Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees."

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.

Slightly off topic but I think transaction fees should be as close to zero. No, I am not talking about lightning. If we need to start fresh and design a new system that allows it, I am all for ditching Bitcoin altogether as well. It will have served a purpose in that we have learned a lot.

To me, low transaction fees is more important than even anonymity or decentralization. My understanding of the problem is that we need to somehow encourage everyone to run a full node. We've decided a transaction fee that goes to "miners" is a good way to do that.

Well, my problem is that now miners want higher transaction fees. We have inherently opposite goals and as such I cannot be allied with miners at all.

Then make something else. Bitcoin is not designed to be a low/zero transaction fee system. It makes clear architectural choices in support of decentralization at the expense of scalability. Don't destroy bitcoin because you wanted something else.

Here's another story:

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.

Oh dear... this sounds like another Mt. Gox waiting to happen. In what world will this not be exploited sooner or later?

I'm (pretty) sure this is a result of them using MongoDB. A friend of mine also accomplished a double sell (BTC -> USD, -1x credit on the BTC but +2x on the USD), he ended up keeping it and never hearing from Coinbase.