Employee #1: Coinbase
themacro.com
themacro.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.
Do not use Coinbase.
There are some companies which operate purely in the digital currency world, and never store people's money. They are not regulated businesses. I'm glad these exist (and it sounds like this is what you are looking for) but this is not Coinbase.
Coinbase is an exchange that integrates with the traditional financial system to help people convert their local currency into and out of digital currency. I wrote a post about this here which may help: https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/coinbase-is-not-a-walle...
When you say Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for, I have to disagree. We are enabling millions of people to get access to digital currency so that it can succeed. We do this successfully by playing by the rules in the existing ecosystem. You may not like these rules, but if you want millions of people to have easy access to digital currency (so that a new economy can develop etc) we are the greatest ally you have on that mission.
One company can't play both roles, of integrating with the existing financial ecosystem, and creating the brave new world that you want to see. That role probably needs to be filled by separate companies.
We are much closer to Stripe and other businesses which don't allow adult businesses either. https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed
Further reading: https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge-why...
Are you implying that by supporting my business you would not be playing by the rules? If that's what you're saying, you don't seem to be fully aware of the rules. That, or you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the financial ecosystem or somehow believe that a company selling mature content is not "playing by the rules".
My business has a physical store, existing relationships with banks, existing relationships with credit card companies, approval to sell adult comics on Amazon, and even approval to sell with PayPal (yes, they know we sell adult comics). When our customers requested we accept Bitcoin we turned to Coinbase, and you banned our account without providing a reason.
It's ironic, given their history, that PayPal is more accepting of merchants like myself than your company.
This is why I chose to speak up.
You may be an ally to the big banks, but you are not an ally to small businesses or consumers.
If I want terrible, uninformed, opaque service only when it is convenient for the other party, I can already get that at every bank I've ever dealt with.
You could be better than that, but it is hard to believe that that is what you are trying to do.
From your link: "As a result, the decision to support a business is not solely up to Stripe; it involves the various financial companies in the credit card processing chain. Their restrictions tend to be broad and, as a result, often pretty confusing."
You don't deal with visa/mastercard payment network companies do you? If not, how can you have the same rationalizations as Stripe? And of course if you share the same problems as credit card companies (of which there are SO many), what problems are you solving?
We do deal with visa/mastercard networks. They have rules, as do other financial institutions we work with.
Is it just that payment processing is an easier problem than storing money and acting as an exchange? So perhaps Coinbase's larger scope comes with more restrictions?
I am exhausted from waiting for a reply from your helpdesk: they just send the same canned reply, when this might be a code bug in your verification workflow.
On a side note, you have raised 100mm+ from VC. How do you ever hope to deliver these VCs a profit? Is Coinbase going to be a write down for these VC funds?
I had to add up all the transactions from their logs to figure out they made the mistake on their end. I got it all resolved but to have cryptocurrency transactions disappear after it's been registered?? Just boggles my mind as to how this could have happened.
I understand that many of these qualities are somewhat superficial when it comes to security and reliable service. What competing companies out there do a better job in your experience?
r/bitcoin is littered with such user complaints. It is sad that the best way to get support on Coinbase issues is to go on reddit to complain.
Many people have moved to Circle for a smoother consumer experience.
p.s. no relation to either Coinbase or Circle except as a consumer.
Then they incorrectly decided my immigration status and removed my bank connection.
I closed my account and asked for my inappropriately obtained information to be deleted. They refused to "protect" me from "identity theft". Screw them.
The other reason you see so many complaints there is that there are many scammers trying to buy digital currency with stolen credentials, and a common scammer tactic is to appear angry (via support channels, or any public forum) in the hopes that we will approve their purchase.
No fees to move money, and no limits on how much you send or
receive each week using your Circle account.
While on the consumer this its great, if the merchant side is horrid, you can bet it will hurt the adoption of bitcoin.
Unfortunately there are times when we would like to support a merchant but can't, but its a hard thing to keep the bridge open. You can read more here: https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/building-the-bridge-why...
I am exhausted from waiting for a reply from your helpdesk: they just send the same canned reply, when this might be a code bug in your verification workflow.
I would gladly raise from someone who's gone through the gauntlet, as opposed to someone who won the birth lottery and is investing money from the bank of mom and dad.
To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered "when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit."
A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and tickets) were pouring in.
The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds.
It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.
My girlfriend is finishing her master's in anthropology. I'm going to the Anthro/IT conference in Tartu (Estonia) in November. I'm curious about the intersection.
Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University. My team provided web application development and protected data management to social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public Instruction on certain projects.
Without question, data management is the thing. Field data is almost entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia, but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air gapping).
It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of best practice in the social sciences.
-------
Olaf : This is just to Fred. Fred and I probably talked for 45 minutes–a long time. Then Fred gave me a really brutal mathematics problem ...
Okay. So there are 100 lockers in a row. They’re all closed, okay? A kid goes by. He opens every single locker. A second kid goes by. Now he closes every other locker, every second locker. Third kid comes by, every third locker. If it’s open, he closes it. If it closed, he opens it. Then the fourth kid goes by. Every fourth locker, he changes the state. And now 100 kids go by. What is the state of the lockers after 100 kids go by?
...
Craig : What was the actual job?
Olaf : Customer support
I aced the stupid online test they wanted, then aced the phone interview with Brian (the CEO), and then on top of that they wanted me to come in and contract with them for a week as a “trial” which I did do partially (didn’t do the full week because I was busy that time of year). Their expectations of the trial were entirely unrealistic, misguided, and in some cases nonexistent (which is worse than misguided imo). It was doomed to fail from the beginning.
Anyway, jokes on them because they lost out on a great engineer. I wonder how many more they lost out on due to misguided and mismanaged hiring practices. Now I’m shipping software to more users than Coinbase can ever dream of, having more impact on those users than Bitcoin ever will, and making far more money to boot while working with a higher caliber Eng team. So I'm incredibly thankful for having dodged that bullet.
I've passed many interviews where I thought: "Wow that interview process truly sucked, even though I made it through".
I've failed many interviews where I still walked away thinking "That was a great interview experience, I respect everyone I interviewed with, it didn't work out, but I still admire the company and will cheer them on, and I learned some things too“.This was not one of those experiences, and I have no reason to dress it up as such.
If you think I’m an empty cart making a racket, feel free, I don’t really care for such one-liners. The only reason I even shared my experience interviewing at Coinbase is because I think we’re obligated to share our experiences in the industry for the benefit of our colleagues (past, present, and future!). I literally don’t gain anything from unfairly ranting about some random interview experience from a couple of years ago. This post just happened to remind me, and I figured some people might find it useful.
For all I know, Coinbase might have changed their process significantly since then and maybe the CEO stopped being rude to potential hires. Who knows? Certainly not me. They could even be an awesome employer today. But I do know that I personally won’t recommend the company just based on my single personal datapoint.
Then it's "do two presentations by tomorrow". (I guess they assumed he had no plans for the evening). Then after what sounded like typical tech interview hazing, it only took 4 days for the company to decide? Wow!
I'm curious how long it takes on average for most VC's to go from good interview to acceptance.
The whole interview process comes off as having been designed by someone who had no idea what they were doing.
As you can imagine, things may have changed a bit 120 employees and thousands of interviews later.
I think you'd find the experience quite different today.
It seems to me that:
1) Every locker essentially is open (let's say "1"), and it will switch to the other binary state ("0" from 1, or 1 from 0) a number of times.
2) The number of switches is based on number of factors that comprise that number, minus one. E.g. position 1 = zero switches. Position 2 = one switch. Position 3 = one switch. Position 4 = two switches. Position 5 = one switch. Position 6 = three switches. And so on.
Am I correct?
In case, the final result is something like: 100100001000000... Which is essentially 1 + a number of zeros equal to two, then four, then six, then eight, etc.
Edit: I've now continued reading the article and, well, the solution is down there. In a way, it seems I was correct.
When are they the same? When d = n/d, or d^2 = n (n is a perfect square). Therefore, only perfect squares have an odd number of factors (2 * the number of pairs of factors + 1).
It should be clear here that the number of times the nth door is flipped is the number of unique divisors that n has.
For any non-perfect square n, for any divisor p, n/p = q is another divisor not equal to p. So non-perfect square numbers have an even number of divisors.
Perfect square numbers are the only numbers that have an odd number of divisors, which in this game corresponds to being flipped an odd number of times.
So, for any number of lockers/kids, n, the number of open doors is simply floor(sqrt(n)).
25: 1 5 25 (3)
36: 1 2 3 4 6 9 12 18 36 (9)
lockers = ['Closed'] * 101
for i in range(1, 101):
for locker in range(i, 101, i):
lockers[locker] = 'Open' if lockers[locker] == 'Closed' else 'Closed'
print ([locker for locker, value in enumerate(lockers) if value == 'Open'])
>>> [1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]I complained about this to customer service, and got a canned reply saying I need to empty my wallet to proceed.
A lot of companies are guilty of the same sins, having weird catch-22 glitches on the platform and customer service that wants to close tickets, not help customers, but if Coinbase seriously wants to handle my money, they need to start doing better.
Uh, what? Has anyone heard of this kind of procedure? I'm aware of other methods to induce lucid dreams but never ones that involve OTC medicine.
Abstract:
>This article explores the effectiveness of using supplements to induce lucid dreams. The method of combining a cholinergic stimulating substance (galantamine & choline) with a deep sleep suppressing substance (sulbutiamine, caffeine, or desmopressin) is examined. Eleven nights of EEG data were recorded from a subject skilled in lucid dreaming techniques. On each experimental night, the subject slept for 3.5-4.5 hours before consuming either a deep sleep suppressing substance (DSS), a cholinergic stimulating substance (CS) or a combination of the two.
>The subject experienced a lucid dream in five out of five trials that included a combination of cholinergic stimulation with deep sleep suppression. Furthermore, the five lucid dream events occurred in the span of 10 calendar days and were all characterized as Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams (WILDs) in which conscious awareness remained during the transition from the waking state to the dream state. A second observation relating the influence of dopamine uptake to the subject’s control over the dream environment is also discussed.
[0] http://www.bluesilk.com.au/lucidmind/ld_resources/Pharmacolo...
I've heard anecdotal evidence on caffeine giving people nightmares and vivid dreams, especially when consumed immediately before sleep.
After digging a little more, I also found that caffeine is also an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor (it disrupts the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine) which have medical use in promoting REM sleep and induce lucid dreaming.
Is this any different from buying actual bitcoins, ether, litecoins etc?
A lot of capital backed projects in the blockchain space were attempting to "responsibly not buy the speculative asset because we don't want to lose money irresponsibly", and they all lost money irresponsibly because they couldn't find a way to make any money
There are ways to improve the blockchain space, with capital, and it so far requires getting capital into the tokens itself.
That kind of sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme. Is that a more responsible way to make money?
There really is no rebuttal to the clever savant that makes this observation whether you are at a VC fundraising event, an Amway meeting, or talking to Charles Ponzi himself
> My belief is that the inexperienced, interested person will outperform the experienced, uninterested person over time.
It's good to know what the limit to customer support can be. Don't say customer support doesn't scale.
Galantamine is marketed as an Alzheimer treatment, and although me and others are weary of pharmaceuticals (side effects? cancer? higher-morality rates in clinical trials?) drug induced lucid dreams sound very interesting to me. Has anyone on HN experimented with this?
Extremely small doses of Yohimbine (~300mcg) and Mucuna Pruriens are lesser known and quite effective for me. Yohimbine is a norepinephrine agonist and Mucuna Pruriens has L-dopa and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Keep in mind it's much more important to be extremely diligent about writing down your dreams, every night.
Don't pay attention to how galantamine/yohimbine are marketed - do the research yourself.
It does take a bit of practice/getting used to. The apps monitor you heart rate and movement patterns to try and detect REM sleep and send a signal to you. At first these signals will wake you up but with practice you will recognize them in your dreams without waking up.
http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream
Keeping a dream journal is probably one of the best techniques.