Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#301

Post by raiyu » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #241

skybrian wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.

Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate ele…

I think you captured this notion quite well and I think it's very interesting that for a decentralized system people have immediately given up on that so called benefit because it wasn't as easy to use as a trusted intermediary.

Then the whole angle of "trusted" is complex due to the parties that you are entrusting and the number of issues that they have suffered.

So then you look at banks and say ok, interesting, perhaps I haven't quite noticed the seamless ease of use layer that they provide, that I have undervalued simply because it's been a fact of life for so long it becomes invisible until you deal with the exact opposite.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by coin » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

mrb wrote: post #179

rexf wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While coinbase & BTC seems to be doing well, I've anecdotally seen a bunch of people who can't get a response from coinbase support over long periods of time. Doesn't make relying on coinbase seem like a good idea.

Coinbase is simply suffering from insane growth pains. I mean, come on, they are adding half a million new users per week ! Of course support isn't going to be very responsive.

Don't accept new customers if you don't have the capacity to support them

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by artursapek » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:16 PM UTC

zkms wrote: post #174

CydeWeys wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but this takes seconds instead of 2-3 business days in the case of ACH verification. 2-3 business days is an absolute eternity in the world of Bitcoin speculation.

You can do what Gemini does -- credit the account with fake money once the user requests ACH transfer, let them make trades with it, and only let them withdraw any proceeds of it (whether bitcoin or fiat) once the ACH transaction fully settles.

That's a really interesting approach... do they front the money to the user while the deposit is settling?

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by jacobr1 » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

ethagnawl wrote: post #285

ethagnawl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my experience* over the past ~week, "robust" is not a word I'd use in the same sentence as "coinbase". *In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.

UPDATE: My "pending" transaction was marked as "complete" and the coins appeared in my coinbase wallet this morning (almost 11 days after I initially moved the coins). I'm not necessarily chalking it up to this comment, but I suppose it's possible. Fortune favored me this time around, but I don't know if I can trust coinbase again. If the price had dipped, I'd be out a bunch of money. (Just to be clear: they received…

Coinbase isn't a trading platform. But they do own and operate one: gdax.com

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by imartin2k » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

Coinbase is down again. This seems to happen with every BTC price spike now, and since these spikes get more extreme, I guess Coinbase's infrastructure always lags behind.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by seattle_spring » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

> 57) Customer Service

58) Recruiting process

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by vocatus_gate » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

hectorr1 wrote: post #276

I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are: 1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulat…

Agree with almost everything you've said, and unfortunately if past experience is anything to go by, they'll crash/go down during the next big price dip.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by kleer001 » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

tony101 wrote: post #146

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's very hard to get anyone to take this seriously. But as far as I can tell, it's a real possibility. I had to talk some sense into a friend who was saying she was fed up with being poor and was going to put her $7k life savings into bitcoin. I told her to treat it like gold, hold it, and be very careful to keep it secure. And off Coinbase. And my advice made her hesitate, and now she missed the 100% growth ove…

Could you explain why "this" needs to "stop"? Why would the success of Bitcoin be apocalyptic?

#1 reason BTC based economy would suck: No loans. It's a deflationary currency, meaning its value goes up over time instead of down. So, there's no incentive to spend your money before it loses value like with inflationary currencies. Instead the incentive is to hoard your money because it's going to be worth more tomorrow. It's anti-growth.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by jonwachob91 » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #273

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do customer service when you get 100K new users / day though?

You charge the customers sufficiently so that you can (and do) hire a customer service person for each X new customers.

... There is a lag between signing new customers and hiring competent customer service employees + training them. Just saying.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

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Post by seanalltogether » Thu, Dec 07, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

shiado wrote: post #88

It is pretty funny how the original value proposition of "being your own bank" given in the bitcoin whitepaper, which is necessitated by actually possessing the private keys, has gone out the window due to convenience and a lack of understanding of the fundamental blockchain technology by speculators. Coinbase is central in these facts.

I remember reading somewhere that even satoshi acknowledged that larger services providers would take over in time, that it was infeasible to expect every user in the economy to run a full node and participate in transactions at the block level.