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Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

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451–460 of 515 posts

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.

You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the busines…

You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks.

No way. Not on fin-co ops.

That's like a car tire store without a pressure guage in shop.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#452
post #376
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Financial transactions are really almost never implemented with database transactions.

A lot of people truly don't understand how financial companies do stuff. Hell, Financial companies are ones who are adopting Mongo and the like themselves. We all assume it's one way, when it's actually done another....

They're really only doing that for hipster cred. That way they can easily write articles titled "How I made (really simple/trivial application) with (really fledgling technology)" such as "how I made a twitter client with node.js" or "how I put 2 sprites on the screen with webgl" or "how I managed 2tps with java".

We know all financial companies use databases running on tandem or tuxedo. But that's not cool sounding. How are they supposed to get fun jobs doing nothing with catered lunches? HOW, HOW I ASK!

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#453

Here is the problem with coinbases tactics. Consider buying $1,000 worth of bitcoins... Coinbase can tell you your price. Coinbase can then just wait, and wait and wait, weeks on end for the price to dip down. They can then buy the coins at the lower price and deliver them to you voila, they profit from you. This is very dubious. If the price goes up they then buy at your price + some percent of their commission so t…

Yeah but what if you decide to withdraw while they are waiting for the price to dip?

You can't because your coins aren't "available." I've only used coinbase once and haven't done more than buy btc, but it did take several days for the coins to become available (presumably for bank transfer to clear), during which time the price dropped by about $100/btc. I'm not mad about this- it was clear at time of purchase that I'd have to wait for transaction to clear, but >3 days would have upset me.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#454
post #48

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…

Why can't you file a small claims lawsuit? It should cost you about $50 and a few hours of your time.

"a few hours" lol. Also, where? Summon whom to court? If I were coinbase I'd simply ignore such a suit.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#455

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…

Brian, thank you for fixing the issue and making things right. As they typically say, a great company isn't judged by how many problems they have, but by how well they handle their problems.

You got a +1 here.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#456
This is why I can't take Bitcoin seriously. It's a liquidity depth issue. Much like HFT, there is a _perception_ that the order book has depth. But there's no guarantee that you'll get execution at the price displayed. At least market makers in the past were forced to execute up to a certain amount by regulation. No such regulation exists here.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#457
post #225
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

MtGox was a URL that the original founder had, but the bitcoin site was not made originally to sell trading cards. It was made to sell bitcoins and he just used a URL he had.

Re: Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hol…

But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.

You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.
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