Was the delivery date of the BTC ever set? They guaranteed a price and delivered on it (yes, they took a while, yes the value went down in the meantime). If the price went up, everyone would certainly expect them to deliver at the guaranteed price and not the current one.

What they probably should have done is just reversed the transaction entirely, but if I was deciding this, barring some agreement on delivery time, Coinbase would be mostly blameless.

The protocol should have been to reverse the USD charge(not to the bank but the OPs coinbase account), and let the OP decide if they want to buy BTC now, wait or withdraw the funds in its entirety.

The reason for this is, they failed to deliver, that is not under debate. But they are assuming that someone who was long on BTC as a speculator, is still long on BTC.

In the latest edit Brian from coinbase mentioned that they are now honoring today's rate, which is a step in the right direction, and has subsequently save the OP substantial losses, but this does not absolve them of the original screw-up.

I doubt the OP will complain. If I were in his shoes I would personally request a complete reversal even if I wanted to buy at today's prices, and manually make a new request.

Any seasoned/experienced business would do this.

Example: If amazon fails to deliver/the shipped item is lost in transit, they reverse the credit card transaction and request you to re-order if you still want to purchase.

What should happen is that people should notice that they do not have a reliable process for either delivering the coins or canceling the transaction (if the coins cannot be delivered within some reasonable period of time).

This sort of settlement process is a scary thing to throw very much money at.

Oh, absolutely this should give people pause at spending $35k at coinbase (or on bitcoins period). Or, rather, maybe people should stop massive speculation on bitcoins on a platform that takes at least a few days (best case) to clear.

Yeah, only if he can make the case that he would have sold or used the bitcoins prior to the new valuation, and only if you don't treat it as a currency.

But the point is that he provide 40 BTC worth of USD when he made the order, of $35K.

So he should get $35K worth of BTC at todays price (~60 or so BTC)

He should just get a refund in USD for the original amount. This would be classified as a failed trade in any other market.

These weren't the BTC he was looking for...

He only suffers a loss if he sells. I'm bearish, but it's too soon to say that it's never going back up to 800.

... which he could have minimized if he had access to the coin when promised.

Don't be silly.

He suffered a $12k loss because of price fluctuations most likely tied to People's Bank of China news, not because of Coinbase's error. There are no grounds for a lawsuit here.

What are you talking about? He could have sold them on December 13 if he had gotten them at that time.