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Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by sheetjs on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @04:42PM (#6931039)
There was a similar discussion with a very interesting comment regarding their use of mongodb: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382

PG's reply in the thread is very telling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428372

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by seldo on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:18PM (#6931281)
Holy cow, that's amazing.

Q: Does MongoDB support transactions?

A: MongoDB does not provide ACID transactions.

( http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/#does-mongod... )

It is crazy to be doing financial stuff in a DB that doesn't provide transactions. It completely blows my mind that anybody would do this.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by TylerE on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:58PM (#6931517)
Not really. Financial transactions are really almost never implemented with database transactions.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by girvo on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @07:20PM (#6932035)
A lot of people truly don't understand how financial companies do stuff. Hell, Financial companies are ones who are adopting Mongo and the like themselves. We all assume it's one way, when it's actually done another....
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by grogenaut on Thursday December 19, 2013 @12:00AM (#6932987)
They're really only doing that for hipster cred. That way they can easily write articles titled "How I made (really simple/trivial application) with (really fledgling technology)" such as "how I made a twitter client with node.js" or "how I put 2 sprites on the screen with webgl" or "how I managed 2tps with java".

We know all financial companies use databases running on tandem or tuxedo. But that's not cool sounding. How are they supposed to get fun jobs doing nothing with catered lunches? HOW, HOW I ASK!

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by gaadd33 on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @09:44PM (#6932577)
What financial companies are adopting Mongo for accounting/customer transaction storage?

I've heard of somewhere like ADP using it but they are using it as an analytics database, not for actual payroll processing.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by jboggan on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @08:50PM (#6932400)
I'd love for you to expound on this point. I'm curious, what are they doing?
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by remon on Thursday December 19, 2013 @04:31AM (#6933662)
What is crazy is people claiming a bank uses a transactional database for their financial transaction processing or that all parts of that system are "ACID". Both are false. Don't like MongoDB? Fair enough, it isn't great. But the tech banks use is a lot closer to MongoDB's persistence model than it is to your typical RDBMS.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by joezydeco on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:02PM (#6931168)
I've been keeping my mouth shut here about Coinbase after starting that thread 9 months ago.

I feel bad for someone that can't put a finger on his 30K, but I can't feel that bad if he didn't do a little research here first.

Hopefully on the next bubble people will be a little more enlightened.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by sheetjs on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:09PM (#6931205)
As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation.

As PG wrote:

> Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely

Now, it's possible that other complaints on HN were nuked by PG or some other moderator, making it difficult for someone to find it.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by kbenson on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:27PM (#6931335)
As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation

As PG wrote:

> Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely

That's not why he said that. He explains further down thread:

HN is a news site, not a customer support forum for companies funded by YC, and in fact the site guidelines explicitly ask that it not be used that way

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by anonymoushn on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:55PM (#6931493)
This objection is pretty flimsy. HN is very frequently used as a customer support forum for large tech companies not funded by YC. A policy that it is okay to use HN as a customer support forum for Google, Amazon, and Facebook but not for Coinbase does not look very good.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by kordless on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @06:22PM (#6931678)
HN is run by YC. While it may feel like a public forum, it is owned by a private entity. I'm OK with a benevolent dictator taking care of matters here, and trust PG to do the right thing by all of us.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by kudu on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @08:54PM (#6932423)
On HN, there is an expectation of a certain degree of impartiality and free speech. Of course, YC doesn't have to provide it, but that's irrelevant: it's just something that is expected.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by eclw on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @07:46PM (#6932137)
Then you are an awfully silly individual.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by yeukhon on Thursday December 19, 2013 @03:09AM (#6933464)
Why would you trust pg in the first place? I wouldn't trust him.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by jessedhillon on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:38PM (#6931397)
Apparently, referring to a thread which is highly critical of Coinbase, while participating in another critical thread, is proof enough for you that Coinbase criticism is silenced. I hope when I frame it like this, you understand how stupid it is, what you wrote.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by sheetjs on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @08:35PM (#6932331)
What's apparent is the fact that you are incapable of analysis.

If you bothered to read the other thread, you'll see parallels to the current situation:

- transaction delays on the order of 1 week

- Coinbase is blaming technology (last time it was a database migration, this time server upgrades)

- Customer support has been silent (znowi described it as "information vacuum" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985)

- Online account system called into question, users unaware of current positions (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428090)

If this were the first time, you can cut some slack if Coinbase responded appropriately and took steps to prevent this from happening in the future. Based on what played out recently, it's not clear if Coinbase actually learned anything from the previous issues.

And in the future, if you ever do decide to start a company and find yourself in a similar situation, I hope you would be a bit more communicative and proactive than Coinbase was in this case.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by jessedhillon on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @09:29PM (#6932532)
You're changing the subject to something which is not in dispute.

You said that the standard approach on HN is to silence criticism -- a stupefying statement, given that at the time you posted it, this conversation had maybe 100+ comments and had been on the front page for a while. Also, in that same comment, you linked to another voluminous thread criticizing Coinbase. Amazingly, the existence of your comment strongly mitigates against your thesis being true.

I think you must realize this at some level, as you have chosen to employ the age-old tactic of the inescapably wrong: quietly change subjects and hope nobody notices.

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by sheetjs on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @09:38PM (#6932557)
There is zero ambiguity in the PG quote

> Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely

And this was 9 months ago. We are left to assume that the policy was enforced (after all, if the post were killed, it wouldn't show up in a search).

And even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931168

> I've been keeping my mouth shut here about Coinbase after starting that thread 9 months ago.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear others echo the same sentiment (concern about expressing grievances about Coinbase) especially after PG's responses in the original conversation.

Others in the original thread refuted the argument you are presenting, so I recommend you start https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428757 before rehashing arguments that have already been addressed

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by jessedhillon on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @11:41PM (#6932921)
Sign #1 that should have given you pause: in order to disprove your assertion a person would need to prove a negative, i.e., prove that no criticism was nullified. If you don't see what the problem is here, you may need a course in critical thinking.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by sheetjs on Thursday December 19, 2013 @12:47PM (#6936270)
(pointing to the statement that HN is not a support forum) + (commenting that PG should have killed the thread) = (PG is likely to kill all threads that may seem like support requests)

Given that many defenders of coinbase, including PG, are seeing support requests as criticisms, (threads that criticize coinbase = threads that seem like support requests) in their heads.

Therefore, (pointing to the statement that HN is not a support forum) + (commenting that PG should have killed the thread) = (PG is likely to kill all threads that may seem like support requests) = (PG is likely to kill all threads that criticize coinbase)

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by makomk on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @06:27PM (#6931704)
If you're to believe the press they've received, Coinbase are basically the most reputable and trustworthy company in Bitcoin and the one that's going to bring it into the mainstream.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by gigq on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @10:16PM (#6932657)
If you've dealt with any of the bitcoin exchanges you'd realize Coinbase is the most reputable and trustworthy. It's either deal with them, trust Magic the Gathering Online Xchange or the Russian mobsters over at btc-e.com. Seriously this is a sector that is in desperate need of more legitimate players but so for this is the best we have.
Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by Asparagirl on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @09:07PM (#6932468)
Scariest comment of the thread, surely.