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Comment by gt_ | Hacker News Reader

I ran into a problem using them, realized their customer support appears to have given up, and decided it was time to get my money out. That was this morning. As of now, the BTC transaction I initialized is reported as “complete” on my Coinbase account, which now has a balance of 0, and the transaction has not even registered on the blockchain. This is certainly not my definition of “robust.”

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While coinbase & BTC seems to be doing well, I've anecdotally seen a bunch of people who can't get a response from coinbase support over long periods of time. Doesn't make relying on coinbase seem like a good idea.

Other stories:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933360

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985

4 years ago they had a problem with customer service and the situation does not appear to have improved:

> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.

>> When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.

I wonder if that applies to Google too, the most famous company for which you need to get on the HN frontpage to actually reach someone there.

How do you do customer service when you get 100K new users / day though?

That's easy - you outsource it to cheapest provider you can find, preferably to the other side of the planet.

You charge the customers sufficiently so that you can (and do) hire a customer service person for each X new customers.

... There is a lag between signing new customers and hiring competent customer service employees + training them. Just saying.

That's not what their VCs want them to do, unfortunately.

Coinbase is simply suffering from insane growth pains. I mean, come on, they are adding half a million new users per week! Of course support isn't going to be very responsive.

Funny how they are coping with signing up users just fine. Takes about 5 mins for somebody to check your ID and create an account. Support however seems not to be a priority to them.

Don't you think that part is automated?

How can you automate the checking of an ID?

Third party identity verification services use OCR and machine learning on scanned ID documents.

99% get an automatic Green flag. Only ~1% are manually reviewed.

Interesting. I'd assume that these methods are probably more effective than a manual review by your average person anyway, but there are certain areas where I would expect automation to be at least frowned upon.

    if (Math.random() > 0.2) { // rate of false accounts at last review was ~20% 
      return false;
    } else { 
      return true;
    }

    return Math.random() <= 0.2

> Funny how they are coping with signing up users just fine.

Not my experience - no luck getting ID verified yet.

Don't accept new customers if you don't have the capacity to support them

You've got a point, and I tried to be understanding about the slow customer support response, but after a certain point the _growing pains_ excuse just does not pass muster. Coinbase has been around for years and their business model would seem to be dependent upon rapid adoption/growth of BTC/ETH/LTC. So, they knew this day would come and should have had processes in place to handle the influx (of traffic and related customer support requests). I just cannot _understand_ how a business could misplace $NON_TRIVIAL_AMOUNT_OF_BTC and then not respond to their customer's inquiries about it for _days_ at a time.

My experience with coinbase was terrible. I bought roughly 10k of eth this past summer.

Eventuslly I was up 5000 I decided to sell 10k so I could let the rest freeride. When I went to sell coinbase told me they couldn't validate my identity and wouldn't let me sell.

Which is ridiculous. They had no problem taking 10k from me, but not the other way around?

At the very least they should have put some info somewhere telling me that before I bought any.

Nothing I did worked. It just kept telling me it couldn't validate and to try again in 24hr. I contacted support and eventually got a boiler plate email.

Eventually I opened a new account on another exchange, sent my eth there and sold it for btc which I sold for usd on localbtc.

Ended up a 2000 dollar loss because this whole process took like a week or so during which eth kept dropping.

My advice to anyone using cb would be to have a local wallet and working accounts on multiple exchanges. If I had done that I would have been okay.

However I still think that if my identity was no sufficiently validated to sell, they should have told me before I went to sell.

From my experience that seems to be the case with pretty much all the exchanges and resellers lately.

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