We're trying very hard to scale our support team. We've gone from 1 to 12 support in a matter of months, and we are hiring more support staff, and it is still difficult to keep up. We are responding, but it is almost impossible to grow fast enough. That said, 10 days sounds way too long. If you send your coinbase email address to me at craig(at)coinbase, I'll get your ticket prioritized.

Is there really no faster way for coinbase to receive a payment? This doesn't seem practical, or rather it seems a bit too practical for a company that wanted to set up a one-way "pump" to profit by alternatively: immediately completing, or stretching out, transactions based on which action pulls value directly out of the customer's pocket.

That being said, I personally think coinbase should burn some of that VC fuel to bring that 4 days down. They will lose money to do it but they'll gain customers like you who aren't used to a 4 day settlement period.

EDIT: actually it would be nice if you responded to some of the many seemingly-reasonable customer complaints on this page.

It seems e.g. PayPal, Amazon, Coinstar, and Bitstamp have negotiated this particular obstacle somehow.

Also, I can't find any way to open support tickets any more. FYI.

I really wanted to like you guys, and I field a lot of questions about how to buy these days.

However, their customer service could definitely be improved. It's been over 9 days since I sent a request with no response and my transactions keep getting denied.

Also, they're doing something called instant pay, which could help normalize expectations of what happens when you buy BTC. I wonder how that works with credit card charge back problems?

pretty crappy for the 2nd most interesting startup of 2013 according to time magazine.