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Comment by shrimpx | Hacker News Reader

To the dozens/hundreds of complaints like this, there are tens of thousands of non-complaints that you don't ever hear about -- users who use the service to buy/sell/withdraw without issues.

People are particularly emotional about Coinbase because it touches on their bottom line -- money. But let's not forget the fact that ALL startups have major scaling woes. Bugs in the tech being ironed out, overwhelmed support and engineering teams recruiting and integrating talent to meet the demand -- in Coinbase's case exponentially growing demand. If you've worked in a software startup you know how easy it is to be met with exponential increase in demand, and how impossibly difficult it is to stay above water growing a team at the same rate.

I'm positive on Coinbase due to their backing. YC, Andreessen Horowitz, DFJ, among dozens of high-profile investors. These guys want a $20B valuation, they're not interested in backing a failing company or a scam.

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If a new investment firm took this long to have securities show up in your account, they'd be shut down faster than you can say SEC. Coinbase isn't exactly a new t-shirt company working out issues with their silk screener, they're an allegedly $20B (alleged) currency exchange. They have a higher standard to meet.

I can see how Silicon Valley standards have to rise up to Wall Street standards and they're not there yet. Tech like Auto/Finance/Space are new to SV and they're all full of scaling woes. Traditionally "SV style" has been to be scrappy and accept a healthy amount of breakage, and never say no to incoming demand, even if it's crippling your platform.

You have a point that SV needs to get into the mindsets of the industries they are trying to disrupt and rise to those higher standards.

To add another point, Coinbase is in unchartered territory. I want to see a new cryptocurrency investment firm show up on the market and function without a hitch. Companies like Coinbase are the only datapoints so far in this space.

Handwaving.

Yup, they're a startup, they're having problems, they're doing their best, actually managing pretty well given the circumstances.

None of that changes the fact that they can't deliver the service as expected.

"Can't deliver the service as expected" is par for the course in innovative early stage startups. Veteran tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, etc., struggled hard and failed to deliver as expected for many years. And still do. Apple computers and OSes in the 90s were unusable garbage; you spent more time twiddling extensions than actual use. Remember Windows 3.1x? It was an utter failure of an OS but the only available solution to many businesses. Time will tell how Coinbase evolves but my take is they'll continue to improve and catch up to demand.

But that's not the point here, is it?

It can't provide the level of service expected for financial services of this sort. That doesn't imply they should give up and go home, but it does mean that one should temper one's expectations of being taken fully seriously.

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