Coinbase is getting away with murder charging outrageous fees, cashing in the bitcoin frenzy. Kinda like the shady brokerages in the 80s.
Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
251–260 of 355 posts
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#252Their ID system keeps throwing me errors when using my US passport. i have no Us drivers license or Active Us Cel phone for auth.
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're promoting is a totally centralized cryptocurrency vision for the vast majority of the world, where the very rich and large institutions alone get to use their private keys with any frequency. It utterly contradicts the title of Bitcoin's white paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Nodes are peers. If you don't own one, especially if you can't run one, and you don't use it to secure your transactions on the blockchain, you aren't one. You skipped right over the peer part, even though the word is used twice, and started talking about the cash part.
No matter how you try to spin it, you can't make a future where the vast majority can't control their own private keys sound consistent with Satoshi's vision, or rewrite the public statements Satoshi made about how Bitcoin should scale.
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not so much that they don't understand, but rather that they don't care. People can buy Bitcoin for fun or to try to make money without believing in the ideology that was originally used to justify it.
Which is why I got out of bitcoin. There's literally nothing special about bitcoin, apart from its decentralised nature. Other than that, it's just a big ledger. No different from virtually any other database. It's special because it's decentralised. The way people use bitcoin however, completely reverses that and is extremely geared towards use of centralised parties. It's as if we built solar panels to generate ele…
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#255With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be pa…
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran into a problem using them, realized their customer support appears to have given up, and decided it was time to get my money out. That was this morning. As of now, the BTC transaction I initialized is reported as “complete” on my Coinbase account, which now has a balance of 0, and the transaction has not even registered on the blockchain. This is certainly not my definition of “robust.”
While coinbase & BTC seems to be doing well, I've anecdotally seen a bunch of people who can't get a response from coinbase support over long periods of time. Doesn't make relying on coinbase seem like a good idea.
Eventuslly I was up 5000 I decided to sell 10k so I could let the rest freeride. When I went to sell coinbase told me they couldn't validate my identity and wouldn't let me sell.
Which is ridiculous. They had no problem taking 10k from me, but not the other way around?
At the very least they should have put some info somewhere telling me that before I bought any.
Nothing I did worked. It just kept telling me it couldn't validate and to try again in 24hr. I contacted support and eventually got a boiler plate email.
Eventually I opened a new account on another exchange, sent my eth there and sold it for btc which I sold for usd on localbtc.
Ended up a 2000 dollar loss because this whole process took like a week or so during which eth kept dropping.
My advice to anyone using cb would be to have a local wallet and working accounts on multiple exchanges. If I had done that I would have been okay.
However I still think that if my identity was no sufficiently validated to sell, they should have told me before I went to sell.
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nodes are peers. If you don't own one, especially if you can't run one, and you don't use it to secure your transactions on the blockchain, you aren't one. You skipped right over the peer part, even though the word is used twice, and started talking about the cash part.
If you don't control your own private keys, you don't have any control of your own money. Satoshi certainly did not think using light clients while controlling one's own private keys contradicted the principle of "peer-to-peer electronic cash". No matter how you try to spin it, you can't make a future where the vast majority can't control their own private keys sound consistent with Satoshi's vision, or rewrite the p…
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#258With the frenzy out there, Coinbase makes crypto currencies trading/investing/purchasing as robust and seemingly as safe as possible. This could be a signal, now that we have some reputable market players that crypto currencies are really just starting and there is a very high ceiling. Getting in before coinbase you had to mine your own (that party ended quickly - Butterfly Labs, cex.io for cloud mining etc) or be pa…
I've run into all sorts of bugs which made the site annoying to use. 1. My bank account has a 5000$ limit and my credit card has a 750$ limit. After spending 1000$ from the bank (which takes a week), I wanted a quick 50$ from my CC, but it said I was already past the 750$ limit. 2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say yo…
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, and this happened to Donald Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
This is just bananas. I always thought the routing/acct would just authorize deposits. I assumed this, because every time I need this info, I look at my checks. (When people wire money to me). When you write a check, the signature is the authorization to withdraw funds, and the amount and recipient is specified. I’m shocked that banks would permit a withdrawal without some kind of “anolog” to this authorization patte…
Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, all one needs to do is have access to the routing / account number and one can start withdrawing funds, paying bills, etc. There is nothing in place to prevent that and nothing else is needed.
And the police will do nothing about it. Even if the fraudster uses your checking account to pay for their power bill. Good luck getting the police in a big city to head over to the house and investigate.