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Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

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Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#61

Post by michaelt »

kylebrown wrote: post #26
teacup50 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin with central key escrow is completely and utterly pointless, unless the goal is to generate a lot of waste heat from servers. > Most people aren't going to want to hold their own keys as most people can't stop their computers from being constantly infected by malware. We have cheap, secure hardware crypto tokens that rely on two-factor auth. You don't need to keep millions of dollars on a Windows PC. > Just a…

I don't see how the regulation level of Coinbase affects anything. Some people will store their keys on Coinbase. Paranoid users will use hardware wallets like Trezor. And there's a lot of options in between. The point is that its that choice (for starters) which differentiates bitcoin from Paypal. What if Paypal were to adopt bitcoin as a deposit/withdrawal method, right next to credit card and bank transfer? That w…

  I don't quite understand what you're
  worried about.
Keeping your bitcoin in Coinbase is a bad idea for the same reason keeping your bitcoin in MtGox is a bad idea.

It's the "largest and most established", until it isn't and your deposits have vanished like a fart in the wind.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#62

Post by buro9 »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #59
jasondc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on a few large scale financial databases and none of the ones I've worked on use transactions (using Oracle). Most of them are insert only with bi-temporal data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitemporal_Modeling

Do you have any more info on that technique? The wikipedia article is a little scarce.

A simple entry into the field is to imagine that instead of storing a row in which you have a single balance, you would instead have an append-only table in which you store all transactions including their timestamp and auditing info.

The balance would then be calculated as the sum of transactions, and you could modify the query to view a balance in the past by only including transactions before a certain point in time.

A reversal or correction would be an append action, not a modification to existing data. Thus giving you an accurate history of the data.

This is a simple entry point, as bitemporal modelling usually affects the entire datastore and also has to handle potentially massive data and so requires ideas of how to archive old data, and provide performant ways of knowing the current state. There are lots of tricks here, and the sum of those tricks is how bitemporal modelling is achieved.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#63

Post by smtddr »

consz wrote: post #36

I hope he gets them off MongoDB. I still can't believe they let me double sell without even contacting me afterwards (I sold ~10 bitcoins when it was around $800 and the site was exceptionally busy -- had USD in my Coinbase account afterwards and the bitcoins never left, and I was able to transfer both the USD and BTC out afterwards).

>>had USD in my Coinbase account afterwards

Unlike btc-e.com, I don't think you can have a USD balance on coinbase. If you sell your BTC, you _must_ select the bank to have your money wired too.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#64

Post by ojr »

hendzen wrote: post #12

I'll be honest, I am a Bitcoin fan. But I realize there is a relatively large chance that it might just fail entirely (or only be used by criminals and just be regulated to death). Venture Capital investment in Bitcoin has been fairly massive - and from many top tier VCs e.g. a16z, USV & Accel (but notably not Sequoia nor Greylock). Some key investments: 75m for Coinbase, 20m for Xapo, 9m for Circle (still haven't la…

Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? More people use US Dollars for crime than Bitcoin and it will always be that way especially if you consider military funding, Bitcoin doesn't need fancy investment firms, to invest in it, I'll consider as a "bootstrapped" startup. The total crypto-currency market is over 12 Billion Dollars. Bitcoin doesnt live and die with some rich people who live in California, its global

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#65

Post by mcv »

ojr wrote: post #64
hendzen wrote: post #12

I'll be honest, I am a Bitcoin fan. But I realize there is a relatively large chance that it might just fail entirely (or only be used by criminals and just be regulated to death). Venture Capital investment in Bitcoin has been fairly massive - and from many top tier VCs e.g. a16z, USV & Accel (but notably not Sequoia nor Greylock). Some key investments: 75m for Coinbase, 20m for Xapo, 9m for Circle (still haven't la…

Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? More people use US Dollars for crime than Bitcoin and it will always be that way especially if you consider military funding, Bitcoin doesn't need fancy investment firms, to invest in it, I'll consider as a "bootstrapped" startup. The total crypto-currency market is over 12 Billion Dollars. Bitcoin doesnt live and die with some rich people who…

> Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals?

Name one that is only used by criminals.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#66

Post by mcv »

consz wrote: post #36

I hope he gets them off MongoDB. I still can't believe they let me double sell without even contacting me afterwards (I sold ~10 bitcoins when it was around $800 and the site was exceptionally busy -- had USD in my Coinbase account afterwards and the bitcoins never left, and I was able to transfer both the USD and BTC out afterwards).

Is this Coinbase? Sounds like they're not a lot better than all the others then: amateurs unaware of best practices for what they're dealing with.

MongoDB and similar NoSQL DBs are really cool when you need to deal with vast amounts of statistical data or stuff like that, but for financial transactions, you really need ACID transactions. There's just no substitute for that.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#67

Post by nyrina »

mcv wrote: post #65
ojr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? More people use US Dollars for crime than Bitcoin and it will always be that way especially if you consider military funding, Bitcoin doesn't need fancy investment firms, to invest in it, I'll consider as a "bootstrapped" startup. The total crypto-currency market is over 12 Billion Dollars. Bitcoin doesnt live and die with some rich people who…

> Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? Name one that is only used by criminals.

I did not know I was a criminal for using bitcoin.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#68

Post by atom-morgan »

mcv wrote: post #65
ojr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? More people use US Dollars for crime than Bitcoin and it will always be that way especially if you consider military funding, Bitcoin doesn't need fancy investment firms, to invest in it, I'll consider as a "bootstrapped" startup. The total crypto-currency market is over 12 Billion Dollars. Bitcoin doesnt live and die with some rich people who…

> Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? Name one that is only used by criminals.

My friend bought groceries at Whole Foods with BTC.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#69

Post by mcv »

nyrina wrote: post #67
mcv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Name a major currency in fiat money ($,£,¥..) that isnt used by criminals? Name one that is only used by criminals.

I did not know I was a criminal for using bitcoin.

You may not be, but have you really missed the reports on how popular it is with criminals? The OP fears that if bitcoin goes down, the criminals might end up being the only remaining bitcoin users.

All this straw man stuff about how every currency has its criminals and not every bitcoin user is a criminal right now is totally irrelevant to that. But I guess some people suffer from jerking knees that interfere with their reading.

Re: Facebook Security Director Joins Bitcoin Startup Coinbase

#70

Post by jedanbik »

bowmessage wrote: post #39
consz wrote: post #36

I hope he gets them off MongoDB. I still can't believe they let me double sell without even contacting me afterwards (I sold ~10 bitcoins when it was around $800 and the site was exceptionally busy -- had USD in my Coinbase account afterwards and the bitcoins never left, and I was able to transfer both the USD and BTC out afterwards).

This happened to me and many others on Reddit. It's something that they manually audited it seemed and I got emails about it letting me know that they would be correcting the issue about a week after it happened. Sounds like in your case they never contacted you though? Wow. Still, it made me wonder if I could have just ran with the money and drained the bank acct they had access to... Not a good thing for an exchang…

Manual audits? What is this, the Cretaceous period?
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