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Trouble at Coinbase

33 points| taytus | 8 years ago |reddit.com | reply

13 comments

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[+] thephyber|8 years ago|reply
Flash message currently on the CoinBase support website[1]:

> Partial System Outage: We're investigating an issue where some customers recently were charged incorrectly for purchases of digital currency with credit and debit cards. This is related to the recent MCC code change by the card networks and card issuers charging additional fees. We have identified a solution and any future purchases will not be affected by this issue. We will ensure any customer affected by this issue is fully refunded. We expect this to happen for customers automatically through their bank. If you believe, you were affected by this issue. Please contact support at support.coinbase.com.

[1] https://support.coinbase.com/

[+] siruncledrew|8 years ago|reply
That message is there every time I go to the website. It's been 3 weeks and support has still not resolved my issue. Yea, more people are using the service now, but they are struggling really hard at client services.
[+] ben_jones|8 years ago|reply
I don't get how you can raise $225 million dollars in VC and not manage basic financial transactions.
[+] thephyber|8 years ago|reply
> not manage basic financial transactions

Do you have any reason to believe that CoinBase doesn't manage financial transactions at least as well as the next largest CryptoCurrency exchange?

[+] jxub|8 years ago|reply
Looks bad. BitGrail 2.0 with implications many magnitude worse.

It's a shame that a technology with so much possible positive impact on the world, getting rid of untrusted and sometimes scammy 3rd parties is itself exposed so much to scam.

[+] thephyber|8 years ago|reply
> getting rid of untrusted and sometimes scammy 3rd parties is itself exposed so much to scam.

One could argue that CoinBase was among the least "scammy" or "untrusted" actors in the Crypto exchange space.

It's important to keep perspective. BitCoin is not quite 10 years old. Coinbase had to scale up transactions 10x from late summer to mid fall while keeping and dealing with the process of currencies forking (including supporting transactions for one of those forks), cycling hot wallets to cold and back to hot only when more currency was required to transfer. Also, the run DAX, which is the market-making system used for all CoinBase transactions.

There's no reason to think CoinBase is 7x charging purposefully at this point. It's far more likely that they are adding an item to a message queue, processing the task but not marking it as complete, then retrying each task 6ish times before permanently removing from the queue marking it as "unable to complete".

No new technology will be immune to "scam" or human error. It's probably time to reset your expectations.

[+] coralreef|8 years ago|reply
Huh? How do you figure this is a hacking, and not some terrible payment processing bug?

As far as I can tell these are random repeating charges on credit cards/bank cards.

[+] ilaksh|8 years ago|reply
The transactions were being repeated, right? To me this is further evidence that traditional banking is obsolete and should be replaced by more sophisticated technology that has built in protection from problems like that.
[+] hyder_m29|8 years ago|reply
This comment sounds troubling.

> Very interesting.

> My bank told me that they used the transaction authorization code from the last transaction. According to this statement, they had to manually enter the previous transaction authorization number and then tag the transaction as a "force post".

> "A force-post transaction allows the merchant to bypass the authorization process by manually entering a previously obtained authorization code.

> The transaction is then routed through clearing and settlement and subsequently force-posted to the issuer."

> The key word is MANUALLY.

There's another user claiming to have heard from his bank that coinbase used force-post transaction.