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Comment by varbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to send $700 in bitcoin to purchase something. It's going to cost me $65 to buy the coins and several hours of time.

Of course, I am banned from Coinbase for an innocous bank mistake. There's literally no other options to buy coins at 1-2% in the US.

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Here's a list [1] of 400 exchanges you can buy Bitcoin from, 34 of trade BTC/USD. This doesn't include some sites that charge a premium and allow you to buy with debit cards. There are also Bitcoin ATMs, over 1000 of them in the United States [2].

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets [2] https://coinatmradar.com/

That's not a useful response. ATM's will likely have over 1-2% in fees, and just trading USD isn't enough - you need a way to get your money in and out.

Gemini and Kraken are just two I can list from the top of my head.

Isn't Gemini 0.25%?

I just tried registering with them and the reg page is down for maintenance.

yes or lower, https://gemini.com/fee-schedule/

Create an Electrum wallet. Find a friend who has Bitcoin. Meet for lunch/dinner. They transfer ~70 mBTC to you, with a 1-2 mBTC fee. After 2-3 confirmations, you give them $710-$720 cash. Done.

With a process so simple, why would anyone ever use cash?!

Well, OP could just ask about mailing cash, instead of using Bitcoin ;) And do recall that OP has been banned by Coinbase, and doesn't want to pay over 1-2% fees. So they're a rather special case.

The 3% fee here is the same as a credit card but without any of the benefits, since a credit card nets you purchase protections, extends the manufacturers warranty, 2% or more in cash back and you don't have to pay it off immediately, and it also clears in seconds instead of hours. And the merchant pays the fee not you. Am I missing something?

OP specified Bitcoin, so hey. Maybe there's a reason. OP?

For the record Coinbase is adding 100k users a day. So people need to dial down the expectations...

The number mentioned for the record is wrong: Coinbase has added 100k users in a day, it is not adding 100k users per day [0]. That’s not evening considering the number of users who may be fraudulent, they are hiring [1].

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NgvD2kFT69mSXuJPzPDu...

[1] https://www.coinbase.com/careers/923993

They are hiring and getting flagged off Who's Hiring (did they do this to themselves? never seen anything else like it) for mentioning MongoDB:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14902743

@jessepollak [0] wrote in the thread you linked to saying: "NOTE: A spammer posted this same post below, not sure why. ".

It was a spammer's post that was flagged not Coinbase.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14903400

Down? They've had tons of money and time since June[1] to scale up to handle much larger volume. They don't have a real excuse for these major outages. I got a recruiter email but didn't want to go near them because of how flaky they apparently are.

(Gemini has been much better but they went down for a lot of today too.)

[1] When they had ~4 volume related outages.

I would be surprised if Coinbase didn't get sued because of their bad service... locking people's money when the market is going crazy.

This is (as someone who hasn't played around with bitcoin much) something I've been curious about. How easy is it to get significant amounts of bitcoin turned into cash? This is particularly applicable at a moment like the present. If I had, say, 25 bitcoins that I wanted to trade into dollars _right now_ what hurdles stand in my way, and how long would it take to clear them?

There are liquidation limits on the exchanges. I think Coinbase limits to $10k USD in exchange for your Bitcoins. You can get increases by providing additional identity verification. IRS is way up in Coinbase’s business since this is essentially a huge potential avenue for laundering and tax evasion.

So it might be that bitcoin is rising and rising ever more not just because owners are bullish on future development but also because some of those who are not are disallowed from selling? Best store of value ever, backed by inability to sell.

That’s certainly possible, however I suspect many of them just keep watching their money go up (at least for now). If really motivated you can find other ways to sell like LocalBitcoins, it’s just not as convenient as pressing the “sell” button.

gemini?

Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins. They are a pretty miserable company. How can they claim to sell something "useful" then ban you if you mention using it? They basically are admitting to selling a security if that is the case..wondering if we could take all the nonsensically banned users and do a class action lawsuit against them. It would be one thing if I said drugs but I didnt. They banned me for fucking vitamins.

> Im also banned from coinbase for asking them to hurry my verification because I needed to buy vitamins.

You don't see how that might be a red flag? What vitamins could possibly be so important that you couldn't wait a little while, and would be unavailable from another source?

Plus, the rudeness of "I'm more important than everyone else in the queue, hurry up" can't have helped.

He might be rude, but honestly a company should be expected to deal with rude customers.

It is their job to do deal with slightly rude customers, and I don't think they should be banning anybody for something so small as "being asked to go faster".

The rudeness can't have helped, but I'd imagine the "I desperately need my 'vitamins' that can only be bought with Bitcoin" bit is what got the account flagged.

Right, but (without knowing any more details about the case), I'd hope they needed more than that one thing to "nope" him away.

It actually was vitamins from a foreign shop that took international payments thru bitcoin. I could have shown them if they wanted proof. However they never let me have any recourse. Just instaban, goodbye. As hard as it might be to believe its their job to remain professional. And they failed at that. My account didn't get flagged - I got outright banned- lets not mince words. Coinbase is ran by a bunch of assholes.

It's also their job not to get the company shuttered for knowingly allowing drug money to flow through their books.

If it's weird to me that you need to buy vitamins from a foreign company using Bitcoin (you couldn't get them for a month or two from a provider who takes PayPal/CC, and you couldn't go without for a little while?!), it's going to be really weird to the compliance department of a financial institution responsible for KYC stuff.

Its common for international shops to use Bitcoin. And its common for people to buy home vitamins and supplements, foods, etc.. from their ethnic countries of origin, because they are difficult to find anywhere else. Who exactly determines what someone buying bitcoin is allowed to use it for? If I want to trade it for vitamins or russian crackers or chocolate, am I now banned? Think about what you are saying -- that Bitcoin should be restricted to merely a speculation vehicle. Coinbase seems to have that opinion opaquely -- they function as more of a gambling/security sales portal in that case. And they should be held to the standards of that sector given their rather overt bans where users state a rather innocuous intention to use the Bitcoin for bartering.

Since you're dancing around the point so much, I'll be more direct. Here are specific questions that I suspect Coinbase also had:

What vitamin is unavailable in the US but available internationally?

Is said vitamin legal to import to the US?

Why does the vendor not take anything but Bitcoin?

Why can't you wait a couple weeks to get it?

Where were you getting it previously without Bitcoin, given that it's so critical you can't go without?

I guess every purchase should require an interrogation. Thanks for your thoughts on liberty.

Bitcoin itself is being harmed by the core developers who refuse to do anything to address the insane fees: bitcoin needs more bandwidth and throughput in its blocks, classic supply and demand.

Bitcoin cash or something like etherium are worth a look at. Bitcoin cash, as the name implies, holds the value that bitcoin should be able to be used as electronic cash.

All you bcash advocates should go learn a thing about the infeasibility of solving a (hyper)exponential scaling problem with linear "solutions" (aka block size increase). Alternatively, leave these matters to the engineers.

No one is interested in the centralized bcash. It is a crypto in name only.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin Cash. We immediately restored the ability for Bitcoin to be adopted with low fees and fast confirmations by using 8 MB blocks.

The median income for the world is $6/day. High fees are unaffordable and unadoptable. The Core team has done Bitcoin an enormous disservice; like setting autopilot into the terrain.

You call your alt whatever you like. I'll call it bcash so that it removes confusion from peoples minds that it isn't bitcoin. The only thing that alt has is a name they've stolen from bitcoin. So bcash it is.

No one cares about the fees. If they did, they'd use litecoin. Blocks 4x the speed of bcash and bitcoin, and they have segwit too, so double the capacity of bcash.

8MB blocks don't solve the longterm scalability problem. I agree that high fees are unacceptable, but I'd rather wait for a solution that allows order a transaction increase of several orders of magnitude rather than scaling it linearly (and therefore reducing the number of people that can actually use it).

Bcash was just an attempt to prevent Segwit and keep fees high under the guise of doing the opposite.

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