Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

blog.coinbase.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 359 posts

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#271

Post by jsprogrammer »

jandrese wrote: post #257
joosters wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin addresses for darknet marketplaces are easily available - e.g. https://www.walletexplorer.com/ Perhaps Coinbase will turn you away if they see you depositing money on a drugs market?

It is ironic that Bitcoin is thought of as the criminals currency when it's one of the most trackable in the world.

Bitcoin allows more to know of those criminal actions.

With untrackable currency (USD, et al.), you get HSBC's and all the others, who may commit crimes in secret and destroy the evidence.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#272

Post by anon1mous »

oxide wrote: post #171
jessedhillon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why would you do that? Why wouldn't you transfer coins to a wallet you control and then conduct the transaction from there? Doing it from Coinbase throws away anonymity -- why not just buy your drugs with a Visa card then?

that's the recommended course of action, IIRC. personally, I prefer to do all my gray market drug purchases on the ol' regular internet with a prepaid debit card.

How do you get the prepaid card?

Cameras are so cheap that practically every shop has them. Voice, face, body recognition are getting better by the week and can be run on all recordings.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#273

Post by amyjess »

samstave wrote: post #267
jandrese wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you give them your private key? Doesn't that defeat the entire security model of Bitcoin? Once Coinbase is hacked all of your money will be gone. It seems crazy to me that you would give them the private key.

Well if everyone was smart, they should just store all keys into a public Github repo. At least then they would have a backup if they may be stolen!!

Oh, I see you must be an Uber DBA.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#274

Post by vkou »

celticninja wrote: post #173
vkou wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone stole 5% of all the world's fiat currency from an unregulated, uninsured financial institution (Which in that sense was no different from any other BTC exchange... So it's not like anyone had better options.) with customers not getting any recourse, that would be a disaster for fiat currencies. At least, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the Wild West style of regulating fiat currencies. People hold…

Have a look at secure investment, they split with $130 million dollars in fiat. What about the $1bn stolen from moldovan banks? There has been no customer recourse there. Trillion? Really? That is an order of magnitude grater than bitcoins total market cap.

The MT.Gox disaster included the theft of ~7% of all BTC.

Depending on how you want to measure the amount of fiat currency in circulation, 7% of that would be close to a trillion dollars.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#276

Post by samstave »

amyjess wrote: post #273
samstave wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if everyone was smart, they should just store all keys into a public Github repo. At least then they would have a backup if they may be stolen!!

Oh, I see you must be an Uber DBA.

Hahahahahhaha

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#277

Post by necessity »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #231
ewillbefull wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only appear to care about the customer experience when someone complains on social media, until then they have a history of being jerks to their users. They closed my account after I made a (relatively small) wire transfer after not using their service for a while. The year before I made much larger transfers that didn't seem to concern them. Suddenly I needed to provide them with lots of financial information.…

What's really odd about this (to me at least) is I've never had such an experience from any of my real banks.

I and many other fellow countrymen have had that experience with Itaú (largest bank in the southern hemisphere). Paypal seems to be a popular source of complaints regarding frozen accounts too.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#278

Post by mks »

wmf wrote: post #96
drcode wrote: post #39

Just a reminder to Bitcoin newbies: This card looks like an OK product (still open questions about how much coinbase is gaming the ask/bid spread) but just realize that this card does NOT use Bitcoin, it uses "Coinbase Bitcoin"[1] which is Bitcoin for which the coinbase company is managing your private key: You only truly own Bitcoins if you own the private key for the account (users of MtGox learn this the hard way…

I don't see how a debit card could work any other way, since VISA is a pull-based system. If I have Bitcoin on my own computer and I swipe the card, how does the right amount of BTC get sucked out of my computer and exchanged?

Your issuer could talk directly to your private wallet (e.g. on your phone or on server). You could preapprove requests coming from your issuer to be automatically executed so that there is no payment delay. This scenario would be somewhat similar to Direct Debit transaction and would require wallet software supporting automated requests.

Implementing interactive approval would be more difficult to integrate. Authorization systems typically respond pretty fast, so there might be automatic timeout in the payment chain (terminal, acquirer, schema network, issuer) if the transaction was waiting for your interactive confirmation. Maybe some magic with initial pre-auth and subsequent post-auth attempts at regular intervals could work but would be no fun to implement either.

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#279

Post by conradev »

jandrese wrote: post #260
drcode wrote: post #39

Just a reminder to Bitcoin newbies: This card looks like an OK product (still open questions about how much coinbase is gaming the ask/bid spread) but just realize that this card does NOT use Bitcoin, it uses "Coinbase Bitcoin"[1] which is Bitcoin for which the coinbase company is managing your private key: You only truly own Bitcoins if you own the private key for the account (users of MtGox learn this the hard way…

Wait, you give them your private key? Doesn't that defeat the entire security model of Bitcoin? Once Coinbase is hacked all of your money will be gone. It seems crazy to me that you would give them the private key.

> Coinbase is insured against employee theft and hacking in an amount that exceeds the average value of online bitcoin it holds at any given time.

Key word there is "online", but it's better than nothing (see: Mt. Gox).

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...

Re: Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

#280

Post by iamsohungry »

ShiftPayments wrote: post #22
TomGullen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty horrendous. Should be inactive until you activate it, or randomly generated and displayed to you securely in some way.

The card actually is inactive until you activate it once it arrives

False: the card is inactive until someone activates it.
Post reply on HN