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Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

mashable.com

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Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#41

Post by russdpale »

eximius wrote: post #25
rihegher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the existing competition? 1Broker 1BTCXE ACX Allcoin ANXPro Anybits Bibox Binance Bit2C bitbank BitBay Bitfinex bitFlyer Bithumb bitkk Bitlish BitMarket BitMEX Bitsane Bitso Bitstamp Bittrex Bit-Z BL3P Bleutrade Braziliex BtcBox BTCChina BTCExchange BTC Markets BtcTrade.im BTC Trade UA BTCTurk BTCX BX.in.th C-CEX CEX.IO CHBTC ChileBit COBINHOOD coincheck CoinEgg CoinEx CoinExchange coinfloor Coingi…

With the exception of Kraken, Poloniex, and Gemini, I either haven't heard of these places or have heard nothing but terrible, terrible things (i.e., Bitfinex). And I'm sure people have bad things to say about the ones I listed as not being that bad. There simply isn't a well trusted exchange. Coinbase/GDAX and Kraken are the two I would recommend to people getting started, even with these issues surfacing.

Preferably out of US jurisdiction as well.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#43

Post by orthecreedence »

eximius wrote: post #25
rihegher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the existing competition? 1Broker 1BTCXE ACX Allcoin ANXPro Anybits Bibox Binance Bit2C bitbank BitBay Bitfinex bitFlyer Bithumb bitkk Bitlish BitMarket BitMEX Bitsane Bitso Bitstamp Bittrex Bit-Z BL3P Bleutrade Braziliex BtcBox BTCChina BTCExchange BTC Markets BtcTrade.im BTC Trade UA BTCTurk BTCX BX.in.th C-CEX CEX.IO CHBTC ChileBit COBINHOOD coincheck CoinEgg CoinEx CoinExchange coinfloor Coingi…

With the exception of Kraken, Poloniex, and Gemini, I either haven't heard of these places or have heard nothing but terrible, terrible things (i.e., Bitfinex). And I'm sure people have bad things to say about the ones I listed as not being that bad. There simply isn't a well trusted exchange. Coinbase/GDAX and Kraken are the two I would recommend to people getting started, even with these issues surfacing.

Anecdotal, but I quite like Gemini. Coinbase deactivated my account without cause so I moved to Gemini and TBH they seem to take compliance much more seriously. I still don't store money on there, but out of all the exchanges I've worked with over the years, Gemini feels the most secure.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#44

Post by sanderjd »

mkirklions wrote: post #31
thisisit wrote: post #22

This is a settlement problem. Coinbase is unable to settle money between different accounts. And there is a perfect solution for this. We can use blockchain....Oh Wait. /s On a serious note, building a production level real time two book entry system is hard. Many times money just disappears because both legs of transactions don't match. The only way to track is some real good amount of sleuthing. But given the amoun…

How does money go missing? Ive been reading about money in a database and it seems pretty straight forward. Each transaction has an ID and a user ID, how does money disappear?

On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult; the system Coinbase is running is definitely not as straight forward as whatever you've been reading about. On the other hand, this is their core competency and it is absolutely not acceptable for money to go missing; it's a tough problem but its their business and they have to make it work or they're in for major trouble.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#45

Post by cc-d »

spaceandthyme wrote: post #20

I know several good people that have been locked out of Coinbase permanently - without any explanation of why - for over a year despite repeated unanswered requests to have accounts reinstated. I watched those people turn from advocates for coinbase into critics. Just a simple explanation would have helped prevent that scenario. This company is a terrible example of how to do business. It's as if they watched how Goo…

I am one of those people.

While I could still login to my account, I was unable to deposit/withdraw any usd/crypto. After repeatedly attempting to contact coinbase support for months, I never got any further than automated responses or if I was lucky "We'll look into it" (that was never followed up on).

Perhaps with the recent spike in interest in cryptocurrency, coinbase is more concerned with institutional customers who are depositing 5+ figure amounts frequently, and no longer have any interest in people such as myself who only occasionally deposit $100 or so.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#46

Post by existencebox »

spaceandthyme wrote: post #20

I know several good people that have been locked out of Coinbase permanently - without any explanation of why - for over a year despite repeated unanswered requests to have accounts reinstated. I watched those people turn from advocates for coinbase into critics. Just a simple explanation would have helped prevent that scenario. This company is a terrible example of how to do business. It's as if they watched how Goo…

To add to sister comments, I'm also one of these people.

My account became re-locked behind a 2 factor validation step, at some point, asking me for a token they claimed to have sent me. Asking to resend results in a server error. I went through 3 support ticket trains before I got "blacklisted." All 3 support agents stopped responding eventually, and after the third, I never got another response back to an initial bug (made with ~1 month increments). This was ~ a year ago.

I made similar posts in the past and will echo the sentiment now. Coinbase is a fantastic example of how we've gotten into this state of the world where businesses, including ones touching the most sensitive aspects of your life (financial, private communication, private data storage) have almost no accountability to their users if you fall under their "not enough to care" epsilon. Unfortunately, that epsilon was likely derived by looking at the impact of failed tickets, so I'm pessimistic there will _be_ an impact. If there was, they'd be incentivised to change their behavior.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#47

Post by 394549 »

sanderjd wrote: post #44
mkirklions wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does money go missing? Ive been reading about money in a database and it seems pretty straight forward. Each transaction has an ID and a user ID, how does money disappear?

On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult; the system Coinbase is running is definitely not as straight forward as whatever you've been reading about. On the other hand, this is their core competency and it is absolutely not acceptable for money to go missing; it's a tough problem but its their business and they…

> On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult

Banks have scaled systems like this with mainframes and COBOL for decades. It's probably not as hard as you think to get it right if you have your priorities straight.

IMHO, for banking, you need to KISS and avoid all unnecessary complexity (especially in the name of "scale"), at least for your master source of truth.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#48

Post by omarchowdhury »

eximius wrote: post #25
rihegher wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the existing competition? 1Broker 1BTCXE ACX Allcoin ANXPro Anybits Bibox Binance Bit2C bitbank BitBay Bitfinex bitFlyer Bithumb bitkk Bitlish BitMarket BitMEX Bitsane Bitso Bitstamp Bittrex Bit-Z BL3P Bleutrade Braziliex BtcBox BTCChina BTCExchange BTC Markets BtcTrade.im BTC Trade UA BTCTurk BTCX BX.in.th C-CEX CEX.IO CHBTC ChileBit COBINHOOD coincheck CoinEgg CoinEx CoinExchange coinfloor Coingi…

With the exception of Kraken, Poloniex, and Gemini, I either haven't heard of these places or have heard nothing but terrible, terrible things (i.e., Bitfinex). And I'm sure people have bad things to say about the ones I listed as not being that bad. There simply isn't a well trusted exchange. Coinbase/GDAX and Kraken are the two I would recommend to people getting started, even with these issues surfacing.

You really haven't heard of Binance or Bittrex?

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#49

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

largehotcoffee wrote: post #36

I operate an adult comic book publisher and Coinbase shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took 3 - 5 weeks to get a reply and it was always unhelpful. For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up…

If you weren't converting to USD, why use Coinbase at all?

I understand there might be a convenience factor for managing the BTC transaction, but there are many options for doing so that don't introduce such a liability.

Re: Desperate Coinbase customers turn to SEC with allegations of fraud

#50

Post by freeloop10 »

garmaine wrote: post #12
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is a genuine question or not, because if it's genuine you're giving the OP an extremely ungenerous reading. "They didn't tell me I couldn't sell them until after I'd already purchased" doesn't mean "I couldn't sell the coins until after I bought them, and I had no idea that was the case because I don't understand the basic concept of transactions." It means "I wasn't allowed to sell the coins, an…

Ok. GP should reword because it seriously didn’t read that way.

me as well
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