Wells Fargo closed an account without notice or explanation after a customer had a few normal deposits and withdrawals. deep rolls eyes
Yeh I think people flooding to coinbase to make overnight money expect instant gratification but coinbase has to register users with the Federal Trade commission at least for me as an American so let's not forget in addition to the other comments detailing how hard it is for any startup to scale, there is another bottleneck called FTC approval for first time coinbase users and that is on the Federal Trade Commissions timeline.
Let's also not forget while many other otherwise good UI platforms dropped out of NY because well, it was too hard and the fees were too high coinbase continued to integrate and work with lawmakers because they know how important it would be not to disciminate against states and also to have legal integration with Wallstreet, so as much as you may be upset with Coinbase for not scaling fast enough for you and making the government go faster, you should ask why so many other platforms aren't there to offer you an equally good alternative.
That being said, throughout all this bustle lately, I have not experienced issues with Coinbase and have performed a variety of money moving actions to and from multiple bank accounts coinbase and gdax with no delays. This could be because I'm an established user, approved by the Federal Trade Commission and have an established credit history with Coinbase which has led to another increase in what I am allowed to do.
Furthermore, Coinbase has been open apologetic, taken complete responsibility for the lack of being able to instantly gratify as they stayed over 8x the exponentiation of new users trying to register relative to the last spurt in the sunmer and promised to be transparent even if they can't be perfect. They have a ten day backlog on customer support tickets even after hiring 400 new people just for customer support and plan to hire even more.
It sounds like you are a new user who feels entitled to instant gratification, instant approval by the FCC, instant trust from Coinbase who probably doesn't have an established credit history with you and you're mad because things didn't work for you immediately.
I saw the other day Coinbase had an update saying wire transfers we're delayed 2-3 business days but I did not have a delay with mine, which means they probably prioritize established traders.
I wouldn't be so hard on Coinbase, but if you think you can provide a better solution by all means go for it. We need more competition in this space.
I also recommend certifying yourself with a few other platforms and getting your accounts tested and registered and having some money there so if you experience delays with Coinbase you have other options to move money. I am established with multiple platforms in case I experience issues with Gdax, but as it turns out I never have.
Imagine building a startup that moves 10's of millions of new users' monies each month out of US bank accounts. While other startups are just scaling page views, Coinbase is scaling money. Keep in mind that it takes just one financial loss to break trust from the entire community. Has any other bank in history scaled this fast?
To the dozens/hundreds of complaints like this, there are tens of thousands of non-complaints that you don't ever hear about -- users who use the service to buy/sell/withdraw without issues.
People are particularly emotional about Coinbase because it touches on their bottom line -- money. But let's not forget the fact that ALL startups have major scaling woes. Bugs in the tech being ironed out, overwhelmed support and engineering teams recruiting and integrating talent to meet the demand -- in Coinbase's case exponentially growing demand. If you've worked in a software startup you know how easy it is to be met with exponential increase in demand, and how impossibly difficult it is to stay above water growing a team at the same rate.
I'm positive on Coinbase due to their backing. YC, Andreessen Horowitz, DFJ, among dozens of high-profile investors. These guys want a $20B valuation, they're not interested in backing a failing company or a scam.
Until the situation with bitfinex pumping billions of unbacked tether into the ecosystem is resolved, doing anything involving bitcoin right now is insane.
They’ve released almost $200 million worth of tether in the last day.
My theory on tether is their goal is to absorb as much downward (selling) pressure as possible on the BTC/USD market and encourage only upward movement of BTC (equally applies to any other crypto)
1) Someone who wants to sell $1M USD of BTC may be happy to take $1M USDT instead for legal/tax purposes. This transaction would have zero impact on the BTC/USD price.
2) Tether receives $1M worth of BTC they can slowly disperse back into the market via their own exchange (since Bitfinex owns Tether) in a controlled manner that doesn't push the price down.
3) With USD in hand they can either put it into their reserves (assuming we trust them) or they could also use the cash to further eliminate any selling pressure on the exchange (with a large buy order "wall") or even generate upward pressure.
4) BTC price becomes stable or only moves upward and attracts more outside money and speculation. Repeat the cycle.
The truth is that nobody knows. We'll have to wait for an audit or a lawsuit to learn the truth. People are sounding alarms based on the amount of Tether being transferred to exchanges, creating theories that they must be printed from thin air. "Look how much they transferred, it must be fake." Really? The large amount is your only "proof?" "There was a Tether hack, it must be an inside job." Really? Based on what? Nothing.
The Twitter user Bitfinex'd is pretty much solely responsible for starting this trend, with Emil Gun Sirer retweeting pretty much all Bitfinex'd tweets. Often, if you dig into this evidence, you find mostly FUD signals -- taking various data from the internet and interpreting it into something that it isn't.
Basically I don't know nor care if Tether and Bitfinex are fraudulent, but personally I've never seen clear evidence that it is, and people like Bitfinex'd and Emil Gun Sirer seem to push FUD backing their personal anti-Bitfinex agendas without proof.
Can you provide a source for this? Is there an easy way to view the transactions that create new USDT? My searches are just turning up old Reddit posts and news articles supported by imgur screenshots.
I've been reading about this but still don't understand the scope. The money might all be fraudulent, but it also seems like the most liquid exchange on the market would also have a huge pile of cash to sit on right now after the last few years appreciation of btc. Did Tether fraud kick off this wave?
> “But first, Coinbase...needs to legitimize itself -- and bring in revenue...”
Like it doesn’t have revenue? It’s daily volumes of BTC are around 30k. Sometimes a lot more. Plus ETH. Plus LTC. They must be making at least a million per day in trading fees. They’re a money printing machine at this point.
Their website is often down, can't properly scale up and they expect trust? If you're Canadian, you can buy but can't sell cryptos, that's a red flag anywhere regarding investments.
It's interesting the negativity I read about Coinbase in this thread. Makes me wonder if those who do complain tried other exchanges? I've tried Kraken (down much more often), Bittrex (worst trading UI ever), CAvirtex (they are shutdown) ... Coinbase/ GDAX I have had a much better experience. If you want a fast money wire, pay the price for same day processing (30$), I always do and it usually takes a 2 hours.
The fact that other exchanges are worse doesn't make Coinbase any better though, that's the problem. It'd be interesting to see what % of coins is held by them. While I don't really care about Coinbase per se, I think that it could hurt the public perception of the whole crypto ecosystem if something went wrong and people were locked out of their accounts, lost funds, etc.
Coinbase has been one of the more poorly constructed sites I've used in the past couple years. I don't just mean the inability to handle volume.
I saw it riddled with HTML errors, there were buttons that didn't do anything, I got (html) responses that were false, which I only knew was the case because I looked directly at the API response.
I remember I 'sold' some litecoin on Coinbase that never sold. Took me to a couple days just to know it wasn't going to mysteriously disappear.
I find the fact that they want to add new coins even though they haven't solved any of their current issues very alarming.
Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job.
Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues.
I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. They'll be fine, they're just learning how to deal with alot of hard issues all at once.
The question was posed, what do you need to do to get institutional money and I answered.
To clarify...
Coinbase , atleast from a hedge funds perspective has 2 tasks.
1) prime broker or custodian, from this perspective you just can't be hacked and loose anyone's bitcoins.
Not sure how a hedge fund would tell its clients that they lost any amount of their funds due to an exchange being hacked, this is just so foreign to the way the markets currently work. I don't think the funds clients would be too accepting of a loss of any amount due to this.
2) as an exchange, This is probably easy for people to understand. When the volume picks up that's when you make your money. If Volume causes the exchange to go down, you can't make money.
Again this is very rare for most markets now to go down to volume and when it does it doesn't really matter too much because the concept of having your shares with an exchange doesn't really make sense in the equities market.
You'd just start trading at another exchange and none of your shares are actually held with the exchange, nor do you need to send shares to an exchange to trade, you just trade and settle at the end of the day.
EDIT END
I'll preface this by saying, what I'm asking for is hard, very hard, but being a grown up is hard..... You can't just ask people to invest billions of other peoples money and then claim "best efforts" if your exchange crashes under load.
Well what institutional investors want is pretty simple to understand, though very hard to implement.
1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf.
A hedge fund can't just go to their clients and say sorry, lost all our money, coinbase got hacked, the hedge fund itself and its principles would be sued into oblivion.
I mean if the Nasdaq, NYSE or prime broker ever got hacked, no one would expect to suddenly loose all their shares, or cash held with their prime broker.
2) The exchange can't go down, like at all. Once a year for 5 minutes is fine, or every day at midnight for 10 minutes is fine, but during regular trading hours you can't just throw your hand up and say "hey, best efforts here there just alot of volume right now, we'll be up in a few minutes"
Hedge funds make their money on volatility, which means the more volatile and busy the exchange is the more they'll want to trade. Going down when times are busy is just can't happen.
It is not easy to build a company/service like Coinbase; having said that, I think that Coinbase in its current state is slightly better than a joke, starting from their customer support.
A few years ago, it was easy to say "well, all the issues are at the BTC <-> USD (or other fiat currency) boundaries". But today's bitcoin is nearly unusable even just within the confines of the bitcoin network. For small amount of bitcoin (less then $15) it is incredible impractical to make a single transaction. Fees are around $5 and often much higher, with confirmation times sometimes reaching 6+ hours.
Maybe there is hope with Bitcoin Cash (BCH), because it can piggyback on the existing bitcoin integration infrastructure. Or maybe Ethereum or Monero or some other altcoin will take the place of Bitcoin. But more and more, it's looking like the original cryptocurrency has failed to innovate and solve fundamental scaling issues and it's first-mover advantage won't last. If these altcoins can scale better than bitcoin, they only need to match bitcoin's integrations with the existing financial system to win.
Indeed. Considering the volume of transactions going to and from Coinbase, their adoption of Segwit would go a long way towards alleviating the current mempool situation, which would bring lower fees for everyone.
It's pretty amusing that Brian was willing to back an altcoin (B2X) that hadn't even performed basic testing before its spectacular failure, and yet coinbase can't manage to enable segwit. Did they implement their own Bitcoin and decide not to port segwit?
A good currency is fungible: It has a stable value and allows rapid exchange. Bitcoin does not meet these basic requirements. So many people forget that the original paper clearly states that Bitcoin is an experiment.
I've wondered about this. I haven't tried paying for any services with BTC, but I suspect many of them would change you the current real price (in euros, usd, gbp) and show you the equivalent btc in today's money.
So some of these servers that were wise have only paid everything (servers, wages, etc.) using the real currency that comes in via credit cards and paypal and have just held onto the btc .. which makes it extremely valuable.
But people don't set prices in btc. The prices are set in fiat currency and are paid for based on the price of btc that day .. meaning you could have spent 10euro for a service last year in btc that would have been worth 100euro .. or that could be worth 0.01 euro depending on where the market goes.
But yes you're right, unless services start pricing actual service in btc, it's not really fungible for goods. It's always going through that translation layer. If anything, if McDonalds started taking mBTC and charged x mBTC for a burger and didn't change that value with the market, you'd start to see bitcoin stabilize (although you might be paying $100 for a burger some days .. if you go by what the exchanges claim the value is).
This may be a stupid question but I dont understand every aspect of bitcoin so bear with me.
Is Bitcoin access coupled with one private key or multiple?
Say someone has 10 bitcoin on their computer and a private key so its only accessible from that computer. That computer holds a lot of value. If the computer gets stolen theyve stolen all the bitcoins with it? Given that the secret to the private key can be broken at some point in the future.
Or is there a way for the user to claim back his/ger bitcoin by creating a new key with same secret?
> In traditional finance, custody banks like State Street Corp. hold securities, keep records and provide other services for investment advisers. A lack of similar offerings in the cryptocurrency world has kept many institutions on the sidelines.
>Coinbase has offered a solution: crypto custodial services, slated to roll out next year. Called Coinbase Custody, it'll be available to investors with at least $10 million in deposits.
I think most of you don't realise at what scale Coinbase work.
You just have to watch the trade history on GDAX for a few seconds to understand the sheer volume of what is actually happening. The GDAX web socket is very very robust. It's very rarely down for me, and have not been down at all since they did whatever upgrade/maintenance they had to a few days ago.
I've been trying to log into my account for over 3 weeks with no response from Coinbase. They need to handle their own support issue better if they want consumer trust.
In my case, I sent some ETH to "my" ETH wallet at Coinbase, received an email from Coinbase alerting me of the incoming transfer, and then - nothing, that ETH is nowhere to be found except on the blockchain (it's not showing in my ETH Coinbase account, and it's not shown under transactions).
Frankly, this (misplacing a transaction) is more concerning to me than delays or verification issues. Losing a transfer like that puts their whole transactional integrity into question.
Again, delays (something showing as "pending", etc) I could live with, considering their recent spike in usage. But, when a transaction is simply missing, while the ones before and after it are showing in Coinbase, is scary.
I agree with you that they need to handle their support much much better. The bulk of their cases (judging by the publicly visible mentions of @CoinbaseSupport on Twitter) can be handled by simply explaining the situation and telling people to wait. There are only 5 or 6 issue types that can be categorized and routed programmatically even. Instead, they are currently only responding to 0.5% (not a typo) of Support requests on Twitter (not counting DMs). I think that may be the lowest response rate I've ever seen from a company, especially a tech one.
I had a similar and frustrating issue where my 2 factor auth was re-enabled after I manually disabled when I knew I was giving up my phone. They eventually helped, but it took longer than I would like.
[+] [-] H99189|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solumos|8 years ago|reply
I've had a ticket open for about a month w/o access to those funds.
[+] [-] gecko39|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_dev|8 years ago|reply
I went with BitPanda. I should leave my referral link here but rather my own words carry the recommendation.
[+] [-] notyourday|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mizza|8 years ago|reply
Looking for a new exchange, but they're all having problems with staying online or verifying new accounts.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|8 years ago|reply
At times I’ve been unable to access my accounts or have transactions complete in a reasonable amount of time. Coinbase closed my account without notice with no explanation other than a mention of their desire to comply with FinCEN. I never got an answer from them as-to what I did “wrong”. I sure as hell wasnt selling heroin or babies on Silk Road. Imagine if Wells Fargo closed an account without notice or explanation after a customer had a few normal deposits and withdrawals. deep rolls eyes
[+] [-] yueq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp987654|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahdum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memorymappings|8 years ago|reply
Let's also not forget while many other otherwise good UI platforms dropped out of NY because well, it was too hard and the fees were too high coinbase continued to integrate and work with lawmakers because they know how important it would be not to disciminate against states and also to have legal integration with Wallstreet, so as much as you may be upset with Coinbase for not scaling fast enough for you and making the government go faster, you should ask why so many other platforms aren't there to offer you an equally good alternative.
That being said, throughout all this bustle lately, I have not experienced issues with Coinbase and have performed a variety of money moving actions to and from multiple bank accounts coinbase and gdax with no delays. This could be because I'm an established user, approved by the Federal Trade Commission and have an established credit history with Coinbase which has led to another increase in what I am allowed to do.
Furthermore, Coinbase has been open apologetic, taken complete responsibility for the lack of being able to instantly gratify as they stayed over 8x the exponentiation of new users trying to register relative to the last spurt in the sunmer and promised to be transparent even if they can't be perfect. They have a ten day backlog on customer support tickets even after hiring 400 new people just for customer support and plan to hire even more.
It sounds like you are a new user who feels entitled to instant gratification, instant approval by the FCC, instant trust from Coinbase who probably doesn't have an established credit history with you and you're mad because things didn't work for you immediately.
I saw the other day Coinbase had an update saying wire transfers we're delayed 2-3 business days but I did not have a delay with mine, which means they probably prioritize established traders.
I wouldn't be so hard on Coinbase, but if you think you can provide a better solution by all means go for it. We need more competition in this space.
I also recommend certifying yourself with a few other platforms and getting your accounts tested and registered and having some money there so if you experience delays with Coinbase you have other options to move money. I am established with multiple platforms in case I experience issues with Gdax, but as it turns out I never have.
Very impressed with them.
[+] [-] bayofpigs|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] billions|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrimpx|8 years ago|reply
People are particularly emotional about Coinbase because it touches on their bottom line -- money. But let's not forget the fact that ALL startups have major scaling woes. Bugs in the tech being ironed out, overwhelmed support and engineering teams recruiting and integrating talent to meet the demand -- in Coinbase's case exponentially growing demand. If you've worked in a software startup you know how easy it is to be met with exponential increase in demand, and how impossibly difficult it is to stay above water growing a team at the same rate.
I'm positive on Coinbase due to their backing. YC, Andreessen Horowitz, DFJ, among dozens of high-profile investors. These guys want a $20B valuation, they're not interested in backing a failing company or a scam.
[+] [-] empath75|8 years ago|reply
They’ve released almost $200 million worth of tether in the last day.
[+] [-] meritt|8 years ago|reply
1) Someone who wants to sell $1M USD of BTC may be happy to take $1M USDT instead for legal/tax purposes. This transaction would have zero impact on the BTC/USD price.
2) Tether receives $1M worth of BTC they can slowly disperse back into the market via their own exchange (since Bitfinex owns Tether) in a controlled manner that doesn't push the price down.
3) With USD in hand they can either put it into their reserves (assuming we trust them) or they could also use the cash to further eliminate any selling pressure on the exchange (with a large buy order "wall") or even generate upward pressure.
4) BTC price becomes stable or only moves upward and attracts more outside money and speculation. Repeat the cycle.
[+] [-] shrimpx|8 years ago|reply
The Twitter user Bitfinex'd is pretty much solely responsible for starting this trend, with Emil Gun Sirer retweeting pretty much all Bitfinex'd tweets. Often, if you dig into this evidence, you find mostly FUD signals -- taking various data from the internet and interpreting it into something that it isn't.
Basically I don't know nor care if Tether and Bitfinex are fraudulent, but personally I've never seen clear evidence that it is, and people like Bitfinex'd and Emil Gun Sirer seem to push FUD backing their personal anti-Bitfinex agendas without proof.
[+] [-] Rmilb|8 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/941707765910818816
I think this is a bearish signal until its clarified.
[+] [-] sjy|8 years ago|reply
edit: This seems to show that $180 million was issued in the last 3 days: http://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=3MbYQMMmSkC3...
[+] [-] heurist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eosophos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahdum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erentz|8 years ago|reply
> “But first, Coinbase...needs to legitimize itself -- and bring in revenue...”
Like it doesn’t have revenue? It’s daily volumes of BTC are around 30k. Sometimes a lot more. Plus ETH. Plus LTC. They must be making at least a million per day in trading fees. They’re a money printing machine at this point.
[+] [-] lechiffre10|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guiomie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FanaHOVA|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustAnotherPat|8 years ago|reply
I saw it riddled with HTML errors, there were buttons that didn't do anything, I got (html) responses that were false, which I only knew was the case because I looked directly at the API response.
I remember I 'sold' some litecoin on Coinbase that never sold. Took me to a couple days just to know it wasn't going to mysteriously disappear.
I find the fact that they want to add new coins even though they haven't solved any of their current issues very alarming.
[+] [-] chollida1|8 years ago|reply
Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job.
Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues.
I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. They'll be fine, they're just learning how to deal with alot of hard issues all at once.
The question was posed, what do you need to do to get institutional money and I answered.
To clarify...
Coinbase , atleast from a hedge funds perspective has 2 tasks.
1) prime broker or custodian, from this perspective you just can't be hacked and loose anyone's bitcoins.
Not sure how a hedge fund would tell its clients that they lost any amount of their funds due to an exchange being hacked, this is just so foreign to the way the markets currently work. I don't think the funds clients would be too accepting of a loss of any amount due to this.
2) as an exchange, This is probably easy for people to understand. When the volume picks up that's when you make your money. If Volume causes the exchange to go down, you can't make money.
Again this is very rare for most markets now to go down to volume and when it does it doesn't really matter too much because the concept of having your shares with an exchange doesn't really make sense in the equities market.
You'd just start trading at another exchange and none of your shares are actually held with the exchange, nor do you need to send shares to an exchange to trade, you just trade and settle at the end of the day.
EDIT END
I'll preface this by saying, what I'm asking for is hard, very hard, but being a grown up is hard..... You can't just ask people to invest billions of other peoples money and then claim "best efforts" if your exchange crashes under load.
Well what institutional investors want is pretty simple to understand, though very hard to implement.
1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf.
A hedge fund can't just go to their clients and say sorry, lost all our money, coinbase got hacked, the hedge fund itself and its principles would be sued into oblivion.
I mean if the Nasdaq, NYSE or prime broker ever got hacked, no one would expect to suddenly loose all their shares, or cash held with their prime broker.
2) The exchange can't go down, like at all. Once a year for 5 minutes is fine, or every day at midnight for 10 minutes is fine, but during regular trading hours you can't just throw your hand up and say "hey, best efforts here there just alot of volume right now, we'll be up in a few minutes"
Hedge funds make their money on volatility, which means the more volatile and busy the exchange is the more they'll want to trade. Going down when times are busy is just can't happen.
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creeble|8 years ago|reply
https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-thin...
Bitcoin can't operate as a currency without having exchanges between it and other currencies, and those exchanges strip all the benefits of bitcoin.
Edit: show title of article.
[+] [-] nextstep|8 years ago|reply
Maybe there is hope with Bitcoin Cash (BCH), because it can piggyback on the existing bitcoin integration infrastructure. Or maybe Ethereum or Monero or some other altcoin will take the place of Bitcoin. But more and more, it's looking like the original cryptocurrency has failed to innovate and solve fundamental scaling issues and it's first-mover advantage won't last. If these altcoins can scale better than bitcoin, they only need to match bitcoin's integrations with the existing financial system to win.
[+] [-] lawlessone|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon_smark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dajohnson89|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brndnmtthws|8 years ago|reply
It's pretty amusing that Brian was willing to back an altcoin (B2X) that hadn't even performed basic testing before its spectacular failure, and yet coinbase can't manage to enable segwit. Did they implement their own Bitcoin and decide not to port segwit?
[+] [-] gwbas1c|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] once_inc|8 years ago|reply
Where exactly in the white paper does it state this? I've just looked it up, and don't see any reference to Bitcoin being an experiment.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
So some of these servers that were wise have only paid everything (servers, wages, etc.) using the real currency that comes in via credit cards and paypal and have just held onto the btc .. which makes it extremely valuable.
But people don't set prices in btc. The prices are set in fiat currency and are paid for based on the price of btc that day .. meaning you could have spent 10euro for a service last year in btc that would have been worth 100euro .. or that could be worth 0.01 euro depending on where the market goes.
But yes you're right, unless services start pricing actual service in btc, it's not really fungible for goods. It's always going through that translation layer. If anything, if McDonalds started taking mBTC and charged x mBTC for a burger and didn't change that value with the market, you'd start to see bitcoin stabilize (although you might be paying $100 for a burger some days .. if you go by what the exchanges claim the value is).
[+] [-] shroom|8 years ago|reply
Is Bitcoin access coupled with one private key or multiple?
Say someone has 10 bitcoin on their computer and a private key so its only accessible from that computer. That computer holds a lot of value. If the computer gets stolen theyve stolen all the bitcoins with it? Given that the secret to the private key can be broken at some point in the future.
Or is there a way for the user to claim back his/ger bitcoin by creating a new key with same secret?
[+] [-] JackFr|8 years ago|reply
>Coinbase has offered a solution: crypto custodial services, slated to roll out next year. Called Coinbase Custody, it'll be available to investors with at least $10 million in deposits.
Honestly, WTF?
[+] [-] dimillian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatboxrevival|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mv4|8 years ago|reply
Frankly, this (misplacing a transaction) is more concerning to me than delays or verification issues. Losing a transfer like that puts their whole transactional integrity into question.
Again, delays (something showing as "pending", etc) I could live with, considering their recent spike in usage. But, when a transaction is simply missing, while the ones before and after it are showing in Coinbase, is scary.
I agree with you that they need to handle their support much much better. The bulk of their cases (judging by the publicly visible mentions of @CoinbaseSupport on Twitter) can be handled by simply explaining the situation and telling people to wait. There are only 5 or 6 issue types that can be categorized and routed programmatically even. Instead, they are currently only responding to 0.5% (not a typo) of Support requests on Twitter (not counting DMs). I think that may be the lowest response rate I've ever seen from a company, especially a tech one.
[+] [-] sfennell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artur_makly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justifier|8 years ago|reply
are they just trying to cash in as much as possible, like many of the investors, before the math is settled
or do they publicly state that they believe.. meaning without proof.. that p!=np?
are they resting their future, and the futures of all of their users.. and here apparently the economy writ large.. on faith?
[+] [-] idibidiart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapauldo|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]