Imagine having your salary drop 70% year over year because interest rates are no longer zero.
Nobody is being bound to hold BTC once the payment is made. Nor needs the salary amount be contractually specified in BTC.
Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
31–40 of 134 posts
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#32I would like to get into crypto (for transfer, not for asset speculation) but can't understand the point of using a decentralized ledger and yet using these centralized exchanges which control the on/off ramps. Isn't the whole idea not to rely on gatekeepers? There's been news (Canadian truckers incident) where the government told Paypal/Visa/Mastercard etc to stop the flow on crypto currency. Am I missing something…
As Ron Paul once said about the Federal Reserve system, "If that doesn't make any sense to you, then you understand it just fine."
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#33You want to use Bitcoin to make international payments without headaches... so you open an account on a custodial service? I don't understand what you expected to happen. All you had to do is download a wallet and transfer your Bitcoin directly.
> and transfer your Bitcoin directly OP was trying to get the Bitcoin in the first place.
That doesn't seem correct. It's pretty simple to buy BTC on Coinbase and then transfer it to another wallet. Then you can do anything you want with it.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#34I'm on Coinbase's side. From their point of view, this story reads like "I am trying to launder money". Why not just use a payment method with a settlement period, instead of insisting on using a (new) debit card?
While I agree that the process could have raised red flags with the customer's behavior, why not have a human look into it and verify that it's legitimate? Why the ghosting/poor communication?
Because humans are expensive, and you (the customer) aren't worth the effort and expense unless you're a major client with lots of money.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#35I think this level of heavy-handed measures are a result of cases like this [0] where a Sony employee embezzled $150 millions and converted them to BTC using Coinbase. Probably their silly security flags went up thinking you are trying to steal your business's money using BTC? Edit: people who want to know more about the case, here's a Money Stuff article by Matt Levine [1], jump to "Coinbase compliance". Bunch of re…
Well, the accounts share nothing in common other than me. And, I deleted my personal account, like they asked. They seem unable to move forward after that. As a developer myself, it's clear that request (delete personal account) was a hail mary. They had no idea if it would work. And, the amounts of money involved are very small.
Sure, but how does coinbase know that? For that matter how do we even know you’re telling the truth now?
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#36I'm on Coinbase's side. From their point of view, this story reads like "I am trying to launder money". Why not just use a payment method with a settlement period, instead of insisting on using a (new) debit card?
I am not on coinbase's side, because the advent of cryptocurrency, should it work - will make it trivially easy to avoid nasty letter regulation as it exists today.
They are taking steps to comply with a regulatory policy that is not voted on, nor written by legislature, and failing to make their case to the people that they should own their own money.
I understand why, but it bothers me that the CEO is pro crypto, has tons of money, and yet consistently fails to fight for the user.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#37Have you tried Wise (formerly TransferWise)? I don't know if they have issues with transfers to Ukraine, but in general they have provided an excellent service for paying contractors in foreign currency. We also use Deel and I can recommend it. It's $50/month for contractors which is usually sufficient depending on employment law (FTE through Deel is more expensive ). They handle all payments and we just connect our…
In a previous role I used to pay contractors all over the world - Estonia, Kenya, France, Italy, Spain, Peru, South Korea, China and the UK just to name a few.
TransferWise was awesome at what it did, and it was pretty quick too. In some cases I could send money straight to my employee's phones - particularly in Kenya (via M-PESA) and China (via some sort of Wise-WeChat partnership). The fees were very competitive & reasonable, and their customer support was great in the few times I needed it to be. Can't recommend them enough.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#38My guess is that it is a challenge to pay them because they live in Crimea or Donbas and carry a Russian passport. There are no issues sending money to Ukraine using conventional methods.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#39Imagine having your salary drop 70% year over year because interest rates are no longer zero.
There are currencies that are similarly unstable (I was unable to get actual rates for UAH, but the official/pegged rate dropped 20% suddenly mid-2022), but unless the salary is denominated in BTC, the only thing that matters is short-term fluctuations between the point where the amount is converted to BTC and the point where the recipient converts it to local currency.
The advantage of BTC here is the decoupling of the sender and recipient exchanges: Instead of having to find one company that handles the whole transfer end to end (i.e. is active in both the sender's country and the recipient's country), it shifts the problem to finding one trustworthy exchange usable by the sender and another trustworthy exchange usable by the recipient.
Unlike banks or classic money transmitters, there is no need for trust/coordination between the two exchanges.
Re: Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
#40Sounds a little rough, and the support times aren't the best, but admittedly Coinbase is designed for consumers, and for large-volume traders with their institutional products. This low-volume business case is pretty edge. They could do better but for most people in most cases, the product works very well.
They were recently fined $100 million [0] for compliance reasons (essentially not moving quickly enough on a few cases), and the amount of info they collected was already heavy before that. When you can't make a mistake or you get fined millions, the edge cases on any money transfer system, especially one involving crypto, will probably default to not letting you get through rather than letting you skirt through easily.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/coinbase-settlem....