I have for months encouraged everyone I know not to use coinbase and will continue to do so.
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/
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.
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.