That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day.

It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?

I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.

No way. Not on fin-co ops.

That's like a car tire store without a pressure guage in shop.

In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.

Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.

Is this a reference to MySQL, pre-InnoDB, not being ACID compliant? InnoDB's been around for a decade and has been the default database engine for years.

Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.

Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations.

Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.

No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.

Does Coinbase have external auditors?

For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.

This is literally an economy of "shut up and take my money," but no one wants to play ball.

If I could post on yc and quickly get a response from my bank, I'd be a happy customer.

1. Let's suppose I employ an old gambit: process a large transaction through CoinBase, receive the coins and say "I never received them." I'm sure they have at least enough controls in place to avoid double-credit fraud.

As a coinbase customer and someone who manages a team and large complex distributed systems, this is an oversight I would not expect from an industry leader and makes me nervous to continue doing transactions with coinbase.

How can we be made comfortable that this won't happen again? $50 isn't the root cause fix and could have cost the OP $15,000 due to the delay. What if those BTC was going to be used to make a purchase? He is left holding the bag, leaving a sour taste.

I've had to deal with micropayment reconciliation for a minor handset mfgr (multiple currencies, payment processors, timezones, products, on and on). Sometimes the credit card processor up and changes the API without notice, and a whole slew of payments have to rerun. This is where fields in the local reconcilation db start to creep in and all sort of weird flags get made. What the heck is flag F? (IOTW, document the heck out of the db schema AND have lots^10 unit tests.)

Complaining about the complexities does not instill faith that you have a solid grasp on your product. Tell me you dont work at coinbase, please.

why, we do - a team who could quickly build a rails app and connect it to third party payment processor.)

There may not be a well-developed specialized regulatory system in place with authority over some bitcoin firms, but in most of the places that bitcoin firms operate there is a legal system in place, and entering into a sale contract, accepting payment, and then failing to deliver the product is the kind of thing that is well within the scope of competence of most of those legal systems.