301–310 of 515 posts
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Care to elaborate more? Specifics?
There isn't any more to it. I disagreed with what I received, they said "we're so really deeply truly sorry but don't care, kthx for the money". Bank said "lol direct transfer". End of story.
Brian from Coinbase here. Sorry for the delay on that - definitely not the customer experience we are striving for. We should have things squared away for you by end of day. Edit: your bitcoin credit has now been processed. It looks like as we were performing server upgrades last week a handful of jobs didn't run as normal. We should have certainly caught it and responded sooner so that was our fault. My deepest apol…
Having a customer service that actually responds to issues meaningfully would be a first step, but that's only the beginning.
There's a technological solution to this. If you know that for whatever reason some transactions might never complete on your end, one of several obvious solutions would be to introduce a timeout after which the transaction is rolled back automatically. That means introducing a batch process to at least trigger a manual review of these cases, and possibly even an automated cancellation with repayment. Doing that within a business day of receiving the money wouldn't be out of order, maybe even make it an hour or so (this is supposed to be a fast medium, right?)
Not to shamelessly self promote, but the best way to buy/sell large amounts of BTC is directly, without going through an exchange/retail site. It is faster, cheaper and definitely a better customer experience. I've worked at two bitcoin exchanges so I know from experience. Now I am arranging private deals between a buyer and a seller. Here is the plug now though www.BitcoinCapitalPartners.com
How can I be sure that the other person won't run away with my money?
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They haven't fixed the core issue at all. What they have done is admitted the situation is entirely their fault (and Brian deserves credit for showing up here so quickly). Hopefully an appropriate remedy will be forthcoming.
Fair point. And agreed, hopefully they will address it further. Again, not saying that this is not a major screw up. I just think Brian and crew deserve more support than they are getting.
For anyone considering using Coinbase or similar services where you have to pay via bank transfer -- think twice and take this as a serious warning that you have almost no protection if they screw you/up somehow. I have a problem with Coinbase for a much smaller sum (luckily): ordered at what I was convinced was a fixed price and just received less BTC at a much higher rate. Their customer support refuses to help (or…
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Forget the difference in the exchange rates. Are you saying you have no system in place to monitor if transactions execute successfully ? I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution.
There was a similar discussion with a very interesting comment regarding their use of mongodb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382 PG's reply in the thread is very telling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372
Q: Does MongoDB support transactions?
A: MongoDB does not provide ACID transactions.
( http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/#does-mongod... )
It is crazy to be doing financial stuff in a DB that doesn't provide transactions. It completely blows my mind that anybody would do this.
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>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.
I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.
That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day.
It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?
The guy who bought these coins is a douche. The fact is bitcoins are highly unstable and he bought them when the price was high(for this week). It is doubtful he would have had the sense to sell them before todays drop. If he really believes that bitcoins are a good investment, which I do, then he should have faith that they will rise in value over time(months, years). It's speculators like this that buy in when the…
> It is doubtful he would have had the sense to sell them before todays drop. Based on... what?
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>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution. That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.
0. This is exactly why auditing (internal and external) and settlement processes exist elsewhere. But it's impossible to have a startup deploy every single control at the very beginning. There are costs (time & money) to get things done, those control don't just magically appear. Eventually, with scale, the growing pains of business process debt (like technical debt) will come due. That's a good thing, because buildi…
As a coinbase customer and someone who manages a team and large complex distributed systems, this is an oversight I would not expect from an industry leader and makes me nervous to continue doing transactions with coinbase.
How can we be made comfortable that this won't happen again? $50 isn't the root cause fix and could have cost the OP $15,000 due to the delay. What if those BTC was going to be used to make a purchase? He is left holding the bag, leaving a sour taste.
Brian from Coinbase here. Sorry for the delay on that - definitely not the customer experience we are striving for. We should have things squared away for you by end of day. Edit: your bitcoin credit has now been processed. It looks like as we were performing server upgrades last week a handful of jobs didn't run as normal. We should have certainly caught it and responded sooner so that was our fault. My deepest apol…
Oh? Did that also cause some kind of downtime in your customer service operations, considering you sure took your sweet time in getting back to him? Funny how the front page of Hacker News makes things run a bit smoother, huh?