Coinbase Commerce: merchants can accept multiple digital currencies (opens in new tab)

Fellow greencard holder here, I’m in the exact same boat with coinbase. I’m booking an appointment at the dmv to get a new ID card just for this. It really sucks.

The error of the ways of Coinbase seems to be allowing various transactions and money transfer activity, sometimes for lengths of time, on unverified accounts. Then, suddenly boom, there's a problem, and customer support is already backlogged.

Kind of like they opened the door to unlimited new subscribers and sobbed that they were overloaded. With some of the HN crowd playing the violin music of poor, fast-growing start-up (the "growing pains" cop out).

Naughty (greedy) Coinbase.

Each state has different laws regarding KYC, AML and money transmitter status. For example, in all states but California payroll companies are money transmitters.

It's annoying, but requiring a state-issued ID instead of a federal ID satisfies some of their legal requirements and makes the verification process much easier on their side.

Could they do this with a federal ID? Probably. It'd be a completely new verification process - not automated. They may need to request recent bills for proof of address, plus the necessary tooling to store/verify these.

It's the same reason you can't wander into a bank with a green card and be like "open an account". You need proof of address, state residency etc.

Could you get a state id as a workaround? Most states issue IDs that pretty much look identical to a drivers license, but are not a drivers license. Much faster turn around time, no real testing required.

It's not that simple. Instant verification is shaky and relies on 1) the ability for a computer to properly read your document and 2) the information it reads to exist in a 3rd party repository of your personal information (these are terrifyingly vast).

If 1 or 2 fails, which they do often, you're back in human land.

There are a significant amount of stories out there (and shared here) that directly disagree with your assertion.

I think you're misunderstanding what the Request network is doing. Their goal is exactly what you described, a payment gateway for existing (all) cryptos (including fiat). The Request token ($REQ) is only used to collect fees for using the request. The REQ tokens are burned as part of the transaction, and in the end goal the end user themselves won't have to actually ever buy any REQ tokens either, it will automatically be done by the network. REQ tokens are actually only ERC20 tokens (meaning they're using the Ethereum blockchain).

The end goal is a decentralized payment gateway that will accept any crypto or fiat and payout in the desired currency. Request will handle the swapping of currencies and everything else in a decentralized manner. Obviously, likely quite a ways away from that, and there are a lot of scaling issues that need to be solved with blockchain tech itself before this can actually exist in a usable way.

I also think there are way too many projects in this space and most of them are very obvious money grabs. Ultimately only a few projects will survive and gain mainstream adoption.

I am really on the face regarding bitcoin though: it is the grandfather of all those crypto projects and massively moves the market, but I don't quite understand how it could ever replace a currency given its very limited supply and astronomical unit economic price: it was not supposed to be a store of value like gold when it started.

Ultimately, I think a few projects with much higher coins in circulation and faster transaction times will end up becoming more valuable due to greater usability.

It's a shame it feels like REQ is a bit late to the game, but they do have ambitious plans, one of them is to enable cross-currency transactions (including fiat). No-one has yet gained the first mover advantage in this space so the jury is still out.

I can't think of anything that is universally good other than God. & from what I've heard about the Old Testament that's not even true!

So we a situation where people can't even construct something from their imagination that is virtuous in all concerns. & people want financial technology to meet that bar? Seems unlikely to me.

Could there be some money laundering? Probably. Will there be attempts by the owners of the payment processor to stop such a thing? Probably. Will there be perfection? Probably not.

From what I understand, most money laundering occurs in the traditional financial system. Does it follow we should tear it down?

& besides, I thought crypto(assets) were a fad. A bubble. A figment of the imagination. A plaything for greater fools. If that's true, it's hardly worth worrying about.

> We don't resell data.

There must be some confusion on my part, because I consider this product (https://plaid.com/products/income/) as selling the income data, I'm guessing it's unrelated to Coinbase.

In any case, are you able to unequivocally state that you do not collect this data for coinbase users, even if it's not for reselling? I know you might have good intentions, but there's no telling where that data will end up once it's collected (past the point of your 'exit' event).

> All I need to transfer money in the US is a routing number and account number

While this is true, Routing + account numbers are less useful as this information can only be shared with trusted parties because anyone with this information can trigger a debit(!) against your account. For all the other countries I know, the worst anyone can do is deposit money into your account.

Right... but then you have to manage securing and cashing out the tokens yourself.

Really funny how we've come full circle to the same centralized cabals acting as the gatekeepers decentralized currency was meant to destroy.

It just goes to show, as long as the world runs on fiat currency, and you need to convert from cryptocurrency -> fiat to live your life, the conversion point (e.g. Coinbase) will always be a point of failure and regulatory capture.

There is no such clause in the Coinbase Commerce TOS[0], and "Coinbase Commerce accounts are completely separate from Coinbase accounts"[1].

Also not sure what the Coinbase Commerce account is even for since "Coinbase Commerce is not a hosted service".

[0]: https://commerce.coinbase.com/legal/terms-of-service/ [1]: https://commerce.coinbase.com/faq

your logic is funny, is like having a busy site with a postgress db, and saying postgress is at fault, look at my mysql wordpress site with 1.3 visitors per day, how fast it is.

Ethereum will colapse on itself sooner of later, no one managed to sync a node recently.

Nano takes like 4 seconds to confirm and has zero fees for transfer. It's really a no-brainer, but unfortunately this Bitgrail thing is going to muddy the waters for a long time.

If they're interested in taking on the counterparty risk they could do this, but when the mempool is flooded you can replace pending transactions with new transactions with a higher fee (called "Replace by Fee").

but they don't seem to convert to fiat (at least from this article or the demo), so it's irrelevant.

It sucks, but you can store cash there in advance, and purchase on the fly when desired.

Lightning Ramp isn't a Coinbase project, it just integrates with them.

Does lightening address coinbases incredibly long and arbitrary delays in deposits to an actual bank account?

Bitcoin Cash was listed in an incredibly dishonest way. They “surprised” announced it at 8pm on a Tuesday night. Along with the “launch” they had disabled selling bch from the fork (you could only buy). The launch coincided with Roger Ver and numerous CNBC “stories” trashing Bitcoin. It was so shady Coinbase agreed to launch an insider trading investigation.

Worse, coinbase is dragging their feet improving their Bitcoin technology stack. At this point it appears intentional.