The KYC/AML regulations require essentially 1:1 human effort for every new person who attempts to buy any practical amount of cryptocurrency (within the US and EU, and probably elsewhere).
So the #1 problem is that people who want to buy some cryptocurrency cannot. They wait days or weeks to get verified. And the exchanges and money changers want to provide the virtual currency to the hungry customers, but they cannot afford to hire enough people to process all the verification applications.
Given this extreme bottleneck, I don't see the significance of news about how much easier it is for people to spend virtual currency.
Ironically, Coinbase is one of the most complained about in terms of slow verifications.
I'm in this boat now - I've been a Coinbase customer for years, and then randomly they blocked my ability to withdraw my money (MY money, BTW) from the account. Nothing had changed about my account setup.
Now they want me to go through the Photo ID process, but I don't have a US drivers license, only a permanent resident (green) card for ID. Which should be fine, after all it works as ID for literally everything else I could need ID for in the US - including flying. Support have been fairly responsive, but they keep sending me back to through their photo verification process, and I keep telling them "but this is not a driver's license, please look at the pictures!".
It's really annoying - this is a federally-issued photo ID I'm required to carry with me, and yet Coinbase seems to be struggling to accept it. In the meantime my money is stuck and I don't know how to get it back.
It only takes about 10 minutes to get verified on Coinbase. The majority of people are done in this amount of time. It's when something goes wrong and you can't get a response from customer service that is a problem. After all this time, it still sucks.
Here's tip for getting past the automatic verification failure problem on Coinbase: after failing, try their mobile option. For whatever reason, the mobile option (where you take a photo of your ID with your phone) seems to work much more reliably than the computer method.
When I first bought ETH (Coinbase) it took 5 min verification and a debit card. Practically instant in comparison to traditional financial setup times.
What does this mean for a crypto project like Request Network (https://request.network/#/) which is trying to become the "Paypal for cryptocurrencies"?
I am genuinely curious as I own some REQ, believe in the team, but also like what Coinbase has done to bring crypto to the masses (minus the outrageous fees of course).
My personal opinion about Request and similar projects.
I have been using bitcoin for a while, I have payed for real goods and online services with it and I've following the crypto ecosystem for a few years. I really can't see the reason for more than just a handful of competing cryptocurrencies becoming mediums of exchange.
Request's goal is noble, but I think that they'd be better off working on implementing payment gateways for existing cryptos. The first mover advantage seems to be huge in this space, and I really can't see how Request, or any other crypto can scale fast enough to dethrone bitcoin or the rest of the big competitors.
I don't understand why companies would compare their offering to paypal but don't offer escrow. I suppose people use paypal for paying individuals but not as much as for goods/services, right?
If you ever added your US bank account to Coinbase by giving it your online banking credentials(!)[1], you might want to know that your financial/banking information was crawled (income, costs, average balance), and is available for resale[2] to 3rd parties.
1. This is very, very, very bad for security, but is only possible because US interbank transfers are way behind the rest of the world (including 3rd world countries). Everywhere else, all you need to transfer money is the name of the bank, account holder and account number.
2. see "Products" on https://plaid.com. Plaid provides Coinbase's bank integration.
Plaid co-founder here. We don't resell data. In the case of Coinbase, they're setting up ACH transfers (see Auth on our products page), to avoid the 3-5 day delay in connecting a bank account for ACH.
> Everywhere else, all you need to transfer money is the name of the bank, account holder and account number.
Actually here only the IBAN account number is required (and it's used everywhere). Bank is inferred from that and it's not stricly necessary to give account holder's name.
I wonder what they're policy is on adult. I do some work on an adult site and ccbill has got to be the worst credit card provider out there. Adult payments need to be disrupted.
I've never used bitcoin but to my understanding it can take quite some time for a payment to be processed.
What happens if you buy something and pay, then when the merchant receives the bitcoins the value of them has dropped say 10%?
Does the merchant take the loss in this system?
Bitcoin alone is responsible for this reputation of slow transaction times among cryptocurrencies. Litecoin and Ethereum have the same blockchain architecture but are mined faster, so they are faster, but this linear improvement may not be sufficient for scaling. Minerless "DAG" coins like Nano may prove to be more practical in the long run because they scale exponentially.
re: Value change during a transaction: volatility is a fundamental problem with any currency. Adoption and volume will decrease volatility, which this announcement is moving towards :) Ripple's value-add to the banking industry, for instance, similarly relies on adoption in order to create an international pool of liquidity in order to facilitate efficient cross-border currency exchange. The more volume, the less volatility there is, which means less cost to banks using XRP as a payment "bridge". The same is desirable for merchants and consumers.
Coinbase can easily take care of this. They can have a small reserve and sell the bitcoin as soon as the transaction is published/sent to the mempool. No need to wait for any confirmations. If the transaction happens to be fraudulent†, they just buy the bitcoin back and realize the earning/loss (in the long run they will tend to even out).
I've made payments to merchants who acknowledge that the price can change over the process of sending a payment. The Bitcoin price is fixed at the point that the transaction is acknowledged in the mempool, so any fluctuation during the time taken for transactions to reach their required verifications is ignored.
This was my immediate question. I bought some Etherium from Coinbase a couple weeks back and by the time I got the funds, the value had dropped (!)25%. I don't particularly care because I'm long on my crypto holdings, but in what world is something like that going to be tolerable for merchants?
I just bought a computer from newegg with bitcoin and I think they used bitgo. They also had the 15 minute window thing. But the transaction didn't have to be confirmed in that time. It just needed to be out there somewhere which only took about a minute. And that was back when BTC was around 15K and it would takes hours for a actual transaction to be confirmed. But it would lock in the transaction quickly and then it would take a while for newegg to send me a email saying the payment was confirmed.
I just checked and the time between my order and initiating the sending of BTC to bitgo in Electrum to newegg saying the payment was accepted was just a little under five hours.
Bitpay and Coinbase's old merchant tools both already use a 15 minute window. Not sure what Sprite is but most likely the influence was the other way around.
I have a coinbase account, but it looks like like a Coinbase Commerce account. Commerce wont accept my regular Coinbase login. I guess I have to create a new account?
I used to be bullish on crypto. Now I see something like this and wonder "why the fuck do I want to use crypto to buy something when cash is instantaneous and my credit card provides consumer protection?". Add on to this the necessity of dealing with capital gains on my taxes at the end of the year just for buying something? No thanks.
I also fully expect to get downvoted to oblivion for this opinion based on what I have seen in the past.
Not only is Coinbase an extremely slimy, untrustworthy company seemingly entirely driven by bad AI, the amount of different currencies they accept is also very limited.
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
So the #1 problem is that people who want to buy some cryptocurrency cannot. They wait days or weeks to get verified. And the exchanges and money changers want to provide the virtual currency to the hungry customers, but they cannot afford to hire enough people to process all the verification applications.
Given this extreme bottleneck, I don't see the significance of news about how much easier it is for people to spend virtual currency.
Ironically, Coinbase is one of the most complained about in terms of slow verifications.
[+] [-] vosper|8 years ago|reply
Now they want me to go through the Photo ID process, but I don't have a US drivers license, only a permanent resident (green) card for ID. Which should be fine, after all it works as ID for literally everything else I could need ID for in the US - including flying. Support have been fairly responsive, but they keep sending me back to through their photo verification process, and I keep telling them "but this is not a driver's license, please look at the pictures!".
It's really annoying - this is a federally-issued photo ID I'm required to carry with me, and yet Coinbase seems to be struggling to accept it. In the meantime my money is stuck and I don't know how to get it back.
[+] [-] beaner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimillian|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edshiro|8 years ago|reply
I am genuinely curious as I own some REQ, believe in the team, but also like what Coinbase has done to bring crypto to the masses (minus the outrageous fees of course).
[+] [-] josu|8 years ago|reply
I have been using bitcoin for a while, I have payed for real goods and online services with it and I've following the crypto ecosystem for a few years. I really can't see the reason for more than just a handful of competing cryptocurrencies becoming mediums of exchange.
Request's goal is noble, but I think that they'd be better off working on implementing payment gateways for existing cryptos. The first mover advantage seems to be huge in this space, and I really can't see how Request, or any other crypto can scale fast enough to dethrone bitcoin or the rest of the big competitors.
[+] [-] wyldfire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decorator|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://globee.com/
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sangnoir|8 years ago|reply
1. This is very, very, very bad for security, but is only possible because US interbank transfers are way behind the rest of the world (including 3rd world countries). Everywhere else, all you need to transfer money is the name of the bank, account holder and account number.
2. see "Products" on https://plaid.com. Plaid provides Coinbase's bank integration.
[+] [-] zachperret|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shoothe|8 years ago|reply
Actually here only the IBAN account number is required (and it's used everywhere). Bank is inferred from that and it's not stricly necessary to give account holder's name.
[+] [-] lojack|8 years ago|reply
I'm curious where you got this bit of information? All I need to transfer money in the US is a routing number and account number.
[+] [-] steveeq1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstanley|8 years ago|reply
You're welcome to accept bitcoin payments without using coinbase or any other payment processor.
[+] [-] diggan|8 years ago|reply
Under "Prohibited Businesses" you can see "Adult Content and Services" being listed. Source: https://www.coinbase.com/legal/user_agreement?locale=en
[+] [-] tyfon|8 years ago|reply
What happens if you buy something and pay, then when the merchant receives the bitcoins the value of them has dropped say 10%? Does the merchant take the loss in this system?
[+] [-] joeyrideout|8 years ago|reply
re: Value change during a transaction: volatility is a fundamental problem with any currency. Adoption and volume will decrease volatility, which this announcement is moving towards :) Ripple's value-add to the banking industry, for instance, similarly relies on adoption in order to create an international pool of liquidity in order to facilitate efficient cross-border currency exchange. The more volume, the less volatility there is, which means less cost to banks using XRP as a payment "bridge". The same is desirable for merchants and consumers.
[+] [-] josu|8 years ago|reply
†Not sure what the attack vectors are here.
[+] [-] mr_sturd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vim_wannabe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnpowell|8 years ago|reply
I just checked and the time between my order and initiating the sending of BTC to bitgo in Electrum to newegg saying the payment was accepted was just a little under five hours.
[+] [-] beaner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesehands|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sethgecko|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXe-wQyrWw&feature=youtu.be
[+] [-] piratebroadcast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustAnotherPat|8 years ago|reply
No conversion to fiat at a guaranteed rate?
Can't you game this with such rapid price fluctuations? Time buying a high priced item during a crash maybe?
[+] [-] traeregan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hesdeadjim|8 years ago|reply
I also fully expect to get downvoted to oblivion for this opinion based on what I have seen in the past.
[+] [-] gymshoes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oculusthrift|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __blockcipher__|8 years ago|reply
GDAX is one of the best companies out there in the field.
Note to others: a portion of the internet seems to relentlessly attack Coinbase because they listed Bitcoin Cash (BCH) months ago
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
> the amount of different currencies they accept is also very limited
They cover the 4 primary ones. I'm not sure as a business I'd want to accept any other ones... besides maybe ZCash and Monero for privacy reasons.
[+] [-] sitepodmatt|8 years ago|reply