Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

bloomberg.com

31–40 of 233 posts

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf. This point may prove to be very sticky. It might be solvable with smart contracts... consider ethereum's https://www.etherdelta.com , which operates as an auditable smart contract. Your money literally can't be stolen without your private key; ev…

This is what insurance is for. If they can’t insure deposits, then that shows a fundamental weakness in the security model.

That is one reason why I'm actually kinda wild about distributed exchange like etherdelta (as proof of concept, at least). The security model is such that it literally doesn't exist in any country, anywhere in the world; doesn't have servers that can be hacked, etc.

(Admittedly the website is housed somewhere, but it's little more than a GUI shell for signing procedure calls, you could run it locally or interact directly).

I think the big issue hindering that model is that they need something allowing users to pipe into traditional currencies. So far all the solutions to that have been IOU tokens like USDT tethers; which end up generating governance headaches of their own, as their value desyncs from their base currency due to arbitrage & supply issues.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#32

EDIT Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job. Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues. I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. The…

> every day at midnight for 10 minutes is fine

No it is not. Coinbase has clients all over the globe. It is always regular trading hours.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#33

EDIT Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job. Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues. I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. The…

What do fellow infrastructure engineers and security experts think about their post on security practices? https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-builds-secure-infrast...

It's hard to tell how many layers of security you need when you're holding tens or hundreds of millions of digital assets that don't require a physical breaking and entering, and when the entire blackhat world is eyeing you as a target.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#34

EDIT Yuck, this blew up and I think alot of people took it the wrong way. I think Coinbase is great, and I'm sure everyone who works there is awesome and terrific at their job. Anyone who has worked on any half way successful project knows just how hard both uptime and security are and I'm in no way upset at Coinbase for having growth issues. I've done this for years and might not even get an interview with them. The…

>1) No counterparty risk. Everyone can get hacked, but coinbase being hacked shouldn't every, under any circumstances result in me loosing any bitcoin they hold on my behalf.

Coinbase is insured by AON Insurance for their hot wallet balance. However, we won't know how Coinbase/AON will handle that until it happens.

I believe any fiat balance is also insured by the FDIC, but I'm less sure about that.

>2) The exchange can't go down, like at all.

Yep. Crypto trades 24/7. It's really surprising they don't have regular planned downtime to address this.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#35

I'm sure you all have very insightful comments about why bitcoin is in a bubble and will fail. Meanwhile, I ignored your comments years ago and I'm very, very comfortably retired now. But please, do go on with your smart insightful comments.

We're all very proud of you.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#36

I'm sure you all have very insightful comments about why bitcoin is in a bubble and will fail. Meanwhile, I ignored your comments years ago and I'm very, very comfortably retired now. But please, do go on with your smart insightful comments.

It can be both a bubble and make lots of people rich...

Also wtf with this comment. Who are you answering to

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#38

I'm sure you all have very insightful comments about why bitcoin is in a bubble and will fail. Meanwhile, I ignored your comments years ago and I'm very, very comfortably retired now. But please, do go on with your smart insightful comments.

Most of the comments here aren't about Bitcoin being in a bubble and falling, they're about Coinbase and varying aspects of their growing pains (security, scalability, lack of insurance and so forth).

Maybe becoming very, very comfortably retired as a bazillionaire has a deleterious effect on reading and attention.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#39
It's interesting the negativity I read about Coinbase in this thread. Makes me wonder if those who do complain tried other exchanges? I've tried Kraken (down much more often), Bittrex (worst trading UI ever), CAvirtex (they are shutdown) ... Coinbase/ GDAX I have had a much better experience. If you want a fast money wire, pay the price for same day processing (30$), I always do and it usually takes a 2 hours.

Re: Coinbase Wants Wall Street to Resolve Its Bitcoin Trust Issues

#40
I think most of you don't realise at what scale Coinbase work. You just have to watch the trade history on GDAX for a few seconds to understand the sheer volume of what is actually happening. The GDAX web socket is very very robust. It's very rarely down for me, and have not been down at all since they did whatever upgrade/maintenance they had to a few days ago.
Post reply on HN