*In addition intermittent outages which prevented me from accessing their site, I sent some Satoshi from my local wallet to coinbase (10 days ago at time of writing) in order to unload some; transaction was marked "pending"; they've since sold the coins; customer support has stopped responding to my emails.

Eventuslly I was up 5000 I decided to sell 10k so I could let the rest freeride. When I went to sell coinbase told me they couldn't validate my identity and wouldn't let me sell.

Which is ridiculous. They had no problem taking 10k from me, but not the other way around?

At the very least they should have put some info somewhere telling me that before I bought any.

Nothing I did worked. It just kept telling me it couldn't validate and to try again in 24hr. I contacted support and eventually got a boiler plate email.

Eventually I opened a new account on another exchange, sent my eth there and sold it for btc which I sold for usd on localbtc.

Ended up a 2000 dollar loss because this whole process took like a week or so during which eth kept dropping.

My advice to anyone using cb would be to have a local wallet and working accounts on multiple exchanges. If I had done that I would have been okay.

However I still think that if my identity was no sufficiently validated to sell, they should have told me before I went to sell.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985

4 years ago they had a problem with customer service and the situation does not appear to have improved:

> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.

I wonder if that applies to Google too, the most famous company for which you need to get on the HN frontpage to actually reach someone there.

99% get an automatic Green flag. Only ~1% are manually reviewed.

    if (Math.random() > 0.2) { // rate of false accounts at last review was ~20% 
      return false;
    } else { 
      return true;
    }

    return Math.random() <= 0.2

Not my experience - no luck getting ID verified yet.

Fortune favored me this time around, but I don't know if I can trust coinbase again. If the price had dipped, I'd be out a bunch of money. (Just to be clear: they received the coins days ago, just didn't credit them to my wallet.) I wish there was an option to sell BTC directly from your local wallet, which would set a strike price and ensure that users don't get screwed if/when this sort of thing happens. (Note: This option may exist and I'm just not aware of it. I tried to log into coinbase just now to verify that ... but the site is down again.)

One of them being a lost deposit. The address generated by the site was wrong and thus the deposit never credited. It took a couple months for support to get on this and refund the lost amount. This happened a couple years ago. So had it happened now I'm not sure if technical support will ever get back.

I also failed to contact their technical support about other issues (can't really remember) but there was no way to reach them. They don't have proper support, they just have monkeys that tries to save face on social media. Only.

The best exchange so far from a technical perspective is Bitfinex. It is surprising because it is quite shady. But it is a rock solid exchange; and it is magnificently engineered. No wonder it is the top exchange out there. And Finex has handled the recent surge much better than Gdax or any other exchange out there.

Wow. Wonder why that might be

Coinbase service is spotty but at least it has its security going for it, for now.

The Bitfinex fiascos, of which there is a chain of suspicious events, could be circumstantial or truly something to be concerned about.

1. My bank account has a 5000$ limit and my credit card has a 750$ limit. After spending 1000$ from the bank (which takes a week), I wanted a quick 50$ from my CC, but it said I was already past the 750$ limit.

2. When trying to recover an older account, the recovery keeps asking for my phone number but isn't sending me texts properly. If you say you lost your phone, you can submit id+selfie, but to get to that step, you need your phone??

3. If you reset Authy, it removes your Coinbase token, and tells you to contact their support. They're very slow as responding, and after a week, I was just told to use my phone number (which again, goes back to #2)...

Two I remember: The id+selfie didn't work in firefox. and they had a page that would calculate the max wrong in firefox. Sent an email about both. I don't think they responded to the first one; and on the second, they redesigned their site a bit to delete the page.. then sent me an email asking if I still had that problem (about 1-2 weeks later).

I don't think they test very thoroughly... and they definitely don't use firefox.

I did this a week ago. They ask you for your current (= old) phone number and your new phone number, but you don't actually need access to your old phone number. You just need to enter it.

Also, that was gold so who is to say that couldn't happen to gold today if it can happen to cryptocurrencies, any hoarding would be a target in another depression that bad much like things like offshoring might be or are in some case.

Why it won't happen today you can base off the reaction during the Great Recession, we bailed out failing banks with TARP that got us into this mess by over-extending leverage instead of consumers. The FDR order helped the economy and all people at the time over the wealthy.

FDR, if he was in charge during the Great Recession, probably would have made new banks and let them fail if that happened under him, a people's president. The SEC was also created during his admin which is arguably the best thing to ever happen to investing in the US, solid markets since Securities Act of 1933 and SEC inception, cryptocurrency will eventually be more closely regulated as it grows.

Starting at what?

What is the value proposition that is actually in play here, for which there is some hard evidence of it's existence, other than a speculative frenzy?

It's a bit galling how many people this go 'round are just outright saying "yeah, it's a ponzi, come on guys hop on! there's a high ceiling! hope you get your chair when the music stops!"

But here's the problem with this idea as being some buoy for bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, once an economy of this sort develops with some semblance of structure, that market is going to seek out inefficiencies. First on the chopping block? A massively inefficient distributed currency system.

For this reason I think any sustainable use case of a bitcoin like system is necessarily rather niche, and rather 'seedy' or worse, ransomware, etc. But if all the bitcoin dreamers fade away, it becomes much easier to counteract the use of btc-like systems for ransomware extortions and the like.

Debt-fueled inflation resistant money. It is right in the statement in the genesis block detailing a bank bailout.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

Who is transacting monetarily in bitcoin? Why do they find it superior to other options? Is this a growing cohort?

There's a plausible justification to invest in bitcoin now if you believe that in future it'll have a large total capitalization because be used as valuable information of e.g. uncensorable pseudonymous transactions, and you'll be able to sell your bitcoins with profit to those people who'll want to use them for transacting.

However, it's not reasonable to state that the valuation is justified by it being used solely as a savings/investment vehicle; because what is the future exit for that investment? When a number savers in aggregate decide to withdraw their savings from the ecosystem at some point (which is inevitable, the global economy has cycles and at some point people will want that), to whom do they sell bitcoin? If there's a different use (as the one described above), then that's an exit that will set the total value of bitcoin at such an event; but if the only use case is "decentralized savings" then it's comparable to the "greater fool" motivation, you can sell/withdraw while there's someone else who wants to enter the product, but when the aggregate motion switches from saving to withdrawing, the value suddenly drops to zero - exactly the behavior that should be impossible in a good savings (as opposed to speculation) vehicle.

Don't forget that it's now possible to broadcast bitcoin transactions via satellite - without internet...

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 get almost all benefit of that value, not bitcoin. Offering payment services to consumers and businesses is a huge value proposition; offering settlement services to institutions or technological payment networks is a lot of value as well but there's less market lock-in and network effect so that's going to be much more commoditized and more vulnerable to competition with established channels.

A consumer is only going to use a few payment methods for convenience reasons; a sophisticated institution (no matter if it's a bank or simply a large corporation selling stuff) or a realistic payment network is easily going to use all possible ways to settle their debts with institution B and is going to route every transaction among the cheapest route possible for that deal. Currently bitcoin is order of magnitude too expensive compared to other real time gross settlement systems (e.g. Target2 starts with ~dollar per transaction and becomes cheaper with more volume), so only transactions that require censorship resistance would be settled through bitcoin and all others would not. Even if we're not talking about institutions but a purely technological solution, using bitcoin as the settlement layer is something that can and will be switched to a different layer if that's more attractive.

2) The properties of bitcoin (irrevocability, pseudonymity, censorship resistance) are benefits to many consumer use-cases and markets, but not particularly relevant to large-volume settlement systems. Anyone who has thousands or millions of payments to aggregate and route through a gross settlement system would generally prefer revocability (partners of payment networks explicitly designed revocability in the protocols they designed, because they wanted this feature); they don't care about pseudonymity because they're large enough that they can't hide, and they don't care about technological censorship resistance because they anyway can't advertise/sell their services if they violate that censorship - they're too large to hide, and they'd be visited by angry men with guns if they tried that. Settlement layer has an entirely different target audience than consumer payments, and that audience has entirely different needs - ones that Bitcoin doesn't fulfill particularly well.

I.e. bitcoin can be used to, for example, smuggle capital out of China avoiding capital controls, and there's value in that use-case; but if it's used as a settlement layer for a service or process smuggling capital out of China, then that wouldn't drive up/maintain the price of Bitcoin nearly as much, and having a censorship-resistant settlement layer doesn't enable you to offer censorship-resistant payments unless all your other money flow is also censorship-resistant.

This was addressing the parent poster's proposal of a single, quite particular (and IMHO not in popular opinion) use-case of it purely as the settlement layer for other payment network(s); but there seems to be no consensus about the main use case, at the very least I see camps of 'value store', 'decentralized payments for the masses' and 'payments that can't be restricted' which already each have some conflicting requirements.

Decentralized censorship and inflation resistant savings account.

stock index futures are 23 hours: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html#equityIndex

stock volume is larger than futures (347B global avg daily volume vs 280 in jan 2016, not sure about now), but futures larger than ETFs (280 vs 88)

youll have to convince me that institutional investors dont drive futures volume, cant find data offhand but wont give you benefit of the doubt on that one :)

Something might be open that will change your money but there is no real liquidity on the weekend.

edit: do tell us hacker news instead of the downvotes...

1) They take account verification seriously and leverage best practices around 2-factor auth etc even going so far as suggesting you NOT use simplified solutions like authy.

2) Your "hot wallet" balance is insured from internal breach / external hacking / etc. Good to note it's not insured from somebody stealing your account credentials from you directly.

3) They store 98% of their total crypto balance offline with a physical system designed to minimize losses or attack vectors.

EG their insurance - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...

So seriously they blocked my entirely legitimate account from buying and refused to provide any explanation or recourse.

The fear you have is real, but it is slowly getting better and with that more will enter. Just like investing in early companies, it is riskier now, but as it becomes safer, those risk takers are rewarded.

Funds were lost in mtgox, btc-e, many others and there is fraud abound (pre-SEC times or early), but coinbase and the coins they offer are currently safer than it was. As more players enter it will be safer still.

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 too great.

Threat models and risk balancing are important.

Per your other argument: a whole host of executive orders spanning 2 years, nearly 100 years ago, designed to work around the federal reserve ratio, doesn't hold much water.

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

Obviously, this makes no sense to a cryto enthusiast, because they care more about the stuff you talked about.

But the "average" zero knowledge person who freaks out about how Bitcoin is "unsafe" is usually talking about private key theft, or getting scammed by someone. These "unsafe" things aren't a problem on coinbase.

https://www.moodys.com/sites/products/DefaultResearch/200710...

Of course, when you start defining "safe" in a probabilistic way, you end up very quickly estimating the degree of safety instead of binary safe/not safe.

Nice subtle joke(?) with that link to a Moody's March 2008 report on rating bonds given that rating agencies were probably the closest single thing you could point to as the fraud that caused the mortgage bubble and 2008 collapse. Yes, sometimes a feeling can be closer to the truth than a lot of complicated math done with wrong assumptions.

I agree that general public is utterly incapable of understanding basic concepts of probability. (See: Clinto had probability 52% of winning. Trump won -> Forecast was wrong. How stupid is that?) I just commented when you told you have not seen safe even defined in a probabilistic way.

> Yes, sometimes a feeling can be closer to the truth than a lot of complicated math done with wrong assumptions.

To me that is like a stopped clock is correct twice a day compared to a working clock that is just having wrong time all the time.

At least with the complicated math you are forced to spell out the assumptions and there is a chance you are able to recognize them before it is too late.

I come from a construction background (big stuff) and it hadn't occurred to me that people would not get my connotative understanding of 'safety'. For me, safety is about risk minimization. If you haven't considered actual risk when you investigate doing something that could hurt you, it isn't 'safe'.

So thanks for helping me recognize that.

In terms of "always on", the futures market is always on. You can trade softs, metals, currencies, bonds - you name it. The leverage available is 200:1, 50 times greater than the SEC's limit on security margins(eg the stock market). This means you can make(and lose) catastrophically larger amounts than you began with. Controlling your risk is no longer done by a broker limiting your leverage, it's done by you and involves methodical discipline.

The downside: you are trading against pros with deeper pockets and more experience than you could possibly imagine. You won't be out smarting, out trading, or getting "an edge" on anyone except the other retail players.

4 Years Ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705

I wonder if equity markets will one day move to always on, I hope they do.

With more investment options such as crypto currencies, I wonder if they will eventually do it to stay competitive to investment cash.

Nothing worse than pre-market and after hours shenanigans in equity markets, can't pull that in an always on market.

Source: https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312z.htm