Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.
Edit: For transparency here is my back and forth with their support (http://imgur.com/CHeAEPP) and the link to one of our books on Amazon I shared (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1634420241/ [NSFW]). Ironically I've been waiting on a reply from them for 22 days and counting. They have about $5,000 in our disabled account along with all our customer/order information that we can't access.
Do not use Coinbase.
I'm an artist who wants to use bitcoins for nearly an identical reason. However, there have been two big limiting factors, which have prevented my supporters and artist peers from using bitcoin.
1) It isn't clear how they get money into and out of the system. - The artists don't want a bunch of 'bitcoins' that they don't know what to do with - The supporters don't own any bitcoins, and don't know where to get them. 2) They are afraid that bitcoin will crash and they will lose all their money.
It's easy enough to dissuade the fears about the second point by 'cashing out' right away. But what are the best options out there to allow the average user to put their money into bitcoin, and to allow not-so-technical users to get money out of bitcoin and into their bank? Coinbase is the only service I've found to 'easily' do this, so far. Even at the cost of my anonymity. :(
You could also make an agreement with somebody on your localbitcoins.com city listing, but then you run into fees and possibly fluctuations since they won't be a 24/7 service like bitpay or coinbase. Localbitcoins may have an API to automatically make a sell listing I'm not sure, I use IRC still to trade.
The entire ordeal was really frustrating and I would strongly recommend against their service also.
To offer this service, we (Coinbase) work with those bank rules and that is why you are seeing our service act much like the traditional financial world. You might not like this, but we didn't make those rules, and it is the only way I know of that works if you want to exchange bitcoin in the traditional financial world. (John's answer from the support thread you linked also explains this).
Accepting purely bitcoin-to-bitcoin payments would be one solution that might work for this if that is what you want (there are plenty of other solutions other than Coinbase for this). I should mention that we are probably at fault for marketing it more as a bitcoin wallet vs an exchange which has different implications to people (I think this is part of the reason for the confusion).
Finally, I believe you may be mistaken that you can't access the $5k in funds. Are you sure? This page describes our policy on that topic: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/190568...
Perhaps you are not legally obliged to give a reason, but it would definitely make you look a lot better then simply saying "uhuh, not here buddy".
I think you can't have it both ways, ignoring support questions and not having to deal with backlash like this.
For example, Stripe also prohibits adult content which is largely (I would guess) a result of input from Wells Fargo https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses
It's still unclear to me why, if you have multiple banking partners, you don't have even one that would support an adult business. There is a lot of adult video and website business - they must have banks.
Furthermore, it's really the lack of transparency that rubs people the wrong way. When your customers are told that their accounts are frozen or closed all of a sudden and with almost no explanation, they are left flailing to try to understand what the heck is going on. It's like being kicked out of a restaurant half way through dinner and when you ask why, they just say "sorry, we can't continue to serve you..." I consider that method of dealing with your honest customers disrespectful.
I am quite familiar with banks having varying levels of comfort with different industries (ours being adult comics), but that didn’t stop us from finding banks that were okay with what we publish and working with them. You should have relationships with multiple banks for situations like this. The fact that your company is locked into a bank that can arbitrarily deny merchant accounts, based on how comfortable they are with each business, is concerning.
More concerning is the fact that the first support email we received tried to pass our account closure off as a FinCEN issue, which only showed how little research was put into our case before the account was closed. How much effort is put into defending your merchants in situations like this?
Instead of closing accounts of small publishers or artists you should be defending them. You’d no doubt have a lot more adamant supporters. If you really do care, and you’re not just commenting to save face, I encourage you to reach out to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (http://cbldf.org/). They provide legal support and counsel for censorship issues like this. They have legally defended countless adult publishers, artists, and readers over the years.
As the CEO of Coinbase you have the resources to make a difference and fix situations like this for the future. Don’t be afraid to stand up and defend merchants, publishers, artists, or whoever else decides to use your service. If you want to be another payment processor that’s fine, but you could be so much more.
This card looks like an OK product (still open questions about how much coinbase is gaming the ask/bid spread) but just realize that this card does NOT use Bitcoin, it uses "Coinbase Bitcoin"[1] which is Bitcoin for which the coinbase company is managing your private key: You only truly own Bitcoins if you own the private key for the account (users of MtGox learn this the hard way last year)
I do think Coinbase also offers a safer multisig account where you own an independent key and no one, including Coinbase, can withdraw money without your permission (was it called "Coinbase Vault?") If you put the majority of your funds in that independent system (or just keep them off Coinbase entirely) and put money in peace-meal to load up your coinbase Visa card you will greatly reduce your exposure to third-party risks.
[1] Reading the documents, it actually uses "Coinbase USD" which is the same difference.
> Coinbase is insured against employee theft and hacking in an amount that exceeds the average value of online bitcoin it holds at any given time.
If someone steals 90% of Coinbase's transiently held coins, no insurance coverage.
Coinbase is a private company that is barely regulated. Any money put into Bitcoins should be money you are willing to lose.
Sorry dude but I can't down vote this hard enough. Please read about the history of Bitcoin exchanges, and for that matter the history of banks. They arent trustworthy, and become insolvent all the time. The FDIC exists for a reason.
Implementing interactive approval would be more difficult to integrate. Authorization systems typically respond pretty fast, so there might be automatic timeout in the payment chain (terminal, acquirer, schema network, issuer) if the transaction was waiting for your interactive confirmation. Maybe some magic with initial pre-auth and subsequent post-auth attempts at regular intervals could work but would be no fun to implement either.
All Coinbase does is 1) make sure you enough bitcoin to cover the transaction 2) sell your bitcoin to recoup the dollars they're paying on your behalf to the merchant
None of this has anything to do with the blockchain or bitcoin as a technology. It's purely a practical product to make it a bit easier to make payments when you have a lot of money stored in bitcoin. I doubt it'll be anything significant, various other players like Xapo did this in a similarly reasonably professional manner and none of that blew up, either.
The reason it's not all that interesting is 1) again, it has nothing to do with bitcoin/blockchain 2) you need to store your bitcoin at a centralised company, essentially creating the equivalent of a traditional bank or financial service with the same issues and with no real extra benefits 3) it solves none of the myriad of security and fraud issues that have plagued creditcards we've had for decades (creditcards are basically plastic sheets of text, the text being the password to your money vault, and you have to hand it over all the time to make payments. It's an insane security premise) 4) it's actually pretty expensive, not only are creditcards expensive (both due to fraud and because you're putting profit into the pockets of a middleman), but on top you're essentially doing a forex currency conversion (in this case bitcoin -> usd) everytime you make a payment.
They're advertising 'no fees' at the moment, of course that's not structural. In fact I'm a bit surprised that legal gave the OK to charge customers $10 for a product without communicating usage fees for said product on any specific timeline whatsoever, normally that's guaranteed trouble & customer complaints down the line. That's like your ISP charges you $100 to install your internet connection, then says 'no monthly internet fees for a limited time'. You can bet your ass it'll turn into a gigantic mess a few months later when you suddenly start charging usage fees.
Still, I welcome it. Making bitcoin more pragmatic for mainstream users is something I applaud. I just don't have high expectations for this particular product.
Looking again at the site, there's no chip on the card. I thought the USA had finally introduced these — did I misunderstand something?
(All my cards have had chips for over 10 years.)
When I legally changed my name last year, I got all new credit cards. Only two of my new cards have chips.
Earlier this year, one card expired, and the new card has a chip. A couple of months ago, one of my cards was compromised by identity theft, and the replacement they sent me has a chip. Both of those were still chipless after I changed my name, so it must've been a recent change.
Also, I applied for yet another card, and this one has a chip.
[1] http://www.paymentsleader.com/will-retailers-be-ready-for-em...
It seems like a small step in the direction of using BTC as an actual primary account on the backend and making transactions in the real world.
Do I only own my dollars if I have them in cash?
There is always the risk of a Bernie Sanders kind of scam, but it's rare enough and regulation is heavy enough that for the common person it's not a real concern, or worth worrying about. Coinbase is regulated similarly, though obviously they are young and have to continue to prove themselves over the course of decades.
As in, one piece at a time.
Key word there is "online", but it's better than nothing (see: Mt. Gox).
https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...
(Creating new Bitcoin addresses is very cheap.)
Here we get into the distinction between ownership and possession. You own coinbase bitcoin the way you own the stocks in your brokerage account. You don't possess coinbase bitcoin the way you possess the dollar in your pocket.
I have for months encouraged everyone I know not to use coinbase and will continue to do so.
Nor is there any sensible moral argument for why companies should impose burdensome and disproportionate identity checks on customers who value their financial privacy. It is unfortunate to see this sort of comment on a site devoted to entrepreneurship.
I'm trying to find a generous reading for this. Perhaps, "sometimes reduces the amount of fraud that impacts customers"?
With millions of SSN and personal information being available after numerous breaches from health care, etc how exactly are you supposed to vett someone's identity over the Internet?
Keister: Yours Covered.
> With millions of SSN and personal information being available after numerous breaches from health care, etc how exactly are you supposed to vett someone's identity over the Internet?
I can't really get into our entire KYC and fraud prevention process, but I'll just say there are many more ways to vet someone's identity then simply asking for their SSN.
Citation needed.
More importantly, if a business has rules meant for financial security, compliance is important. An organization that institutionalizes non-compliance as a norm is seriously problematic.
Recently have to dispute a charge with paypal - an online vendors didn't ship the product I ordered with paypal. The paypal dispute process was hell. Lucky I used credit with paypal. One 3 minutes phone call with credit card company, problem was solved. After that kind of experience, it is much harder for me to trust other payment system.
I have use this credit card for 20+ year. This is the first time I dispute the charge for not-false charge.
Previous transaction with the same vendor/paypal went thru just fine.
Like typical software development, most of the code are for error condition and exception handling. Error condition and exception handling are much harder for payment system.
Unfortunately, for payment system, if it is that tough for normal user like me to gain trust with paypal, it will be impossible to convince me to put $ into a coin base account.
Last 7 days: http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/price/7d/USD?c=e&g=12&r=h...
If you're using bitcoin, I'm assuming you can click something to install to Heroku.
personally, I prefer to do all my gray market drug purchases on the ol' regular internet with a prepaid debit card.
Cameras are so cheap that practically every shop has them. Voice, face, body recognition are getting better by the week and can be run on all recordings.
I get the sense that Coinbase is about as capricious as PayPal. And ought to be avoided for the same reasons.
Gonna go out on a limb here and assume that, yes, you did a bunch of illegal shit.
Is there a comprehensive list of banned destinations?
Perhaps Coinbase will turn you away if they see you depositing money on a drugs market?
With untrackable currency (USD, et al.), you get HSBC's and all the others, who may commit crimes in secret and destroy the evidence.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/P...
They closed my account after I made a (relatively small) wire transfer after not using their service for a while. The year before I made much larger transfers that didn't seem to concern them. Suddenly I needed to provide them with lots of financial information.
The law sucks and I don't blame them for this. But I have provided them with more than enough information to prove all of my income is legitimate, including years of tax forms regarding the income and other crap they absolutely did not need to look at.
What bugs me is that they continued to ask me for this information, which took time for me to compile for them, and they ignored me anyway after I provided everything.
Another thing that bugs me is that (they claim) their support desk software is the most secure method of sending them sensitive documents. Ridiculous. The icing on the cake will be when their system is hacked and I lose a lot of important documents that I was under the impression they would be removing, but clearly haven't.
Information on DL has your height, eye color, address, telephone number, your photo, your finger prints. That's why they don't need to ask for your income again.
However, I tried Coinbase and will not use them ever again.
That seems like a roundabout way of saying, "No, I did not conduct any illegal transactions".
I said clearly that I made _one_ transaction (a wire transfer) and I said clearly that they questioned me on my income. Their concern is "where did you get your money" to which I answered them thoroughly.
That the transactions were believed to be legitimate was strongly implied in the same sentence, which just required a little deduction on your part.
I don't get the point of your comment.
I hope it isn't true, but by now I think I've seen a dozen or so closed account and no communication stories.
In particular, there was an article alleging that Coinbase keeps a list of suspicious wallet addresses, and transacting with them will get your account banned. @gwern (who posts to HN sometimes) is reportedly one of the folks whose address is flagged as suspicious: http://truthvoice.com/2015/05/coinbase-accused-of-tracking-b...
Check out https://www.walletexplorer.com/
That's a terrible idea. This isn't a library card. You're PIN shouldn't be known by anyone who knows your phone number.
Why dont you send the card and PIN out separately like a bank?
Every "normal" credit and debit card I've received in the mail has used this same procedure -- call a number on a removable sticker stuck to the card to activate it where the only verification is the phone number you're calling from (and caller ID is easily faked).
How is this any worse than how every other card activates?
And how do you propose they get around the mail interception problem? Have a courier deliver it to you and place it in your hand?
As for interception, I guess you could require a signature for delivery but that's a pita. You just have to weigh the risks in that situation and the convenience of not requiring a signature obviously outweighs the risks of theft.
EDIT: grammar
Where I am, PIN and Card arrive in different letters, and the Card letter is only sent once you confirmed via your online banking interface (which uses 2FA) that you received the PIN letter. And you need to confirm online in your banking interface to have received the card to be able to use it.
I'd like a chip card that requires a PIN (and that is accepted widely in the US) because such a card would make unauthorized charges less likely after the card is lost or stolen, but was not able to find one.
Require the customer to verify that he/she received the card in their online banking interface.
Mark it as invalid/stolen/whatever before that.
If the attacker already has access to the online banking account, then he/she can do much worse things anyway.
And it only delays the process by 2 days. At maximum.
The fact that you can even say "well it's only 2 days delay" seems insane to me.
I don't know if this is now normal in the UK. The previous time I opened an account in-branch was 2004, when the chip card arrived by post a few days later, with the PIN in a separate letter.
In fact, I’ll go next friday to the bank to get a new debit card, as my existing one stopped working a few months ago.
It's been a long time since I was into telephony stuff, but IIRC caller ID is easily faked but ANI is not. Do verifications use CID or ANI?
this is also why caller ID blocking (as provided by your telco) doesn't work when calling toll-free numbers.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identificatio...
Part of the appeal of bitcoin to many is "Banks are so unnecessarily expensive to transmit value", the bitcoin industry has slowly and painfully been learning one disaster after another that maybe some of that cost isn't unnecessary after all.
EDIT: My point is that a financial service is more than just the protocols used. Actually the protocols are the least important thing to the average customer. The more important thing is trust. I trust that my money in the bank will stay there and that transactions made using my bank will go to the person I say they should. Part of the reason for my trust is in the regulation around the banking industry. E.g. the savings guarantee here in the UK(/EU?). The bitcoin industry (not the protocol but the services around it) have yet to provide me that level of trust coupled with comparative ease of use.
I think that many people hold bitcoin and bitcoin businesses to a higher standard than they would companies that operate outside this sphere.
I hold them to exactly the same standard as traditional financial services. I can see you point in that for many people bitcoin is just voodoo (on the other hand for many people traditional financial services are voodoo and people trust them with their pensions).
At least, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the Wild West style of regulating fiat currencies.
People hold BTC businesses to a higher standard because after your BTC is stolen by 'hackers' in an ex-Soviet republic, you have absolutely zero recourse. They hold BTC to a higher standard because no individual in the fiat world siphoned off a trillion dollars into his accounts last year. They hold BTC to a higher standard because the companies operating in the space absolutely refuse to properly protect their customers.
What about the $1bn stolen from moldovan banks?
There has been no customer recourse there.
Trillion? Really? That is an order of magnitude grater than bitcoins total market cap.
Depending on how you want to measure the amount of fiat currency in circulation, 7% of that would be close to a trillion dollars.
I was more thinking of institutional theft (i.e. embezzlement). I'm almost certain my bank won't just vanish the money I have lent them through my savings account. Of course the same cannot be said of "Random Investment Company Name" who was recommended to me on a forum/down the pub. As yet (and I hope that this changes) non of the bitcoin service companies have risen above this level of trust (for me personally).
EDIT: Added fact that my assessment of trust is my personal subjective opinion and shouldn't be taken as a fact.
.. which isn't really true in the EU ("Faster Payments"). It's only true in the US because the regulation is fragmented and reflexively in favour of the capitalist over the consumer. It's the banking equivalent of Comcast.
Are you from Iceland?
I wonder what it's like working for a company that's so obviously full of shit? How would you reconcile the obvious contradictions in what you're doing every day? I guess it would be kind of like working at the ministry of truth and then getting paid directly in lies.
I'm not a fan of Coinbase but your argument is unfounded.
First of all, Bitcoin should not be seen primarily as a currency, but as a protocol. Therefore, bitcoin does not need to increase in value for it to be successful, and in the long term the price is irrelevant. Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange without regard to the price, and many people at Coinbase believe in this future (rather than bitcoin becoming a widely used currency held directly by end users, at least in the near future).
Secondly, many people at Coinbase believe deeply in the decentralized (and potentially anonymous/privacy-focused) aspects of using bitcoin as a currency (myself included). However, bitcoin cannot be successful as a currency unless it is easy to exchange between bitcoin and your local currency, and bitcoin won't gain worldwide acceptance until it is easy to (a) exchange bitcoin and (b) spend bitcoin. Therefore, Coinbase's primary goal is to make buying and selling bitcoin as easy as possible, so that we can enable a future where financial privacy is optional (versus today, where it is basically inescapable).
This is a typo, right? Financial privacy today is basically impossible, not inescapable. Tracking is basically inescapable, unless one uses cash. And using cash is becoming virtually illegal.
No it is not. Not even close. Stop with the paranoid hyperbole.
Anyway, that's irrelevant. If Bitcoin is for some reason the best protocol to be used, why would someone want to enrich the current holders of Bitcoin (of which I am one, by the way). Transferring value to Bitcoin necessitates buying Bitcoins from existing Bitcoin holders, enriching them for no reason. Why wouldn't a bank or other financial institution just start from a clean slate?
Agreed. But most open source protocols are/were not great. IPv4, SMTP, HTTPv1 all have massive flaws. Once open protocols start gaining momentum though, it's very hard to convince everyone to switch (and bitcoin has by far the most momentum behind it). That said, I'm very interested in Ethereum too.
> necessitates buying Bitcoins from existing Bitcoin holders, enriching them for no reason
If you use bitcoin purely as an intermediary, then you are buying and selling it at the same instant, so it really doesn't affect the price at all. The only thing that makes the price go up is more people hodling it.
Last I checked, there's a single blessed node dishing out verifiable data. It's nicer than having a remote API that just hands you a trusted number, but it's a far cry from Nakamoto Consensus.
* you lose the psuedo-anonymity of Bitcoin (the card has your name on it). * It's a "debit" card, so it also has none of the protection of a normal credit card (eg: if someone steals my card or over-charges or whatever, my actual money is not touched). * It's not even real Bitcoin, it requires a Coinbase account (where, from what I understand, they manage your private key, so really own your bitcoins)
What exactly is the target market for this? The people who have no credit cards, the bulk of their cash in bitcoin, and also don't care about privacy?
I'm not into bitcoin, but even so, I am just not seeing the appeal.
>you lose the psuedo-anonymity of Bitcoin (the card has your name on it) Nobody would ever allow anonymous card transactions. The security risks with that alone are ridiculous.
> It's a "debit" card, so it also has none of the protection of a normal credit card (eg: if someone steals my card or over-charges or whatever, my actual money is not touched). Nope. Debit cards have protection, as does a coinbase account.
>It's not even real Bitcoin, it requires a Coinbase account My credit card isn't even real money either!
>where, from what I understand, they manage your private key, so really own your bitcoins Thats not how that works.
Its a transition between traditional cards and to new forms of money like crypto-currency.
Sure they would. The gift card and reloadable/prepaid debit card market is huge. In theory they try to avoid anonymous usage but in practice they don't.
What I mean is, it'd be cool if the card would do:
- Bitcoin<->CAD
- Bitcoin<->EUR
- Bitcoin<->BHT
- Bitcoin<->HKD
- Bitcoin<->AUD - Bitcoin<->USD<->CAD
- Bitcoin<->USD<->EUR
- Bitcoin<->USD<->BHT
- Bitcoin<->USD<->HKD
- Bitcoin<->USD<->AUDAs an example, I was charged CHF20.00 on 5 October, which the card statement says was converted at a rate of 1.4728 to a £13.58 charge on my account¹. XE.com has that day's average rate as 1.4785.
There aren't going to be any other benefits to the card, but that's OK — I have another card for spending in pounds.
The alternative is a pre-paid credit card.
¹ Halifax Clarity.
- Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->CAD
- Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->EUR
- Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->BHT
- Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->HKD
- Bitcoin<->Dogecoin<->AUDWitness the darling Square getting its lunch eaten by iZettle and Paypal (!) even in the UK, to say nothing of rest of Europe, to say nothing of rest of the world.
Everyone and their dog has been trying to solve remittances with technology at least since Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon. Ultimately it's much less a tech problem than a human problem.
They're based in the UK, and properly regulated by both the UK and US.
You get a free transfer using a referral link: https://transferwise.com/u/61f8ad
Or use the non-referral link if you prefer: https://transferwise.com/
Easy. You swipe your card, Coinbase pays with $, then Coinbase tries to sell enough of the bitcoins you have there to make it even (there might be a fee).
So you need to have a bitcoin balance in Coinbase when you want to use this card.
Now why would you do this? If you're asking yourself this question, there are high chances you are not the target of this product.
There are a lot of people who made a lot of money in bitcoins, and who hold a LOT of bitcoins. This is going to be an easy way for them to spend it on a normal day-to-day basis.
It's a wonderful way to laundry your drug money!
See http://cointelegraph.com/news/115114/localbitcoins-stops-ser... for example.
Of course there could be some saving to the user as otherwise they may need to sell coins (paying fees to do so) then withdraw, again paying a further fee. So this is an immediate way to spend BTC with a merchant that does not accept BTC.
This would be very useful for people who use bitwage to get paid in BTC.
"Bitcoin" all the things => Profit
That seems like a meaningless assertion to make about an unregulated currency. If the free market optimizes for regulated intermediaries, that's perfectly valid.
There are other services that offer m-of-n signatures so that you retain control of your keys and a service provider can still facilitate transactions. Coinbase may even offer one of these services, I don't know. But the primary service that they offer is that of a bank - a non-transparent bank that may or may not have any quantity of bitcoin at any given time. Part of bitcoin's original stated intent was to circumvent this power of banks, particularly the power to run at a fractional reserve and pull "bitcoins" out of thin air, which works fine until it doesn't. And that is exactly what Coinbase and AFAIK most of the other providers in the bitcoin sphere are doing, with many famous scams, crashes, and losses along the way.
Many bitcoin users prefer to generate a new incoming address for each transaction to improve privacy (Bitcoin is "anonymous" only insofar as your legal name is usually not directly attached to the transaction; in most other ways, it's more traceable than the alternatives).
Who live in one of 24 states. New Yorkers need not apply.
Only in less than half of the US states (they use the number "24" prominently, which is still less than half, but include DC and PR, and CA is limited to 1000 users, so 21 is a more realistic number).
[1] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/222...
Edit: downvotes don't tell me why I'm wrong, would appreciate counterexample, I don't see any docs on the Shift site, and there's no way in hell they're using zeroconf transactions at this scale, which means instant payments must come out of a USD account somewhere
Or vise-versa
Meanwhile, I get 1-3% cashback...
(Probably not with this card specifically, but if there was a Somalian equivalent...)
Also, it's worth noting that both Shift and Coinbase are YC companies.
Wouldn't it be nice if almost-monopolies weren't able to raise prices on everything slightly in order to fund their rigged rewards programs?
Or maybe handling transactions is really hard?
Not sure what to think honestly.
The cost of acquiring these licenses is competitively prohibitive to startups, and honestly, there's no reason why it should be state by state. Money transmitter licensing should definitely move to the federal level.
I have met the founders at Coinbase, and their vibe was more like that of an SF startup that will do anything to "win" and "exit big" than a world change agent. Bitcoin needs the latter, not the former.
The only issue I had is my buy limit decreased suddenly because they added more security I had to verify for my identity and didn't notify me. Once I verified my ID it was instantly reinstated.
If I get this card, am I going to still get screwed, or will it suddenly be cheaper to transact?
I'm not trolling I really don't see what I'm missing.
>Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
but given confirmation time inherent to the network, I don't see a way around doing something similar to what coinbase have done here (minus the egregious part where they hold your private key)
It is about decentralization and trying to establish trust outside of the normal banks.
An interesting possible example is in the Genesis block. Satoshi added the newspaper headline:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
I just can't see a scenario where buying bitcoin with USD on Coinbase and then using a debit card to spend it in USD is better than spending USD in the first place. Unless you buy into the pyramid-scheme "it'll be $10000 any day now" nonsense, in which case you have no incentive to spend bitcoin anyways.
> I just can't see a scenario where buying bitcoin with USD on Coinbase and then using a debit card to spend it in USD is better than spending USD in the first place.
Sure, that would be silly. But imagine you're a rich Chinese kid in California whose parents own a sweatshop in Shenzhen. To easily get around capital controls they buy BTC in China and send it to your Coinbase account. You pay for your day-to-day USD expenses on this card. Use your imagination.
Will report about usage, quirks and tricks.