I have been a long time coinbase user. I have been very unhappy with their support. I have been unable to add additional funds to buy both additional ethereum and btc from their site, even after contacting them repeatedly about this ... but never getting a reply. I did multiple identity verifications and connected bank and credit cards. No luck in being able to transact properly. Bitcoin Cash was a forcing function and last week I sent my funds to a private wallet. I am also buying additional crypto on Gemini and other exchanges. To give an idea of my frustration with them, I first tried to buy ethereum thru then at $40. I gave them benefit of the doubt in solving my issues ... and waited and waited. By the time I realized that they were not listening to me, ether had shot up to more than $200. I ultimately bought on Gemini. This was their business to lose and they did exactly that.
I've had almost exactly the same experience. I recently withdrew all my btc into an offline wallet because I just couldn't trust having to deal with Coinbase support based on prior experience.
One example springs to mind. I bought some ETH once they initially began supporting it, just before it shot up in value. However, the transaction just seemed to disappear and I lost out. I tried contacting support by they just kept closing my tickets without explanation. Very, very frustrating.
The only weapon you have (that they care about) is a chargeback dispute.
I know a story when someone bought some coins with Visa credit card and they had some issues with Conibase service. Same story with tickets - open only to have it closed down next day with suggestion to look into knowledge base.
Then they proceed to the bank and opened a chargeback dispute based on false advertising (legitimate reason) that Coinbase promised to help and are not.
You see - since crypto-currency is not tangible item (you can call it service, if you will), neither Visa, nor Amex or Mastercard will have issues with your dispute, because there is even no tracking to proof you received your "product". Of course once the funds are returned to your credit card and bank notifies Coinbase about the dispute, Coinbase will take your coins away from you, but that's not the point. You see -- it doesnt matter to Visa if you process $1 billion in monthly transactions - if you have too many chargebacks, they will shut you down. End of the story. You open another account - you go on the MATCH list and owner(s) SSN/IDs are on it for 5 years so bye bye processing credit card transactions.
Coinbase might not care about you (I am sure they do per se, they just cheap and won't hire enough eyeballs to answer customer support), but surely they care about their chargebacks dispute level.
I've gotta say I've always been skeptical of posts like this because there is a lot of faux hate spewed on the Internet about Coinbase due to them having spoken the heresy of supporting bigger blocks.
That said I'm currently experiencing a problem where all emails from Coinbase to my email address are being lost and it isn't a spam filter. I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
If all they are going to do is regurgitate information from there website why do they have support people at all?
If anyone from Coinbase is reading this all email sent from Coinbase to the Purdue Alumni email forwarding service @alumni.purdue.edu is being lost or not sent or something. It may have something to do with the fact that the alumni.purdue.edu server doesn't support TLS. I don't know just a guess but I know something changed in the past couple months and I don't even get marketing emails from Coinbase any more and it is preventing me from logging into my account.
> I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
I had a similar issue. I posted a clear support ticket, heard nothing for at least a day or two (probably longer) then got boilerplate about checking the support website. I replied saying I did and that the information on the support page couldn't be used to solve the problem. Nothing from Coinbase for a week, then another bot email saying they'll close the ticket unless I reply (again!) saying my issue was not resolved. This back and forth lasted over a month.
It reflects pretty poorly on them as a company and I really can't recommend using them as a result. The underlying support issue was related to their verification software. If their verification software doesn't work for some reason and their support is isn't focused/careful, then you're out of your account for more than a month.
Working in higher ed, I'd say it's more likely your university is filtering it as spam before it ever hits your inbox. Bitcoin and it's ilk are giant red flags for over-protective systems. (I'm not endorsing it, just trying to give some advice).
I, too, have had terrible past experiences with Coinbase and I no longer use them. I now buy on Gemini for fiat -> BTC and use other exchanges for altcoins. That said, I no longer keep any crypto on any exchange, including Gemini. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you are your own bank via ownership of your private keys. By giving them to Coinbase, you centralize the system, concentrate the risk, and create honeypots for hackers. Remember, the government doesn't insure Bitcoin balances like it does with USD in banks and so much Bitcoin has been lost via exchange hacks in the past few years.
Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.
> The whole point of Bitcoin is that you are your own bank
There are several important differences between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. This may be the most important one to you, but it is not to everyone.
Given the high profile attacks on crypto exchanges over recent years, how much trust do you place in Gemini securing your SSN, proof of ID, and proof of address?
Terrible support, if you cant even get answers to basic questions then why would you want to potentially invest through their platform? I immediately sacked them off after not even being able to get a satisfactory response to ID checks
Not to mention that their website was pretty much constantly down during the recent period of Ethereum volatility. Whenever Ethereum price started to move (which is exactly the moment when people want to sell/buy) they would go tits up. And not just for a minute or two, but hours.
I've had a problem where 2FA would always default to the authy app I once used, but I just wanted the raw QR code to use a simple OTP app.
One week after contacting their support and not getting any response, I got an automated response asking if I am still interested in a follow up and if so, I should reply to this mail.
This continued for 2 months every week. I then decided to start complaining on their subreddit and twitter and coincidentally immediately got a mail helping me with my original problem and finally fixing it.
Now with the hardfork I withdrew all my funds as well and will never go back.
Interesting. I had mined some coins a few years ago, and finally decided to sell them off. I was able to sell them on coinbase within 5 days and get the USD into my bank account the following day.
I have had overwhelmingly crappy support as well: initially verified, but then revoked and impossible to reinstate. identity verification uploads that are never satisfactory, or are "processing" indefinitely. laggy orders that cause price shifts in counterparties favor. messages to help desk that go unanswered.
Also during this spring when BTC was up and down on a day to day basis, their services/app was down a few times. Just when you need the app the most, it fails you.
So I don't trust them and as soon as a viable alternative comes along I'm off Coinbase.
Is there a viable alternative to Coinbase? Their support is absurdly awful. Two months and they sent two auto-replies to a simple ticket that couldn't be answered by the knowledge base. They don't care about your money - so long as it's already in their vault.
Before you declare an exception to Hanlon's Razor, hear my story.
Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on.
Years later I still have that BTC.
I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.
In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.
Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.
The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
Long ago I tried to withdraw my BTC, but after clicking the withdrawal button the browser tab was stuck waiting for the HTTP response. So after a while I opened a second tab and tried to withdraw again. Both withdrawals went through and I ended up with a negative BTC balance on Coinbase. I sent one of the transactions back so that my balance ends up at zero again.
biggest thing you need to do to improve support is stop sending mailings from a no-reply email address. Replying should create a support ticket automatically if the email it came from is associated with an account. Further verification could be required depending on the request.
I saw your 3 month remote support contract position, I'm a lawyer in Miami working on my own tech projects, and would be interested in this type of temporary remote work with Coinbase while I hopefully get ramen profitable.
A lot of the issues I've encountered (which were simple card verification errors due to addresses change) could have been easily solved with better Error messages, FAQs and staff training. Instead tickets go into a black hole, you wait 6 hours and get a boilerplate response.
your team is to dumb to be in charge of other peoples money.. Bought cannabis seeds(in a legal state) with coins I bought at coinbase(sent to another wallet, then purchased..) 3 years later I get an email saying my account has been closed due to purchases I've made... LOL coinbase can go to hell.
I’m not sure how Bitstamp works for people in the US, but as a European I’ve had good experience with it in the past. I used both Bitfinex and Bitstamp before Bitfinex got hacked, and have been using Bitstamp exclusively for the last couple of years without any issues. I use SEPA for EUR withdrawals, which arrive in my bank account the same day.
The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched).
To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
Seconded. I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found.
No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue.
Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
> I've had money locked up in Coinbase, unable to sell or trade out of their platform, until I complete an identity verification. Problem is, their code seems to be buggy and even after correctly entering information, I'm told that no identity could be found.
I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem.
Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
Similar experience, locked out of my account and was asked to reply to the ticket I submitted to keep it open before I even got a response. Of course I can't reply because I don't have access to the account associated with the email.
Gemini. I have been a customer of Coinbase for 4 years and Gemini for 6 months. Gemini's withdrawal to bank accounts are faster (same day). Support is more responsive. That said, both companies are licensed, 100% legit/trustworthy, and I like both honestly, but sightly prefer Gemini overall. Each company is a decent alternative to the other IMHO.
In what regard do you consider coinbase a "good alternative" to anything, let alone gemini?
The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
Gemini's identification process is a bit ridiculous imo. After sending them a copy of my drivers license to prove my identity, they emailed me back asking for copy of my most recent pay stub. Ah, no. That's farther than I'm willing to go.
A quick google search leads me to stories about Gemini calling employers after receiving paystubs...
Speed of Government << speed of business << speed of BitCoin forks
"viable alternative" seems pretty subjective.
CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e.
In the process of switching to Gemini. Coinbase limits are too low. I've been waiting for two months for them to raise my limit to half of what Gemini will give me from the start.
Yeah, a while ago I was trying to send some money to them but I wasn't able to validate my address because I had an apartment number but their form didn't include a space for an apartment number so I got a "non-matching address" error. I even contacted their support but they weren't helpful. I'm probably better off.
Honestly, I don't understand why everyone trashes Coinbase.
I work very closely with numerous crypto exchanges for a living (I write code which interfaces with them). Outside of work, I've personally chosen to open a Coinbase account and trade on GDAX.
Coinbase is, in my opinion, the most reputable exchange out there by far.
I generally agree here, but 1. their buy/sell ACH fees are insane, 2. They're always the first to go down in those high panic button situations that have been happening every other week since may. FWIW, Kraken may require a wire, but my money always gets in the exchange for $5, and site is more reliable... the fees are 80% cheaper.
It's a form of price discrimination. Only ignorant end-consumers pay the crazy broker fees. Anyone slightly sophisticated deposits USD via ACH (nearly free) and then transfers to GDAX and does their trading there (0-0.25%).
As in, UX, UI, Docs, APIs, service design etc. are all top notch. Which would make it probable (but not certain) that the more technical parts are well engineered too.
Coinbase is doing perhaps something similar to what Stripe did for its field of business.
What about the crashes a little over a month ago? BTC and ETH crashed hard for a few weeks in a row and Coinbase was constantly down, stopping anyone from buying or selling.
People trash Coinbase because they deserve it: they are a disgrace. You can wait not for days, but for months without a response to support tickets. No company that is unable to communicate with its customers should be holding money on their behalf.
Coinbase is a horrific company: they give the superficial impression of being a reputable place to hold money, but one can go months at a time without a human response to support queries despite holding a substantial balance with them.
I cannot warn other potential victims of Coinbase strongly enough; hopefully the chaos and incompetence around BCC will alert people more publicly about the dangers of getting entangled with them. Hold your cryptocurrency in your own wallet that you control yourself.
Say what you will about Coinbase, but I really appreciate their willingness to adapt and respond to customer feedback.
I personally didn't want to take on the risk of creating a paper wallet and having to move my small amount of BTC from my Coinbase vault, so this is great news for me.
They should have seen this coming (from the ETC split) and come up with this policy ahead of time, instead of scaring customers into withdrawing or providing any doubt that using Coinbase might mean losing out on significant value.
All they had to say was "BCC support for withdrawals will happen within 30 days if BCC trades above X% of BTC". Or basically anything to the effect of "if BCC is worth anything, we'll give it to you", thus satisfying most people without committing to handling worthless forks.
They didn't adapt.
BCH created a new op code for replay protection, so it's trivial to create a transaction to at least cash out BCH.
It just doesn't take 5 to change a bit in a transaction before signing.
Also they can just copy open source code that does this already well.
Uh okay. I will say what I will. They could have held this position from the beginning if they had any foresight at all. How hard would it have been to say something like: 'We do not plan to support Bitcoincash given the impact on operations, security, and value uncertainty. If you want complete freedom with your Bitcoincash, take out your Bitcoin. Otherwise, we may add support in the future, but the timeline will be based on our determination of risk to our systems and effort required.'
> Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required.
> How hard would it have been to say something like
I would suggest that neither of us have any idea how hard that would be. (Also, they gave a pretty similar announcement, minus the "we might support BCH in the future" bit.)
From my perspective, they are now going to devote a shit ton of engineering effort into supporting BCH withdrawals, which will not provide a source of recurring revenue.
Coinbase could easily avoid, or be unable to, provide BCH balances to their bitcoin holding customers.
There's no telling how Coinbase operates internally. You can't just assume that 1 customer == 1 permanent bitcoin address in Coinbase's backend. Perhaps they shift funds around all the time into new addresses, without keeping references/keys to the old ones. In that case, BCH balances would be lost, with no way to restore them to the 'owner' at the time of the fork.
Luckily (for would-be BCH holders) that seems to not be the case, but I think Coinbase deserves credit for going the extra mile when they could justifiably say that it is not their problem to deal with.
Anyone can create a new altcoin which starts with bitcoin balances at certain point of the history. If every bitcoin exchange has to support every new altcoin that does that, it would be lots of hassle. I don't think legally the exchanges would be required to provide features for the new altcoins, but it is nice from them if they do.
You are correct, but this would be a new level of stupid for a leading cyrptocurrency exchange that actually tries to build a reputation and appearance of quality, safety, compliance and being a "legit" service for financial institutions etc.
Maybe I'm just not getting something in my slow brain, hopefully someone here can explain. How does taking out my BTC out of CoinBase ensure I will receive an equivalent amount of BCH?
I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitled to the same amount of BCH... what if there are more forks in the future, I'll just keep getting more of those offshoot coins as well?
You got a lot of replies, but I don't see one critical point addressed. You said you moved from Coinbase (no internal caps) to an exchange. So we can't tell whether you'll get any BCH. If you don't know the private keys for your funds, then you can't spend those funds. You can only ask whoever has your funds to spend them on your behalf. Coinbase hasn't implemented the infrastructure to spend from anything but the main chain. We don't know whether the exchange you're using has, either.
Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.
> Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control)
Actually, transferring from Coinbase to an exchange was the correct move. If you transferred BTC before the fork to an exchange that quickly implemented BCH trading you would have been credited and been able to trade right away. People (like me) who did the 'correct thing' and withdrew to their own wallets now have to wait days to deposit to a BCH exchange and will likely never see $700 BCH again.
I still don't understand how removing my funds from CB into a wallet VS into an exchange has any issue on wether or not I'll get equivalent BCH. Also, I don't understand how removing my funds from CB (into a wallet, I guess) will guarantee them giving me BCH VS having not done anything and just left the money on CB. It seems the latter would have been easier for them to debit me BCH, no?
I'm so confused.
Edit: if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
Imagine you had USD 200 noted in a public ledger (BTC in address you own private keys). Somebody decides to copy that ledger and names it VSD. Its gets public support and so now you have VSD 200 at same address, accessible with same private key, and this point onwards both USD & VSD are going their seperate ways. Whatever you do to one will NOT effect the other because the ledgers are different now.
There can be as much copies of ledger (offshoot coins, forks) as anybody wishes, important is how it grows from there. Most probably it will just die within few mining blocks and thus will not carry any monetary value. And yes, anytime one forks USD to VSD/WSD/YSD/XSD/ZSD they are essentially copying the ledger from that snapshot, with your address having same balance as its fork-parent.
Even simpler analogy to work from: you have a file which has your list of things you bought and sold. The file is called 'transactions.txt' You make a copy of that file, calling it 'transactions_2.txt' and then start appending what you bought and sold on that. But then, you are also still appending to the old file what you bought and sold.
The Bitcoin/BCH thing is like this, but on a greater scale with potential risks around it (BCH had to ensure there were no replay attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain for example.) For example, Trezor recommends (and has to deliver your Bitcoin to a Bcash-specific address: https://trezor.io/claim-bch/.
> How does taking out my BTC out of CoinBase ensure I will receive an equivalent amount of BCH?
By taking your BTC out of Coinbase and into a wallet you control directly (on your computer or phone) before the fork, you have the corresponding private keys during the fork, which after the fork can be used to transact the same value independently on both the BTC and BCH chains.
> I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH?
What matters is what happened at the precise moment of the fork. If at that moment your BTC was on an exchange, the corresponding BCH is at that same exchange. What happens with it depends on the exchange: some might treat it as non-existent, some might credit it to you in full (but it might or might not be possible to trade and/or take it out of the exchange), some might credit it to you partially based on a confusing formula which gets changed after the fact, and some might even take all the BCH for themselves.
Because BCH used the current state of BTC as the starting point when they forked. Whatever existed in BTC now exists as BCH. And yes you will keep getting more free coins whenever there is a fork in a currency you control.
That's awfully cynical. They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently? How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
If you knew me in person you'd know the cynicism was intentional. I've got quite a bit to start with and double so when it comes to anything involving digital currencies.
> They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently?
> How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
I don't think it's possible to tell after less than a day if it's a viable fork. It's way too early. That's why I'm thinking this is driven more from the perceived cost of lawsuits vs. the development cost of supporting the feature.
My impression from reading their announcements before the fork is that it had always been their intention, if the new coin had any value after the fork, to later allow all users to withdraw their "cloned" balance. The transaction freeze around the fork plays into this: not only it protects them against any instability, but it also is a convenient time to snapshot everyone's balance, and to keep a copy of the private keys for future use. They probably planned the balance and keys snapshot since before the first announcement, but just didn't want to promise anything (remember that for instance the fork originally didn't have strong replay protection, which was added just a few days before the fork).
Since the fork didn't die immediately, they are going ahead with the "allow everyone to transfer their BCH out" plan. Had it died, they probably wouldn't bother.
Readit News
One example springs to mind. I bought some ETH once they initially began supporting it, just before it shot up in value. However, the transaction just seemed to disappear and I lost out. I tried contacting support by they just kept closing my tickets without explanation. Very, very frustrating.
I know a story when someone bought some coins with Visa credit card and they had some issues with Conibase service. Same story with tickets - open only to have it closed down next day with suggestion to look into knowledge base.
Then they proceed to the bank and opened a chargeback dispute based on false advertising (legitimate reason) that Coinbase promised to help and are not.
You see - since crypto-currency is not tangible item (you can call it service, if you will), neither Visa, nor Amex or Mastercard will have issues with your dispute, because there is even no tracking to proof you received your "product". Of course once the funds are returned to your credit card and bank notifies Coinbase about the dispute, Coinbase will take your coins away from you, but that's not the point. You see -- it doesnt matter to Visa if you process $1 billion in monthly transactions - if you have too many chargebacks, they will shut you down. End of the story. You open another account - you go on the MATCH list and owner(s) SSN/IDs are on it for 5 years so bye bye processing credit card transactions.
Coinbase might not care about you (I am sure they do per se, they just cheap and won't hire enough eyeballs to answer customer support), but surely they care about their chargebacks dispute level.
That said I'm currently experiencing a problem where all emails from Coinbase to my email address are being lost and it isn't a spam filter. I emailed them describing the problem and they emailed me back with the boiler plate suggestions about checking your spam folder that can be found on their support website. Which I explicitly said I had already tried in my support request.
If all they are going to do is regurgitate information from there website why do they have support people at all?
If anyone from Coinbase is reading this all email sent from Coinbase to the Purdue Alumni email forwarding service @alumni.purdue.edu is being lost or not sent or something. It may have something to do with the fact that the alumni.purdue.edu server doesn't support TLS. I don't know just a guess but I know something changed in the past couple months and I don't even get marketing emails from Coinbase any more and it is preventing me from logging into my account.
I had a similar issue. I posted a clear support ticket, heard nothing for at least a day or two (probably longer) then got boilerplate about checking the support website. I replied saying I did and that the information on the support page couldn't be used to solve the problem. Nothing from Coinbase for a week, then another bot email saying they'll close the ticket unless I reply (again!) saying my issue was not resolved. This back and forth lasted over a month.
It reflects pretty poorly on them as a company and I really can't recommend using them as a result. The underlying support issue was related to their verification software. If their verification software doesn't work for some reason and their support is isn't focused/careful, then you're out of your account for more than a month.
Don't let centralized authorities keep your private keys.
But for the average person the chances are much higher that they will get hacked or lose their keys than losing their coins on Coinbase.
There are several important differences between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. This may be the most important one to you, but it is not to everyone.
One week after contacting their support and not getting any response, I got an automated response asking if I am still interested in a follow up and if so, I should reply to this mail.
This continued for 2 months every week. I then decided to start complaining on their subreddit and twitter and coincidentally immediately got a mail helping me with my original problem and finally fixing it.
Now with the hardfork I withdrew all my funds as well and will never go back.
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So I don't trust them and as soon as a viable alternative comes along I'm off Coinbase.
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Long ago, Coinbase filled a buy order I placed. Then they filled it again. They credited the BTC twice but debited the USD only once. Like a good citizen of the Earth I filed a ticket letting them know their error. I got the same treatment you did. I even emailed Brian personally and via a private list I know he's on.
Years later I still have that BTC.
I think your "so long as it's already in their vault" dig is too strong. They haven't scaled as well as they should, that's all.
You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing.
Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff...
In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it.
Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account.
The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.
Long ago I tried to withdraw my BTC, but after clicking the withdrawal button the browser tab was stuck waiting for the HTTP response. So after a while I opened a second tab and tried to withdraw again. Both withdrawals went through and I ended up with a negative BTC balance on Coinbase. I sent one of the transactions back so that my balance ends up at zero again.
We are trying to scale our support team as quickly as possible. Wish I had a better answer for you. https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...
If you still need help with your issue, send me an email (in my profile).
if appropriate forward my LinkedIn to the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willbrownesq/
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The only technical issue I’ve heard about with Bitstamp is the following, which I hope got fixed, but I never have orders in the book so it’s not relevant to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r4d6t/bitstamps_s... (synopsis: Bitstamp’s streaming order API revealing information about matched orders before they are matched).
To be fair, though, I’m pretty sure the limit order book was reinvented, from the ground up, for all Bitcoin exchanges established prior to 2012. It takes some time to get this right if you’re starting from scratch (the issue was reported in 2013).
No response from support, and from /r/coinbase and their user forums, seems many (many, many!) users have the same issue.
Not much point in using an exchange if you can't use it to...exchange.
Send me an email (in my profile) and we can have someone manually resolve.
I had a similar situation. It was frustrating. I opened a new support ticket referencing the previous issue and the fact that they had not corrected it despite a fairly lengthy period of time. In response to the second ticket, they immediately (within 4 days) corrected the problem.
Of course, this is only another anecdote. Real stats would be useful. An way to escalate issues that guaranteed actual review and contact by some human being would be even better.
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The issues people have consistently reported with it for as long as I've known about it - bad lock-ins during fluctuations, difficulty resolving support requests and withdrawing - are all borderline showstoppers from where I sit; I don't think I'd ever use let alone recommend coinbase to anyone, no offense to its employees in this thread.
"viable alternative" seems pretty subjective.
CoinBase is a pretty damn big cryptocurrency exchange and it's based in the US and complies with US law. Mt Gox (an exchange that ceased operating a few years ago) was based in Japan and got pwned, causing the first large Bitcoin bubble burst. BTC-e just went down the same day Greek police arrested the alleged MtGox hacker, who reportedly had ties to BTC-e.
Choose your exchange carefully.
I work very closely with numerous crypto exchanges for a living (I write code which interfaces with them). Outside of work, I've personally chosen to open a Coinbase account and trade on GDAX.
Coinbase is, in my opinion, the most reputable exchange out there by far.
It's a form of price discrimination. Only ignorant end-consumers pay the crazy broker fees. Anyone slightly sophisticated deposits USD via ACH (nearly free) and then transfers to GDAX and does their trading there (0-0.25%).
So you don't trade on Coinbase yourself?
Edit: It's almost they have one exchange for ppl who know what they're doing, & one to fleece noobs (3.9% on BTC/USD. I think).
As in, UX, UI, Docs, APIs, service design etc. are all top notch. Which would make it probable (but not certain) that the more technical parts are well engineered too.
Coinbase is doing perhaps something similar to what Stripe did for its field of business.
It was a real problem.
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I cannot warn other potential victims of Coinbase strongly enough; hopefully the chaos and incompetence around BCC will alert people more publicly about the dangers of getting entangled with them. Hold your cryptocurrency in your own wallet that you control yourself.
I personally didn't want to take on the risk of creating a paper wallet and having to move my small amount of BTC from my Coinbase vault, so this is great news for me.
All they had to say was "BCC support for withdrawals will happen within 30 days if BCC trades above X% of BTC". Or basically anything to the effect of "if BCC is worth anything, we'll give it to you", thus satisfying most people without committing to handling worthless forks.
They probably could implement it much sooner, but they are waiting for 2 things (I'm speculating here).
1. Larger hashrate, which decreases likelihood of a 51% attack.
2. SegWit2x November hard fork.
> Customers who wish to access both bitcoin (BTC) and bitcoin cash (BCC) need to withdraw bitcoin stored on Coinbase before 11.59 pm PT July 31, 2017. If you do not wish to access bitcoin cash (BCC) then no action is required.
https://blog.coinbase.com/update-for-customers-with-bitcoin-...
I would suggest that neither of us have any idea how hard that would be. (Also, they gave a pretty similar announcement, minus the "we might support BCH in the future" bit.)
From my perspective, they are now going to devote a shit ton of engineering effort into supporting BCH withdrawals, which will not provide a source of recurring revenue.
There's no telling how Coinbase operates internally. You can't just assume that 1 customer == 1 permanent bitcoin address in Coinbase's backend. Perhaps they shift funds around all the time into new addresses, without keeping references/keys to the old ones. In that case, BCH balances would be lost, with no way to restore them to the 'owner' at the time of the fork.
Luckily (for would-be BCH holders) that seems to not be the case, but I think Coinbase deserves credit for going the extra mile when they could justifiably say that it is not their problem to deal with.
You are correct, but this would be a new level of stupid for a leading cyrptocurrency exchange that actually tries to build a reputation and appearance of quality, safety, compliance and being a "legit" service for financial institutions etc.
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I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH? If so, why? I understand there was a fork, but I don't get why I'm entitled to the same amount of BCH... what if there are more forks in the future, I'll just keep getting more of those offshoot coins as well?
Someone at Coinbase is slapping their forehead right now reading your story because you pretty much jumped out of the frying pan into the fire when you transferred from Coinbase to an exchange (rather than a wallet you control). That's exactly what Coinbase _didn't_ want you to do if you wanted full control over your funds.
Actually, transferring from Coinbase to an exchange was the correct move. If you transferred BTC before the fork to an exchange that quickly implemented BCH trading you would have been credited and been able to trade right away. People (like me) who did the 'correct thing' and withdrew to their own wallets now have to wait days to deposit to a BCH exchange and will likely never see $700 BCH again.
I'm so confused.
Edit: if I know my private keys for my BTC, does that mean they are the exact same for BCH? If so, how would I then "acquire" said BCH?
There can be as much copies of ledger (offshoot coins, forks) as anybody wishes, important is how it grows from there. Most probably it will just die within few mining blocks and thus will not carry any monetary value. And yes, anytime one forks USD to VSD/WSD/YSD/XSD/ZSD they are essentially copying the ledger from that snapshot, with your address having same balance as its fork-parent.
The Bitcoin/BCH thing is like this, but on a greater scale with potential risks around it (BCH had to ensure there were no replay attacks on the Bitcoin blockchain for example.) For example, Trezor recommends (and has to deliver your Bitcoin to a Bcash-specific address: https://trezor.io/claim-bch/.
By taking your BTC out of Coinbase and into a wallet you control directly (on your computer or phone) before the fork, you have the corresponding private keys during the fork, which after the fork can be used to transact the same value independently on both the BTC and BCH chains.
> I bought 200$ worth of BTC in the past from CB, and promptly moved to an Exchange. Does that mean I will get whatever amount of BTC I purchased back then in BCH?
What matters is what happened at the precise moment of the fork. If at that moment your BTC was on an exchange, the corresponding BCH is at that same exchange. What happens with it depends on the exchange: some might treat it as non-existent, some might credit it to you in full (but it might or might not be possible to trade and/or take it out of the exchange), some might credit it to you partially based on a confusing formula which gets changed after the fact, and some might even take all the BCH for themselves.
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If you knew me in person you'd know the cynicism was intentional. I've got quite a bit to start with and double so when it comes to anything involving digital currencies.
> They took a wait and see approach. Would you run your engineering team any differently?
On the contrary, I agreed with it. I said as much the day before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14915884
> How do you tell a viable fork from the (many) others that have failed? If BCH falls to $10 in two weeks, would you still direct your engineers to support it?
I don't think it's possible to tell after less than a day if it's a viable fork. It's way too early. That's why I'm thinking this is driven more from the perceived cost of lawsuits vs. the development cost of supporting the feature.
Since the fork didn't die immediately, they are going ahead with the "allow everyone to transfer their BCH out" plan. Had it died, they probably wouldn't bother.