Since coinbase isn’t FDIC insured, it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well. And they aren’t SPIC insured in the situations where crypto is a security.
It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments. That’s why you don’t invest with stuff that isn’t insured. Those aren’t real rates, they are risk adjusted rates for not having insurance.
It’s fine to invest in these products, but scary because people aren’t doing due diligence and have unrealistic expectations.
The CEO’s statement that they won’t go bankrupt it just comical. Of course he thinks they won’t. Few bank CEOs think that. But real banks and brokerages have insurance for their customers in the rare situation that they go bankrupt.
I do wonder why he's allowed to say on Twitter there is no risk of bankruptcy [0]. While the risk could be minimal and maybe negligible saying "no risk" means zero chance. That can't be true of any company. For a public company ceo to say that, isn't that securities fraud?
I guess even if it is fraud and they do get prosecuted by the SEC they'd just get fined for it. And maybe the fine here would be much less than the price of a run on coinbase.
> Since coinbase isn’t FDIC insured, it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well. And they aren’t SPIC insured in the situations where crypto is a security.
Is Coinbase "loaning" out the Bitcoin users have deposited in it?
The reason banks need the FDIC is that they loan your deposits out instead of throwing it in a vault and sitting on it, so if they go under they don't have those assets to distribute in a bankruptcy. Given how immature and non-economic cryptocurrency is, it wouldn't surprise me if Coinbase was sitting on all/most of its users desposits. So it's possible the users might get most of their deposits back after a bankruptcy proceeding (assuming the reason wasn't massive theft of assets or something).
Coinbase looks more like a brokerage to me than a bank. While SPIC insurance covers some of your assets the bigger protection comes from brokerage rules around segregating user funds from company funds and the expectation of the courts that those funds won’t be used to settle company debts.
So it is a little surprising to me that crypto assets wouldn’t be treated similarly, which is probably why the SEC is demanding this disclosure.
I was on reddit and someone called bitcoin a "useful savings account" and I was like, "NO, STOP. Do not tell people this stuff is for savings!" I was downvoted to hell and people were like "lmao noob." Got into a back and forth where I was trying to delineate an investment and savings and people just kept replying stuff like, "it goes up, that means you beat inflation, do you not understand how this works???"
I'm not familiar with how any of this works, but I kind of thought coinbase was less like a bank—paying interest on deposits—and more like a user friendly web ui for managing your assets, because dealing with private keys is hard for a user.
If, for example, Dropbox declares bankruptcy I'd be shocked if creditors could search through the user data for things of value.
It seems like there would be plenty of money to be made just charging transaction fees and holding assets 1-1 for the users, but what do I know.
> It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments.
The problem isn't crypto, it's these exchanges. Nearly everyone just leaves their coins in the exchanges. They're essentially banks but with none of the protections. They even offer cryptocurrency loans, savings accounts and everything.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to replace banks but they ended up reinventing the whole thing badly. It was supposed to be a dollars -> electricity -> CPU -> bitcoins closed decentralized system, but now it's just dollars <-> bitcoin within centralized exchanges.
What i don't understand is why don't people create their own wallet and keep their funds there? Isn't that the entire purpose?
Of course they could still use coinbase as an exchange. But if everyone let's another party "manage" their wallet in what way is it really decentralized...
Surprised that customer positions aren't considered loans with first rights over all other lenders in a bankruptcy proceeding. The company shouldn't be playing around with these, but based on this statement it sounds like they are doing something odd and trying to run a fractional reserve system, or leveraging customer deposits for other high risk activity such that the money may not be there.
Makes me think that I should move my crypto back to my own wallet/sell the crypto.
The only exception I might take to what you're saying is that one of the main reasons for crypto is resistance to central authority, so the emergence of a situation where something like this can happen should be edifying.
It's not the first time this has happened; people seem to forget about Mt Gox.
These exchanges need to be part of the crypto schema. Crypto theory is so focused on the chain and not the infrastructure that builds up around it.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you're saying but it has special meaning when you're talking about something that's supposed to transcend the need for regulatory structures like FDIC.
The Fortune article in the HN link is writing only about the crypto assets, which lack FDIC insurance. Cash assets are FDIC insured.
From Coinbase: "To the extent U.S. customer funds are held as cash, they are maintained in pooled custodial accounts at one or more banks insured by the FDIC."
If this was a brokerage with stocks, the customers own those stocks. There is no reason crypto shouldn't be the same. There is no reason crypto shouldn't have top priority to their owners. It isn't okay for a company to put other creditors above the owners of that crypto
FDIC insurance is for banks, not brokers. I think what protects you from a broker going bust is the separation of client money from firm money. Though I think that separation failed in the most recent major broker bankruptcy (MF Global) and probably many others. FDIC would protect the broker against its own bank going bust (though I am sure there are guarantee caps).
> It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments. That’s why you don’t invest with stuff that isn’t insured. Those aren’t real rates, they are risk adjusted rates for not having insurance.
You are missing the point. We are shocked that even if Coinbase keeps users' deposits 100% safe, users could still lose their deposits if a judge decides so. Why isn't there a way to segregate those deposits from assets on which creditors have a claim? This kind of simple arrangement ought to be possible without new regulations or FDIC-style protection.
Needless to say, "not your keys not your Bitcoin" continues to be good advice.
>> Since coinbase isn’t FDIC insured, it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well.
No it doesn't. Well if coinbase is lending crypto like a bank then sure. But if they are acting like a stock broker, they should be holding real assets on behalf of customers and those assets should go to the customers who actually own them.
Longer term investors can actually (could? it's been a while) get their stock certificate mailed and hold it themselves.
I mean with over 250 billion in assets managed, they should be able to get bought out and / or attract investors instead of go bankrupt. I'm sure there's rich folk who have an interest in owning an established crypto exchange.
Although on the other, with that much in assets, there may also be people with an interest in having it go bankrupt - or just to spread these rumors, to further help crash the price of crypto.
> when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments
Coinbase is not 'crypto' though. Nobody's coins go down if one exchange crashes, unless they are careless enough to leave them there. The real problem is that cryptocoins are hard to use , and so exchanges are used as banks (they shoudn't) . But that is something that tech can fix
Yes, if they definitely won't go bankrupt that means the insurance will be extremely cheap! If this insurance isn't cheap then that means there is a reasonable chance they could go bankrupt. In my opinion all it takes is one insider taking a copy of everyone's private keys and they are toast. I would advise to not put all your eggs in one basket.
> it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well
Others have said this, but just to reiterate : this is quite wrong. This is like saying that because you hold Amazon stock via a Schwab brokerage account, if Schwab were to declare bankruptcy, then you would lose your Amazon stock. Needless to say that wouldn't happen because you are the owner of the stock, not Schwab.
FDIC insurance covers a totally different scenario where the money you deposit doesn't really exist (lent to someone else in the meantime).
What makes sense is that Coinbase isn't the owner of customers' crypto assets. This thread is about the fact that apparently that's _not_ necessarily true.
Since coinbase isn’t FDIC insured, it makes sense that if coinbase goes bankrupt, the customer currencies will go away as well.
No, it doesn't make sense at all. It is incredible to me that these are all solved problems in traditional finance.
Coinbase could utilize the services of a custodian to hold the crypto. In fact, that's what any responsible financial services company would do. It makes perfect sense because if there is a dislocation in crypto, it could bring Coinbase down but it won't bring Bank of New York down. So hold all the customer crypto at Bank of New York.
Or they could have individual wallets titled to customers. More difficult and doesn't allow them to do off-chain transfers but possible.
There are a million ways to do this, this is a solved problem in finance. Coinbase chose not to do it and now is paying for that by having to disclose the truth - retail customers are screwed if Coinbase declares bankruptcy. Whose fault is that? The CEO apologizes for it so that should tell you.
>For our retail customers, we’re taking further steps to update our user terms such that we offer the same protections to those customers in a black swan event. We should have had these in place previously, so let me apologize for that.
> It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments. That’s why you don’t invest with stuff that isn’t insured. Those aren’t real rates, they are risk adjusted rates for not having insurance.
You don't need to hold your crypto within coinbase, you can transfer it to a wallet you fully control.
Coinbase is FDIC insured but that's only relevant for USD. The SEC mandates disclosures of all risk and given that a crypto company like this has not gone bankrupt there, isn't precedent on how bankruptcy courts will consider crypto assets held under custody. Therefore it's a risk that should be made transparent.
> Coinbase users would become “general unsecured creditors,” meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings. Their funds would become inaccessible.
I'm curious about this bit - are they required to structure their company in this way, or was it a choice that they made?
Who's shocked? The journalist? It's their job to appear shocked so stories sound more interesting. You might be imagining some fantasy fool to laugh at.
In other words: We only disclosed these risk factors because we were legally required to. Please ignore our SEC disclosure and half-billion dollar quarterly loss, and instead trust my unregulated statements posted on Twitter. There are no risk factors, your money is safe, the music will never stop.
When a CEO requires 8 twitter posts[1] to essentially convey the message "Don't worry about this legal clause", it sort of has the opposite effect on me.
This boils down to the "not your keys not your coin" mantra that's often repeated in the cryptocurrency community. It is possible to move your coins to your own wallet and manage them on your own. This comes with risks (eg. lost keys). Keeping them on exchange comes with different risks.
Anyone holding significant amount of cryptocurrencies should consider the risks of each choice, make an informed decision, and live with the risk that entails. If that's too scary, then you probably shouldn't be in this market.
It’s amusing for someone who works in finance to see the crypto market re-doing the last century of financial scandals and regulations in fast forward. Discovering capital gain taxes, market manipulations, the necessity to separate firm money from client money for brokers…
Those of us who were around in 2008 remember when Lehman went bankrupt.
In that case they were the custodian for hedge funds assets. Lehman held those assets, in some cases because the British government force them to.
This really caused 2008 to spiral as now hedge funds that were perfectly fine got locked up and had to pull assets from the market due to Lehman holding their assets which caused even more selling and the feed back loop continued as funds sold their best assets first(think the Microsofts of stock world).
A coin bankruptcy would be the same thing, retail probably doesn't matter too much but if COIN held institutional funds, those guys do need to have liquidity for redemptions. This would mean alto of sell pressure on other exchanges and would lead to the best and highest quality crypto assets getting hammered down as funds fled to cash/stable coins.
Solana would probably crash and then shut down the network, even though they still try to claim they are a decentralized network:)
ETH and BTC would see very sharp drops in the first few days and then bounce back as people need to put money somewhere.
DEFI would feel this sell pressure and have alot of failings due to liquidity pools bein drained in this rush to quality. At best they'd get shutdown, at worst they'd just fail and go away.
You'd also expect the algo based stable coins to break the peg, even the well collateralized DAI would probably break.
Tether would probably continue on just fine as that's probably what most institutional funds would go to and I've given up on trying to predict its demise,
Can anyone tell me how to set up a wallet on my Mac in order to get my coins off coinbase. Is there any clear guide on how to do that. Every link on Google seems to be spam or downloading potentially malicious software.
It's very fustrating because so many people seem to know how to set up a wallet on their computer/Mac however I cannot for the life of me find a clear wallet to download and move my funds to or a guide on how to do it.
If I downloaded this - https://bitcoin.org/en/download - is that a way to do it? I can't download this in the UK, so is it safe to download it via a VPN and install it that way?
Thank you so much to anyone who sees this and replies.
I have been trying, unsuccessfully for 2 years to validate my account on Coinbase. I have over 100k in ETH stored in their wallet, have the highest levels of access to their services but CANNOT trade because they have NO HUMANS available. Their systems DO NOT work and there is NO contact info nor any way to actually reach a person.
So I have been trading with others and will never use CB for anything but cold storage. (Which they're great at)...
The company is the worst I have ever dealt with. There is no way to interact with a person. So if something does happen, you have NO RECOURSE.
Based on my experience, they will be bankrupt. This is a certainty. You cannot have a financial entity that has ZERO human interaction or service. No trust, none at all...
Wait, can someone explain to me why they would explicitly announce it like this? This almost sounds like they're expecting to go bankrupt, or have plans to close the platform.
In the last 7 days they have lost over 50% value, and dropping a news bomb like this is only going to make it worse, isn't it?
I've been messing with crypto long enough to know how this goes and my coins are already in a local wallet.
Coinbase had a good run but don't be stupid. Crypto exchanges aren't insured like consumer checking accounts are in the US and when they're gone they're gone. Geth isn't hard to set up for most of us, it took me about 20 minutes to have it up and running after not using a local wallet for nearly a decade.
Remember to write down your password (I can't emphasize that enough. I'd be retired by now if I had done that with the wallet I made in 2011) and back up your wallet. I keep mine in git.
Also read the fine print about the "insurance" Coinbase carries against loss of bitcoin through an attack. It's limited to the hot wallet only. Cold storage is not insured.
In other words, the insurance is probably worthless. People with the good sense to realize that Coinbase is not a bank in any sense of the word are unlikely to be affected.
I feel like saying "We have no risk of bankruptcy" is the same as Musk saying "Funding secured" on Twitter. The statement is provably false and will directly impact stock price.
Coinbase limits withdrawals in times when crypto crashes by removing the 'financial services' header in the settings where your connected bank accounts are listed. I don't know if they still do that, but I saw this as recently as a few months ago. You can still empty your account by going through the account deletion process. It will give you the option to sell all your crypto (and maybe to send it to a wallet, I don't know) and do a full withdrawal. Afterwards you can still stop the deletion process if you think you want to keep the account anyway (e.g. I was worried the transaction would somehow not complete and then not have access to the account).
>in the event it ever declared bankruptcy, “the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings.” Coinbase users would become “general unsecured creditors,”
That's terrible. Coinbase act very much like stockbrokers but with crypto instead of stocks and should segregate client funds the same way. If you deposit a 1000 Apple shares say with eTrade and they go bust the Apple shares are still yours and can't be taken to pay eTrades debts - that's how it should be. Otherwise it's just asking for the brokers to legally steal your investments by paying themselves huge bonuses and then saying oops, we're broke.
Coinbase popping and everyone with their funds/crypto still there gets ruined is probably in my top 5 signs that the crypto apocalypse is nigh and the Ponzi ends.
I still expect that the current downturn reverses later this year, and Coinbase isn't popping yet they're just having to disclose that risk. But given a real melt down in the broader economy and something like commercial mortgage backed securities popping, I expect that Coinbase would melt down.
Even though I'm not as negative as everyone else over current conditions, it is probably time to seek shelter (or that if there is a bounce later this year it is probably a profit taking opportunity before the crash)
As someone without 250k in the bank (or generally), FDIC insurance is quite reassuring. Banks pay into it like any other insurance, so it would take a huge money-doesn't-matter-anymore shock to overwhelm it. 2008 was pretty close! Crypto wouldn't do any good for me since the utility bills for all the internet infrastructure are paid for with real money (in the "most people exchange it for goods and services" sense).
There'd be nowhere to go where even a paper wallet would do me any good. You could execute a 51% attack on a solar-powered NetBSD toaster.
It's crazy that there are still people out there who will defend custodial wallets like this. Not you wallet, not your coins. It's as simple as that. These companies trying to take crypto mainstream are getting so much stuff wrong, it's no wonder they're losing customers and share value.
[+] [-] prepend|3 years ago|reply
It’s funny to see people shocked (SHOCKED!) when crypto doesn’t have the protections of regular banking and investments. That’s why you don’t invest with stuff that isn’t insured. Those aren’t real rates, they are risk adjusted rates for not having insurance.
It’s fine to invest in these products, but scary because people aren’t doing due diligence and have unrealistic expectations.
The CEO’s statement that they won’t go bankrupt it just comical. Of course he thinks they won’t. Few bank CEOs think that. But real banks and brokerages have insurance for their customers in the rare situation that they go bankrupt.
[+] [-] eatonphil|3 years ago|reply
I guess even if it is fraud and they do get prosecuted by the SEC they'd just get fined for it. And maybe the fine here would be much less than the price of a run on coinbase.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1524233602...
[+] [-] tablespoon|3 years ago|reply
Is Coinbase "loaning" out the Bitcoin users have deposited in it?
The reason banks need the FDIC is that they loan your deposits out instead of throwing it in a vault and sitting on it, so if they go under they don't have those assets to distribute in a bankruptcy. Given how immature and non-economic cryptocurrency is, it wouldn't surprise me if Coinbase was sitting on all/most of its users desposits. So it's possible the users might get most of their deposits back after a bankruptcy proceeding (assuming the reason wasn't massive theft of assets or something).
[+] [-] kasey_junk|3 years ago|reply
So it is a little surprising to me that crypto assets wouldn’t be treated similarly, which is probably why the SEC is demanding this disclosure.
[+] [-] pandemicsoul|3 years ago|reply
Sigh.
[+] [-] patrickthebold|3 years ago|reply
If, for example, Dropbox declares bankruptcy I'd be shocked if creditors could search through the user data for things of value.
It seems like there would be plenty of money to be made just charging transaction fees and holding assets 1-1 for the users, but what do I know.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|3 years ago|reply
The problem isn't crypto, it's these exchanges. Nearly everyone just leaves their coins in the exchanges. They're essentially banks but with none of the protections. They even offer cryptocurrency loans, savings accounts and everything.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to replace banks but they ended up reinventing the whole thing badly. It was supposed to be a dollars -> electricity -> CPU -> bitcoins closed decentralized system, but now it's just dollars <-> bitcoin within centralized exchanges.
[+] [-] sureglymop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lumost|3 years ago|reply
Makes me think that I should move my crypto back to my own wallet/sell the crypto.
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
It's not the first time this has happened; people seem to forget about Mt Gox.
These exchanges need to be part of the crypto schema. Crypto theory is so focused on the chain and not the infrastructure that builds up around it.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you're saying but it has special meaning when you're talking about something that's supposed to transcend the need for regulatory structures like FDIC.
[+] [-] jpmattia|3 years ago|reply
The Fortune article in the HN link is writing only about the crypto assets, which lack FDIC insurance. Cash assets are FDIC insured.
From Coinbase: "To the extent U.S. customer funds are held as cash, they are maintained in pooled custodial accounts at one or more banks insured by the FDIC."
https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/legal-pol...
[+] [-] seaourfreed|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|3 years ago|reply
You are missing the point. We are shocked that even if Coinbase keeps users' deposits 100% safe, users could still lose their deposits if a judge decides so. Why isn't there a way to segregate those deposits from assets on which creditors have a claim? This kind of simple arrangement ought to be possible without new regulations or FDIC-style protection.
Needless to say, "not your keys not your Bitcoin" continues to be good advice.
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
No it doesn't. Well if coinbase is lending crypto like a bank then sure. But if they are acting like a stock broker, they should be holding real assets on behalf of customers and those assets should go to the customers who actually own them.
Longer term investors can actually (could? it's been a while) get their stock certificate mailed and hold it themselves.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
Although on the other, with that much in assets, there may also be people with an interest in having it go bankrupt - or just to spread these rumors, to further help crash the price of crypto.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
Coinbase is not 'crypto' though. Nobody's coins go down if one exchange crashes, unless they are careless enough to leave them there. The real problem is that cryptocoins are hard to use , and so exchanges are used as banks (they shoudn't) . But that is something that tech can fix
[+] [-] andy_ppp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|3 years ago|reply
Others have said this, but just to reiterate : this is quite wrong. This is like saying that because you hold Amazon stock via a Schwab brokerage account, if Schwab were to declare bankruptcy, then you would lose your Amazon stock. Needless to say that wouldn't happen because you are the owner of the stock, not Schwab.
FDIC insurance covers a totally different scenario where the money you deposit doesn't really exist (lent to someone else in the meantime).
What makes sense is that Coinbase isn't the owner of customers' crypto assets. This thread is about the fact that apparently that's _not_ necessarily true.
[+] [-] rmbyrro|3 years ago|reply
Crypto being a novel space where no one truly understand its risks and that is (sadly, still) welcoming to scammers is the real issue, in my opinion.
[+] [-] 300bps|3 years ago|reply
No, it doesn't make sense at all. It is incredible to me that these are all solved problems in traditional finance.
Coinbase could utilize the services of a custodian to hold the crypto. In fact, that's what any responsible financial services company would do. It makes perfect sense because if there is a dislocation in crypto, it could bring Coinbase down but it won't bring Bank of New York down. So hold all the customer crypto at Bank of New York.
Or they could have individual wallets titled to customers. More difficult and doesn't allow them to do off-chain transfers but possible.
There are a million ways to do this, this is a solved problem in finance. Coinbase chose not to do it and now is paying for that by having to disclose the truth - retail customers are screwed if Coinbase declares bankruptcy. Whose fault is that? The CEO apologizes for it so that should tell you.
>For our retail customers, we’re taking further steps to update our user terms such that we offer the same protections to those customers in a black swan event. We should have had these in place previously, so let me apologize for that.
https://nitter.net/brian_armstrong/status/152423348004071014...
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|3 years ago|reply
You don't need to hold your crypto within coinbase, you can transfer it to a wallet you fully control.
[+] [-] patricklorio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xur17|3 years ago|reply
I'm curious about this bit - are they required to structure their company in this way, or was it a choice that they made?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] core-utility|3 years ago|reply
Coinbase Pro is FDIC insured, makes one wonder why Coinbase itself isn't.
https://pro.coinbase.com/?1416
[+] [-] sacrosancty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shapefrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ______-_-______|3 years ago|reply
In other words: We only disclosed these risk factors because we were legally required to. Please ignore our SEC disclosure and half-billion dollar quarterly loss, and instead trust my unregulated statements posted on Twitter. There are no risk factors, your money is safe, the music will never stop.
[+] [-] krono|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/15242334800407101...
[+] [-] _Algernon_|3 years ago|reply
Anyone holding significant amount of cryptocurrencies should consider the risks of each choice, make an informed decision, and live with the risk that entails. If that's too scary, then you probably shouldn't be in this market.
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|3 years ago|reply
In that case they were the custodian for hedge funds assets. Lehman held those assets, in some cases because the British government force them to.
This really caused 2008 to spiral as now hedge funds that were perfectly fine got locked up and had to pull assets from the market due to Lehman holding their assets which caused even more selling and the feed back loop continued as funds sold their best assets first(think the Microsofts of stock world).
A coin bankruptcy would be the same thing, retail probably doesn't matter too much but if COIN held institutional funds, those guys do need to have liquidity for redemptions. This would mean alto of sell pressure on other exchanges and would lead to the best and highest quality crypto assets getting hammered down as funds fled to cash/stable coins.
Solana would probably crash and then shut down the network, even though they still try to claim they are a decentralized network:)
ETH and BTC would see very sharp drops in the first few days and then bounce back as people need to put money somewhere.
DEFI would feel this sell pressure and have alot of failings due to liquidity pools bein drained in this rush to quality. At best they'd get shutdown, at worst they'd just fail and go away.
You'd also expect the algo based stable coins to break the peg, even the well collateralized DAI would probably break.
Tether would probably continue on just fine as that's probably what most institutional funds would go to and I've given up on trying to predict its demise,
[+] [-] CyanDeparture|3 years ago|reply
It's very fustrating because so many people seem to know how to set up a wallet on their computer/Mac however I cannot for the life of me find a clear wallet to download and move my funds to or a guide on how to do it.
If I downloaded this - https://bitcoin.org/en/download - is that a way to do it? I can't download this in the UK, so is it safe to download it via a VPN and install it that way?
Thank you so much to anyone who sees this and replies.
[+] [-] FYYFFF|3 years ago|reply
So I have been trading with others and will never use CB for anything but cold storage. (Which they're great at)...
The company is the worst I have ever dealt with. There is no way to interact with a person. So if something does happen, you have NO RECOURSE.
Based on my experience, they will be bankrupt. This is a certainty. You cannot have a financial entity that has ZERO human interaction or service. No trust, none at all...
[+] [-] skilled|3 years ago|reply
In the last 7 days they have lost over 50% value, and dropping a news bomb like this is only going to make it worse, isn't it?
[+] [-] dasz|3 years ago|reply
The whole point of crypto wallets is that you don't need such central businesses to hold your cash.
Then again there's all sorts of benefits so there's a tradeoff.
[+] [-] usrn|3 years ago|reply
Coinbase had a good run but don't be stupid. Crypto exchanges aren't insured like consumer checking accounts are in the US and when they're gone they're gone. Geth isn't hard to set up for most of us, it took me about 20 minutes to have it up and running after not using a local wallet for nearly a decade.
Remember to write down your password (I can't emphasize that enough. I'd be retired by now if I had done that with the wallet I made in 2011) and back up your wallet. I keep mine in git.
[+] [-] Barrera|3 years ago|reply
In other words, the insurance is probably worthless. People with the good sense to realize that Coinbase is not a bank in any sense of the word are unlikely to be affected.
[+] [-] skizm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qgin|3 years ago|reply
When the tables are turned, they have no problem using every inch of that legalese against you and to protect themselves.
If it doesn’t matter, don’t include it in the contract.
[+] [-] noodles_nomore|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|3 years ago|reply
That's terrible. Coinbase act very much like stockbrokers but with crypto instead of stocks and should segregate client funds the same way. If you deposit a 1000 Apple shares say with eTrade and they go bust the Apple shares are still yours and can't be taken to pay eTrades debts - that's how it should be. Otherwise it's just asking for the brokers to legally steal your investments by paying themselves huge bonuses and then saying oops, we're broke.
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
I still expect that the current downturn reverses later this year, and Coinbase isn't popping yet they're just having to disclose that risk. But given a real melt down in the broader economy and something like commercial mortgage backed securities popping, I expect that Coinbase would melt down.
Even though I'm not as negative as everyone else over current conditions, it is probably time to seek shelter (or that if there is a bounce later this year it is probably a profit taking opportunity before the crash)
[+] [-] mkr-hn|3 years ago|reply
There'd be nowhere to go where even a paper wallet would do me any good. You could execute a 51% attack on a solar-powered NetBSD toaster.
[+] [-] smoldesu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ecstatify|3 years ago|reply
Title: {Sensationalized title}
Intro: {Waffle}
Middle: {Sentence that gives context to sensationalized title}
Ending: {Facts & figures to legitimise article}