Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins

Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by midas007 on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:10PM (#6931218)

0. This is exactly why auditing (internal and external) and settlement processes exist elsewhere. But it's impossible to have a startup deploy every single control at the very beginning. There are costs (time & money) to get things done, those control don't just magically appear. Eventually, with scale, the growing pains of business process debt (like technical debt) will come due. That's a good thing, because building every single control into an experimental venture that might not survive could be a very big waste. Just like a successful venture is a series of experiments, the business side gets built incrementally. As a company gets bigger (whether $ or buzz), it's susceptibility to being targeted increases because the bulleye on its back gets larger.

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.

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Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by alttab on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @05:23PM (#6931308)

Giving coins for USD is their primary use case. Monitoring transactions should be the only control they have in place if they must cut corners.

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.

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Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by midas007 on Thursday December 19, 2013 @05:21AM (#6933802)

Coinbase is ultimately a double-ended marketplace. But to add more complexity to the fire, one's own systems count as yet another source of truth. So what the sellers say, what buyers say and what we say have to reconciled. It's these reconciliation processes that are the hard part...

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.)

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Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by alttab on Thursday December 19, 2013 @11:56AM (#6935846)

A customer of bitcoin shouldnt have to care if the service you provide is hard. In fact, thats why they come to you in the first place.

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.

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Re:Sent $35,104.11 USD to CoinBase. Never received Bitcoins by glcbitcoin on Wednesday December 18, 2013 @09:10PM (#6932481)

Agreed. The biggest growth area in banking and finance is compliance & legal. A startup doesn't have the financial resources to make a bulletproof compliance and customer service department.

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