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Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

nytimes.com

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Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#331

Post by Rmilb »

hectorr1 wrote: post #276

I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are: 1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulat…

They have done a lot. However they were pushing too hard for the NY Segwit 2X agreement and complaining loudly of high fees. They still have not upgraded their software to support segwit addresses but still had the time to support the 2X fork. It seems very disingenuous and I wish I had a company that supported what I believe in to recommend for new users.

It is ridiculous to complain about fees and continue to drag your feet to implement tech that is lowering fees in production right now that other companies already have activated.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#332

Post by Rmilb »

snoman wrote: post #175
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely false. The number one rule of bitcoin is never store your bitcoin on an exchange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 You wait and see what happens when coinbase has 500 billion or a trillion dollars worth of hard currency on their platform, and the us dollar is three years into its slide. The temptation to raid that will be far…

Bitcoin is no less safe than any other asset re: civil forfeiture. One might even make the argument that it is moreso because there aren't the established communication mechanisms that exist between law enforcement agencies and banks that allow them to hold funds as quickly as they do. Per your other argument: a whole host of executive orders spanning 2 years, nearly 100 years ago, designed to work around the federal…

How does the government seize bitcoins when you have memorized your private key? They cannot read your mind.

Here is more information about the topic :https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#333

Post by daxorid »

ukoki wrote: post #315
hectorr1 wrote: post #276

I have a ton of respect for Coinbase. It seems like their implied priorities are: 1) Security 1a) Compliance ... 57) Customer Service While annoying, this was both sufficient and necessary for the business to date. Security is necessary for obvious reasons. Compliance is necessary because to be able to do business with US banks (card processing, ACH, wires...) they had to be aggressive about complying with US regulat…

Yep! I contacted customer support over a month ago as I am unable to make withdrawals. Still haven't heard a thing from them.

Same. I'm a little surprised that their focus on "compliance" doesn't cover things like de facto theft of your customer's money. Are there no financial regulations requiring the honoring of withdrawals within a certain period of time?

Either way, we still have the option of buying BTC and transferring it to a company that doesn't defraud its customers, then withdrawing from there.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#334

Post by sugarandcyanide »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #151
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to implement your code changes on the alt of your choice. Bitcoin node users remain unaffected. It's over right? The whole attempt to sideline the bitcoin development team failed, and now that uncertainty has been removed, the price of bitcoin is skyrocketing. That's because bitcoin is valuable for what it is, not for unproven use-cases that decrease bitcoin security. We will get to those use-cases through…

And guess what, businesses are moving on. Steam just dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment. And before that OpenBazaar. And Yours.

FWIW OpenBazaar has not dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment, just chosen to diversify payment options.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#335

Post by xorcist »

mrb wrote: post #173
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with my memory http://bitcoinist.com/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-announces... Not to mention being a signatory to the nya, being the attempted hostile takeover of bitcoin via 2x that crashed one block before the fork. And let's not forget : http://www.coinfox.info/news/persons/5012-brian-armstrong-ca... Losing side. Every time. And no one is interested in a centralized alt like bch, which is why it has…

I dislike it when people like you try to paint segwit2x as a "hostile" attempt to take over Bitcoin. It was not. A few confrontational segwit2x supporters made it look this way, but in reality the people at the center of the movement genuinely cared about simply making Bitcoin scale. See also a longer explanation I wrote at: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7508mh/comment/do7umhy

"Everybody should sign this paper and promise to use btc1 instead of bitcoind. We have a guy on payroll who is both project maintainer and lead developer of said software."

Yes, I can see how some people might see that as a bit hostile. It's as if IBM went around all the Fortune 500 soliciting signatures to swap out all Libreoffice for Openoffice.

Except perhaps Openoffice is a healthy project in comparison.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#336

Post by xorcist »

nextstep wrote: post #94
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technica…

I’m not sure if you’re willfully misinterpreting what happened or just unware, but the debate over how to scale bitcoin (basically, on-chain vs off-chain) is know being played out with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash. And it’s looking like big blocks is actually a solution for scalability (lower fees, faster transactions), at least in the short term. (For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit…

Bitcoin Cash has a much lower blocksize, not larger. It is the maximum limit that is larger. They regularly have < 100 kB blocks. Of course there is no congestion. Nobody uses it.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#337

Post by Frogolocalypse »

PeterisP wrote: post #297
emXdem wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of bitcoin as the censorship resistant settlement layer on which payment networks/systems can and are being built (like lightning network, which just passed all tests). There are some pretty sweet video demos of lightning network/payment channels in action. Don't forget that it's now possible to broadcast bitcoin transactions via satellite - without internet...

That could very well be the thing, and there's certain value in that, however IMHO that value is limited because: 1) the market value of a settlement system handling is much, much lower than that of a retail payment system with a comparable value (not number) of transactions. If the "payment of the future" is a side-chain that uses bitcoin as the settlement layer, then that side-chain will be the value creator and ge…

There are lot of people that can't understand the use-case of bitcoin, and can't understand why it has value if it doesn't meet theirs, yes.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#338

Post by simonebrunozzi »

PeterisP wrote: post #273
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do customer service when you get 100K new users / day though?

You charge the customers sufficiently so that you can (and do) hire a customer service person for each X new customers.

That's not what their VCs want them to do, unfortunately.

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#339

Post by twayamznacct »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #129
nextstep wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if you’re willfully misinterpreting what happened or just unware, but the debate over how to scale bitcoin (basically, on-chain vs off-chain) is know being played out with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash. And it’s looking like big blocks is actually a solution for scalability (lower fees, faster transactions), at least in the short term. (For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit…

Coinbase is only supporting Bitcoin Cash because there was a large and very legitimate class action lawsuit headed their way if they didn't.

Just out of curiosity, why only BCash and not the other "big" forks of BTC (like Gold)?

Re: Coinbase: The Heart of the Bitcoin Frenzy

#340

Post by xorcist »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #192
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Armstrong has quite the history of being on the wrong side of every argument to do with safe and scalable crypto implementation. He has been a champion of centralization and attacks on bitcoin governance. He was a vocal proponent of four out of the five failed fork attempts of bitcoin over the past couple of years. He, and coinbase investors, are very lucky they had people like Charlie Lee managing the technica…

Armstrong was right about Bitcoin's 1 MB limit leading to massive fee increases and retail unusability, and he was right about Ethereum becoming massively adopted. Your characterization of Armstrong's position as being pro-centralization is typical of the total disconnect between the 1-MB-Bitcoin crowd and reality. According to your logic, Satoshi Nakamoto was pro centralization when he described a future with GB blo…

One would think that his company would be first in line to implement the new 2 MB limit then. But no, they're last, and they still don't batch their transactions or implement a proper fee estimator. Their customers still overpay for transactions, often by several hundred percent.

The reality is that they don't care much about fees, they just pass them on to their customers.

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