Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

Although these situations are rightly important to the people experiencing them, such posts are not of general intellectual interest. Mostly they use HN as a sort of desperate trampoline to attract attention from somebody-anybody inside inscrutable $company. Or perhaps the desperation has already metastasized into rage.

These feelings are understandable and we all share them (hence the popularity of these submissions). I've got a couple stories of losing $BigCo accounts myself, which boil my blood whenever I think of them. But we're trying to optimize for exactly one thing on HN: curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and this isn't it. In fact it's the opposite.

Such threads invariably turn into a generic referendum on $company, and eventually a generic dumping ground for ever-expanding indignation. Generic/indignant threads are the opposite of intellectually curious conversation, so this is important.

The goal is to keep HN for its intended purpose: curious conversation on intellectually interesting topics. For this, we have no choice but to treat the YC-related customer-complaint posts similarly to the others, because a glut of complaints about Stripe, Airbnb, or Coinbase isn't any more on topic than the equivalent material about Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Normally I wouldn't comment about this, but when the company is YC-funded, our principle is to moderate less (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), so there's a tradeoff here. Without an explanation, people understandably have perceptions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320001, even though we don't moderate HN that way.

Other recent explanations on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34282052

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192

Edit: Btw, it's the same with Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34441697 - although I downweighted the Coinbase thread quite a bit less, in keeping with the principle of moderating less when a YC startup is the story.

https://twitter.com/ChainflowPOS/status/1564014741214973958

Every time I would log in to transfer some cryptocurrency to another wallet, it would fail and an error message would say I was blocked.

Then I'd call support, get a human on the phone and they would not be permitted to tell me why, and claim there is nothing they could do - I had to wait 14 days until it was lifted.

So I waited a month, and tried again. SAME thing.

I call support and get the same reply - need to wait 14 days. I managed to get support guy to give me the exact timestamp which the block was automatically set. It coincided with either my login or my transfer attempt.

So they are just trying to prevent assets from leaving Coinbase with opaque reasons.

I waited another month and before I logged in I got support on the phone.

"Is there a block on my account?"

"no"

"Ok so i'm going to login now and transfer this asset to my own wallet elsewhere. Can you see a reason why this would be blocked?"

"no"

logs in, transfers assets

Then I tried to get all my USD cash back to my bank account. I'd click their OWN BUTTON which says "all funds" or whatever, and withdraw to my attached bank account - Denied, insufficient funds.

Called support, they said "there's a fee, you need to reduce the amount you're trying to transfer". So I did to simulate, and got to the next screen - there is no fee! OF course, this is my money. I want 100% of it back. But whenever I listed 100% of the value, it would be denied.

Support stuck to her story of there being a fee, even though there isn't.

I rounded off the cents, and whole dollar value worked. They can keep the change.

In both of these cases, the human on the phone presented an immoveable wall to getting access to my own significant assets with no reason (or the wrong one) and no hope for alleviating it. NEVER AGAIN will I trust them with my money. In fact, I'm incredibly suspicious of any new company handling large amounts of my money. I'm sticking with banks/brokers that have decades experience.