One example springs to mind. I bought some ETH once they initially began supporting it, just before it shot up in value. However, the transaction just seemed to disappear and I lost out. I tried contacting support by they just kept closing my tickets without explanation. Very, very frustrating.
I know a story when someone bought some coins with Visa credit card and they had some issues with Conibase service. Same story with tickets - open only to have it closed down next day with suggestion to look into knowledge base.
Then they proceed to the bank and opened a chargeback dispute based on false advertising (legitimate reason) that Coinbase promised to help and are not.
You see - since crypto-currency is not tangible item (you can call it service, if you will), neither Visa, nor Amex or Mastercard will have issues with your dispute, because there is even no tracking to proof you received your "product". Of course once the funds are returned to your credit card and bank notifies Coinbase about the dispute, Coinbase will take your coins away from you, but that's not the point. You see -- it doesnt matter to Visa if you process $1 billion in monthly transactions - if you have too many chargebacks, they will shut you down. End of the story. You open another account - you go on the MATCH list and owner(s) SSN/IDs are on it for 5 years so bye bye processing credit card transactions.
Coinbase might not care about you (I am sure they do per se, they just cheap and won't hire enough eyeballs to answer customer support), but surely they care about their chargebacks dispute level.
That said I'm currently experiencing a problem where all emails from Coinbase to my email address are being lost and it isn't a spam filter. I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
If all they are going to do is regurgitate information from there website why do they have support people at all?
If anyone from Coinbase is reading this all email sent from Coinbase to the Purdue Alumni email forwarding service @alumni.purdue.edu is being lost or not sent or something. It may have something to do with the fact that the alumni.purdue.edu server doesn't support TLS. I don't know just a guess but I know something changed in the past couple months and I don't even get marketing emails from Coinbase any more and it is preventing me from logging into my account.
I had a similar issue. I posted a clear support ticket, heard nothing for at least a day or two (probably longer) then got boilerplate about checking the support website. I replied saying I did and that the information on the support page couldn't be used to solve the problem. Nothing from Coinbase for a week, then another bot email saying they'll close the ticket unless I reply (again!) saying my issue was not resolved. This back and forth lasted over a month.
It reflects pretty poorly on them as a company and I really can't recommend using them as a result. The underlying support issue was related to their verification software. If their verification software doesn't work for some reason and their support is isn't focused/careful, then you're out of your account for more than a month.
Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.
But for the average person the chances are much higher that they will get hacked or lose their keys than losing their coins on Coinbase.
There are several important differences between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. This may be the most important one to you, but it is not to everyone.
One week after contacting their support and not getting any response, I got an automated response asking if I am still interested in a follow up and if so, I should reply to this mail.
This continued for 2 months every week. I then decided to start complaining on their subreddit and twitter and coincidentally immediately got a mail helping me with my original problem and finally fixing it.
Now with the hardfork I withdrew all my funds as well and will never go back.
So I don't trust them and as soon as a viable alternative comes along I'm off Coinbase.
Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on.
Years later I still have that BTC.
I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.
Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff...
In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.
Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.
The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
Long ago I tried to withdraw my BTC, but after clicking the withdrawal button the browser tab was stuck waiting for the HTTP response. So after a while I opened a second tab and tried to withdraw again. Both withdrawals went through and I ended up with a negative BTC balance on Coinbase. I sent one of the transactions back so that my balance ends up at zero again.
We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...
If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).
if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched).
To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue.
Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem.
Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
"viable alternative" seems pretty subjective.
CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e.
Choose your exchange carefully.
I work very closely with numerous crypto exchanges for a living (I write code which interfaces with them). Outside of work, I've personally chosen to open a Coinbase account and trade on GDAX.
Coinbase is, in my opinion, the most reputable exchange out there by far.
It's a form of price discrimination. Only ignorant end-consumers pay the crazy broker fees. Anyone slightly sophisticated deposits USD via ACH (nearly free) and then transfers to GDAX and does their trading there (0-0.25%).
So you don't trade on Coinbase yourself?
Edit: It's almost they have one exchange for ppl who know what they're doing, & one to fleece noobs (3.9% on BTC/USD. I think).
As in, UX, UI, Docs, APIs, service design etc. are all top notch. Which would make it probable (but not certain) that the more technical parts are well engineered too.
Coinbase is doing perhaps something similar to what Stripe did for its field of business.
It was a real problem.
I cannot warn other potential victims of Coinbase strongly enough; hopefully the chaos and incompetence around BCC will alert people more publicly about the dangers of getting entangled with them. Hold your cryptocurrency in your own wallet that you control yourself.
I personally didn't want to take on the risk of creating a paper wallet and having to move my small amount of BTC from my Coinbase vault, so this is great news for me.
All they had to say was "BCC support for withdrawals will happen within 30 days if BCC trades above X% of BTC". Or basically anything to the effect of "if BCC is worth anything, we'll give it to you", thus satisfying most people without committing to handling worthless forks.
They probably could implement it much sooner, but they are waiting for 2 things (I'm speculating here).
1. Larger hashrate, which decreases likelihood of a 51% attack.
2. SegWit2x November hard fork.
> Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required.
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...
I would suggest that neither of us have any idea how hard that would be. (Also, they gave a pretty similar announcement, minus the "we might support BCH in the future" bit.)
From my perspective, they are now going to devote a shit ton of engineering effort into supporting BCH withdrawals, which will not provide a source of recurring revenue.
There's no telling how Coinbase operates internally. You can't just assume that 1 customer == 1 permanent bitcoin address in Coinbase's backend. Perhaps they shift funds around all the time into new addresses, without keeping references/keys to the old ones. In that case, BCH balances would be lost, with no way to restore them to the 'owner' at the time of the fork.
Luckily (for would-be BCH holders) that seems to not be the case, but I think Coinbase deserves credit for going the extra mile when they could justifiably say that it is not their problem to deal with.
You are correct, but this would be a new level of stupid for a leading cyrptocurrency exchange that actually tries to build a reputation and appearance of quality, safety, compliance and being a "legit" service for financial institutions etc.
I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitled to the same amount of BCH... what if there are more forks in the future, I'll just keep getting more of those offshoot coins as well?
Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.
Actually, transferring from Coinbase to an exchange was the correct move. If you transferred BTC before the fork to an exchange that quickly implemented BCH trading you would have been credited and been able to trade right away. People (like me) who did the 'correct thing' and withdrew to their own wallets now have to wait days to deposit to a BCH exchange and will likely never see $700 BCH again.
I'm so confused.
Edit: if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
There can be as much copies of ledger (offshoot coins, forks) as anybody wishes, important is how it grows from there. Most probably it will just die within few mining blocks and thus will not carry any monetary value. And yes, anytime one forks USD to VSD/WSD/YSD/XSD/ZSD they are essentially copying the ledger from that snapshot, with your address having same balance as its fork-parent.
The Bitcoin/BCH thing is like this, but on a greater scale with potential risks around it (BCH had to ensure there were no replay attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain for example.) For example, Trezor recommends (and has to deliver your Bitcoin to a Bcash-specific address: https://trezor.io/claim-bch/.
By taking your BTC out of Coinbase and into a wallet you control directly (on your computer or phone) before the fork, you have the corresponding private keys during the fork, which after the fork can be used to transact the same value independently on both the BTC and BCH chains.
> I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH?
What matters is what happened at the precise moment of the fork. If at that moment your BTC was on an exchange, the corresponding BCH is at that same exchange. What happens with it depends on the exchange: some might treat it as non-existent, some might credit it to you in full (but it might or might not be possible to trade and/or take it out of the exchange), some might credit it to you partially based on a confusing formula which gets changed after the fact, and some might even take all the BCH for themselves.
If you knew me in person you'd know the cynicism was intentional. I've got quite a bit to start with and double so when it comes to anything involving digital currencies.
> They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently?
On the contrary, I agreed with it. I said as much the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14915884
> How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
I don't think it's possible to tell after less than a day if it's a viable fork. It's way too early. That's why I'm thinking this is driven more from the perceived cost of lawsuits vs. the development cost of supporting the feature.
Since the fork didn't die immediately, they are going ahead with the "allow everyone to transfer their BCH out" plan. Had it died, they probably wouldn't bother.
Supposing BCC eventually becomes of comparable value to BTC, does this mean everyone's fortune was just doubled?
No matter which competitor "wins", your assets should keep the same total value they had before.
Bitcoin cash, at the time of writing, looks to be around the 300 USD mark, without BTC having moved much.
I wonder what implications this has to the global economy. If we continue to fork will there be a global hyperinflation?
Ah yes, keeping the sha hash vulnerability open for ASIC mining attacks is not a priority? Empty block exploits not a priority? Thousands of coins have been minted to worthless "proof of work" exploits and early adopters.
Surprised it's lasted this long.
Isn't it how it started with gold-based government currencies as well? every government created their own currency/fork of gold.
edit: typo, inflation
That's why wall street got off gold .
"Over the last several days, we’ve examined all of the relevant issues and have decided to work on adding support for bitcoin cash for Coinbase customers. We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/bitcoin-e...
It's an interesting read even if you don't care about shorts or bitcoin at all.
This really is an interesting situation. In the hours approaching the BCH fork an absolutely massive number of short positions were opened on various bitcoin exchanges, but the price remained steady. I assumed people were shorting in expectation of a crash, but the outlined scenario makes much more sense.
Similarly to the trade outlined in the article, if you already held bitcoin, you could short the equivalent amount and you would still receive bitcoin cash. This trade also had the nice side effect of your exposure to fiat currency staying flat through all the potential fluctuation.
But whoever lent the BTC would most likely want the BTC + BCC they are entitled to, even though you don't really have one to give.
Coinbase has three major advantages: (1) incredible marketing, (2) flashy and good UX, and (3) (claimed) safety via cold storage.
The first (1) is a counter argument in my book, (2) is irrelevant, and (3) only matters if you let them control your private keys, which is stupid and the antithesis to Bitcoin.
They are so going to get sued if the price of Bitcoin Cash crashes by the end of the year. Where do they get off telling customers they can't withdraw an asset for five months?
This is what lawyers call "conversion"[1]. A person who knowingly or intentionally exerts unauthorized control over property of another person commits criminal conversion. The element of knowledge is found when the accused person engages in the conduct and he/she is aware of a high probability that he/she is doing so. An essential element of criminal conversion is that “the property must be owned by another and the conversion thereof must be without the consent and against the will of the party, to whom the property belongs, coupled with the fraudulent intent to deprive the owner of the property.”
It's legally equivalent to theft.[2] The typical example of conversion is renting something and then refusing to return it.
Coinbase execs, you really need to be talking to good securities lawyers.
[1] https://conversion.uslegal.com/criminal-conversion/ [2] https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-1317-n...
When they say it will take them time to implement, it's an honest statement. They literally have to implement software, do lots of code review, check their accounting, pentesting, or at least they should be doing these things, and 5 months is an unusually short timeline. Even if they took 10% as fee to hire extra developers to work on this project, 5 months is not guaranteeable at all.
The short timelines proposed for hard-forks is one of the reasons why so many bitcoin developers have voiced caution about hard-fork proposals: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support (far right columns)
Cryptsy was quickly installing random altcoins on their servers until one of the 200 coins they installed ended up being malware (a reverse shell or whatever) and poof goes their exchange, plus or minus some other possible fraud occurring. There is value to caution and review when upgrading software systems.... much less financial systems. With backwards-compatible upgrades, you can be more certain about the net impacts. For example, if the changes were compatible with the pre-existing bitcoin rules, then none of this new coin stuff would have happened, and the whole industry could benefit from the compatible upgrades.
Animats-coin could be created and supported by 2 machines. Is Coinbase obligated to support it just because you have a couple graphics cards and forked code?
If so, there are many near-worthless bitcoin variants and forked chains they aren't supporting.
Whenever someone gets rainbows in their eyes about the magic of the blockchain, I can't help but think "you can imagine the perfect, utopian future - the same one we imagined about the internet in 1994 - but none of the unintended side effects."
Coinbase doesn't have to trade Bitcoin Cash, but they do have to deliver it to the customers they owe on demand. In the world of real securities, "failure to deliver" is a big deal. It is not at the broker's option.
Q: Do I need to withdraw my BTC from Coinbase?
... If you wish to access your coins on the UAHF
chain ... you should withdraw your BTC from Coinbase
to an external wallet address under your control by
July 31.
For multiple non-legal reasons they should, unless writing the code is too much of a burden, but there's not much justification for being picky that it takes actual dev time.
Then I realized there is a little less than 5 months left of 2017... Time is fucking flying!
The issue is that BCH belongs to the original owner of the BTC it was forked from. Despite Coinbase telling people to withdraw their BTC if they wanted the BCH a lot of people no-doubt now feel aggrieved that they're unable to access the new theoretical windfall.
It costs a lot of man hours to add infrastructure work for that, and they're setting a precedent that they'll support every single fork that people speculate with.
I personally think this is lazyman bullshit where people harp about how Coinbase being amicable with the feds are bad until they want to file suit lol. People who were knowledgeable enough about the fork but too lazy to learn how to move their Bitcoin out, not have their private keys stolen/lost, and redeem the coins on two chains without fucking up feel entitled to free money that costs Coinbase man hours and technical debt. Despite all ideals about them technically controlling the BCH, they should be able to draft a legal document placing their licensing at stake that asserts they're not claiming customer BCH and get back to answering my limit increase email.
*Disclaimer: I don't work for Coinbase or a Bitcoin company
Maybe a month for rush (but tested) development. Four months means they have other plans for the money and therefore I believe either they will revise that number or there will be a very large lawsuit. Something like criminal conversion or something.
They have around 7 million customers. If the average amount of bitcoin comes out to 0.5 bitcoin (could be more, could be less, who knows?) then that is 0.5 * 375 (current BCH price) * 7 million = around 1.3 billion USD. Maybe it averages out to quite a bit more. But they are saying they need to hold on to a billion dollars worth of assets until next year for 'safe keeping' or because its technically too hard? LOL.
Ripple's XRP will win
Looks like BitConnect might need to come up with a new short-name?
"This means if there are two separate digital currencies – bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) – customers with Bitcoin stored on Coinbase will only have access to the current version of bitcoin we support (BTC). Customers will not have access to, or be able to withdraw, bitcoin cash (BCC).
Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required."
Any "calculated move" that involves repeated pleas to one's own customers to withdraw all their assets from one's platform to protect themselves from that move... well, you can characterize that as well as I can.
It does seem like they're understaffed. Maybe they were hoping the fork would wither away quickly and they wouldn't need to deal with it. As one of the largest exchanges they should have better contingency planning than that.
I hope they continue to succeed because I do like Coinbase.