Coinbase reliability is so bad recently they would do better-telling people when they are fully functional because of thats the abnormal state.

As a Coinbase user, I'd love to get away from Coinbase but I can't get them to even acknowledge the $5,000 I wired them 15 days ago. Two emails into CS and still no response from them other than an automated email stating they are really behind. If I can ever get my money back, I'll never use them again.

Gemini seems to work well and be much more reliable, albeit much smaller and not as functional as GDAX.

UPDATE: Coinbase email about my missing wire, the first response in the 15 days since my wire:

"This is an automated email. As we experience rapid growth, we are also experiencing a high volume of support requests and we regret not being able to answer your inquiry in a reasonable amount of time."

gemini requires you to give them your bank's username and password. It's not like you are authenticating with your bank directly. It's actually quite deceptive. It'll show you something similar to your bank's login screen, but you are still on gemini's website. You are literally giving gemini your password. I'm not sure why people don't object to that. They have a roundabout wire transfer way for the initial authentication, for which they claim that they credit the wire fees. I did the roundabout wire thing, and still waiting for the credit. Support has been lackluster. gemini also forces you to use authy, as opposed to standard totp. Overall, gdax(coinbase) for me is much better than gemini.

That's not what's happening at all. They are using a service called Plaid for bank authentication. It's used a lot of places. And you are doing ACH transfers; not bank wires.

https://plaid.com/

What they do at the end is moot. Their domain, or a third party domain, asks you to enter bank credentials. The red flag is that you are not entering your credentials in your bank's website. Most other places ask you for your account and routing number, and do ACH micro deposits, after which you confirm the deposited amount. Gemini doesn't do that. The only way to avoid that on Gemini is go the wire route, which will incur a $20-$30 charge from your bank.

it's a third party service that provides your routing numbers to gemini. they aren't storing your bank password anywhere.

Why should you need to trust a third party (payment company) of a third party (Gemini) with the plaintext password to my bank account ? Even if you trust them to not store the password long term, in the interim you are giving them access to your entire financial history. That's a pretty big privacy issue in itself.

Holy shit, it's not a plaintext password. sigh read about plaid. I linked to it.

web authentication is really not my area, but would you care to explain how this is safe ? For instance, I recognize when an app or a site is trying to use google to authenticate me, I am taken to google to authenticate. I'm not taken to the bank in this case. From https://blog.plaid.com/getting-started/, it looks like a curl request with plaintext password request made to plaid's servers.

Also from https://plaid.com/legal/longtail/, "You acknowledge that in accessing your data and information through the Service, your provider account access number(s), password(s), security question(s) and answer(s), account number(s), login information, and any other security or access information, and the actual data in your account(s) with such provider(s) such as bank and other account balances, credit card charges, debits and deposits (collectively, "Provider Account Data"), may be collected and stored in the Service."

Try https://cryptowat.ch/gemini/btcusd for Gemini charts, which seems to be their biggest missing function.

There's nothing wrong with participating in the crypto currency world. For all you know $5000 is chump change to him. Of course the risks are high, but people are also making quite significant returns as well.

Assuming he's trying to get into Ethereum, it doesn't quite fit the definition of a "scam". The tech is very interesting and who knows how far it will go.

There was nothing wrong with investing in tulip bulbs in 1637 either. But investors shouldn't expect any sympathy when they get burned.

This is less about the investment and more about the broker. If bitcoin takes a dive or the blockchain forks and users lose their investment, that's investing in a crash. When the broker absconds with the money, that's breaking the law. Users should have every reason to be confident Coinbase is reliable.

There's a difference between buying tulip bulbs and having the price collapse and buying bitcoin and never even receiving the bitcoin.

What properties of ideal money do tulip bulbs have?

Last week I received an automated email from them saying my 2-factor settings had changed and that if I didn't initiate it, please contact them.

I contacted them and they sent this: "You received an SMS and email notification indicating that your 2FA settings were changed. Please note that this message was sent in error and your 2FA settings have not been changed."

Wow.

Same thing happened to me. I tried to log in, but the number on my account had been changed. Support has simply said to create a new account... But what about my holdings and bank account connection?

seriously coinbase?

Ouch, that would give me a heart attack considering the recent buzz about hijacked SMS being an attack vector:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/12/21/hackers-ar...

Note that Coinbase sent an email out some weeks ago telling customers to switch to Google/Microsoft Authenticator instead of relying on Authy and SMS: https://blog.coinbase.com/how-to-increase-your-coinbase-acco...

EU Debit / Credit Card withdrawals are down, but SEPA transfers are still up, as is the API, so you can pull your money and Bitcoins out of Coinbase. Do so now; if Coinbase is OK, you can put it back; if not, you've got it.

The history of Bitcoin exchanges is that when they get into trouble, things get worse, not better. Get out while you can.

The Mt. Gox liquidation is still proceeding, slowly.[1]

[1] https://www.mtgox.com/

Hate to pile on with the same comment that appears in every "github.com is down" post on HN, but BTC/ETH/LTC are decentralized networks.

Why would anyone carry balances in wallets outside their immediate, local control?

because its convenient, and most people who are exposed to cryptocurrencies dont have the technical knowledge to do it on their own.

im in the official ethereum gitter and every day at least one person comes in saying something along the lines of "hello i have just poured half my life savings into this, my money is gone but my eth is not in my wallet please help" - only for some semi-official support guy to tell them that if they screw up, their money is gone.

then there are the people who make transactions in the tens of eth (thousands of dollars) to the wrong address, then begging on etherscan for the owner of that address to send their eth back.

crypto is in such an infantile state that even most "software engineers" shouldnt get anywhere near it on their own.

If wallet security didn't require levels of opsec that no regular human can manage or understand, you might have a point.

But you can't blame a layman for preferring to trust an ostensibly secure service in lieu of screwing up security themselves, given how many stories are out there of people getting compromised and their Bitcoin stolen.

> Why would anyone carry balances in wallets outside their immediate, local control?

To be able to exchange it to a non-crypto currency.

That. And do it fast, and cheap. Sure, you can keep it in your own wallet, but then you have to wait half an hour and pay > 5$ extra for every round-trip into fiat.

Call me paranoid, but the largest entry point into the Bitcoin network going down like this at such a volatile time sounds like an excellent way to drop the price a bit while the general public can't get in to buy. Turn the site back on, wait a few hours, and sell into the resulting rally.

This has happened a few times already, just happened on Kraken a bit ago.

My bittrex wallet is also unable to receive funds:

'Wallet offline - Waiting for ETH network to stabalize'

Uh....

This also happened during the BAT ICO; its a similar network attack on Bancor ICO now.

The Coinbase stability problem is basically just functioning as an accidental circuit breaker that triggers whenever there is too much volatility.

Right now though most alts are so mispriced that I expect it will be basically the same situation all week as each one slowly drains into ETH until it hits a semi-rational market cap.

I think Charlie Lee picked a good day to quit as director of engineering:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/charlie-lee-ends-his-coinbas...

Did he quit or did they come to a "mutual understanding?"

And I suppose he picked a good time seeing as he finally got LTC into Coinbase right before the segwit pump.

and probably related to the 10% drop in price of the bitcoin: https://cryptowat.ch/bitfinex/btcusd

They also stole 50$ of my money when I tried to make a deposit. They just returned the amount -50$ without explanation. Not gonna use coinbase anytime soon.

This is similar to what happened to me. I've attempted to contact their "support" via email but nobody's replied in over a month.

This is getting ridiculous. Anyone have any insight as to why they are so badly managed?

Coinbase isn't a trading exchange, so it's not designed to be one. But people try to use it as one because they don't realize the difference.

Okay, but what about gdax? Their name is literally global digital assets exchange. There's absolutely no excuse for this kind of nonsense.

Exactly, http://bitstamp.net is design more in that way

I really want to get a hardware wallet because of these situations, but I'm afraid of two things:

(1) I want to be able to get my currencies into USD FAST if needed. (given that Coinbase is down, a hardware wallet in this case would probably be a lot faster FWIW)

(2) I'm not entirely sure I trust myself to not lose the ledger and paper phrase more than I trust Coinbase or other online wallet.

Somebody convince me otherwise?

Why not just have an encrypted wallet file that you backup remotely? I wouldn't trust myself to not lose the hardware, or the hardware to continue functioning indefinitely. Just use a strong passphrase that you can memorize.

>Given that Coinbase is down, a hardware wallet in this case would probably be a lot faster...

Other exchanges will be faster in any such case. Coinbase is almost always unstable or down during price crashes.

Why do you want to convert to USD fast? If you're concerned about such short time movements in price it's probably not an asset you want to have a lot of money in...

My coinbase account was hacked, phone number changed (2FA). It has my bank account hooked to it... Their resolution so far was to simply create a new account...

I've had a support ticket open with them for over 30 days and not a single human response. There were two automated messages stating that they were backlogged, but at this point it's beyond ridiculous. I've gone to their forums and have tweeted at them, but support is completely non-existent. It surprised me how big of a player they are considering this and similar issues listed here in the comment thread.

Just looking at BTC/LTC/ETH on Coinbase it seems like all have experienced a significant drop in price. This often seems to coincide with terrible Coinbase performance. Does downtime cause the drop in price/drop in price spike traffic and cause downtime/or are they unrelated?

When there's a significant drop in price, usually there's a rush of people trying to sell off BTC/ETH and another rush of people trying to buy BTC/ETH. Coinbase has been having issues with uptime with the recent surge in interest for cryptocurrencies.

This is really frustrating. At least GDAX is still up. Any thoughts on GDAX vs. Gemini vs. Poloniex vs Kraken?

GDAX, Gemini, and Kraken all require identification. I'm trying to go through Gemini and Kraken, though, because they have passport as an option instead of a State ID (which I don't have). With Poloniex, I don't think you can go from fiat-to-crypto and their customer service is probably the worse out of all four; in my case, I currently have $200 in SC locked up and am waiting for them to rebroadcast the transaction.

Kraken is also very slow today. Large price drops and volumes on ETH and BTC and all other cryptocurrencies.

Kraken and Gemini inexplicably don't support users from WA state, which is incredibly frustrating.

I live in washington and use itbit.com

gemini just told me they support wa state on my new acct.

Starting to think that this is all intentional. Or the worst service ever. I'll never ever use coinbase.

I've made $12k (4x return) from my ETH investment through Coinbase. Overall the site has worked well, granted I don't trade as frenetically as most crypto speculators.

I've had a support ticket open with Coinbase for weeks with no update. It led me to open an account with Gemini.

App is back up and working for me now (for anyone concerned and wanting to buy or sell). site still down.

In case anyone from coinbase is watching:

"Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have receive a..."

The & symbol seems a tad bit awkward

s/receive/received/

Might wanna say "some customers" or "many customers" or w/e, instead of just "customers"

I'm sure the maintenance page phrasing is their top priority.

Who is surprised?

how can they handle traffic for gdax and fail miserably dealing with some static pages like the front page?

lol, i'm sure that being on the front page of hacker news helps them be less overwhelmed with traffic

Seems like it happens every other week?

Not only are they usually down when abnormally high traffic hits; they are down for a good number of hours as can be seen by the age of this post.

I will never do business on coinbase again.

Over the past few years, they are always down at the most inopportune time. I wouldn't trust them at this point.

No, I don't have alternatives, no I don't want to divulge details, just putting the warning out there. Yes you're free to do as you please.

Coinbase is the most incompetent service ever. I will try to hack them.