Coinbase is a hot mess

The author here is clearly biased, having publicly declared blockchain to be useless [0] and having made bets against crypto [1][2]. It seems like his motivation here is to smear Coinbase for issues incurred by their payment processor.

[0] - https://glennchan.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/blockchain-is-a-u...

[1] - https://glennchan.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/betting-against-t...

[2] - https://glennchan.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/some-ways-to-shor...

I'm not quite sure why this is trending, as it feels more than a bit like conspiracy mongering: "one of the world’s most popular and reputable exchanges is borrowing money from consumers (without their permission) to stave off a liquidity crisis."

Really? Payment processor troubles and an increase in complaints, especially amidst rapid growth and volatility combined with growing interest in cryptocurrencies from largely uniformed consumers, doesn't obviously strike me as a sign of malicious behaviour. Lots of weighty allegations, but no real evidence. All legitimate signs I've seen point to Coinbase being one of the only reputable and law-abiding exchanges in the business, with recent backing from major VCs and banks who would not abide by the type of shadiness this blogger suggests.

(I say this as someone with no skin in the game: I have no ties to any cryptocurrency businesses, and possess a grand total of 0.073 BTC.)

No one has mentioned it yet, so here it is. If you don't control your private keys, you don't control your bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency). Hardware wallets are easy to use. Of course you still have to physically secure hardware wallets, but at least you're in complete control of screwing that up.

I have been trying to get a low 4 figure amount of money transferred from my Coinbase/GDAX account to some bank account I control since January 27th. The first one failed because the first name on my 25 year old bank account was my nickname and not my official legal name. Ok, fine. After 9-11 we all need to make sure that our names are all the same everywhere and never change. But this has never been a problem for me before.

Then the transfer to my other bank account also failed. I can't say for sure why, as they never tell you what the problem is specifically, but I think it is because my other bank account does not have my middle name. First and last name match exactly. On further inspection, the Coinbase site has Legal Name with only two boxes and my first and middle name are put in the first box. Does this mean my first name has been incorrectly entered by Coinbase?

Also, giving my banking account name and password is not something I have done for any other site online ever. If I knew that was required for transferring funds to my checking account, I would have likely not have signed up.

Hopfully this gets cleared up at some point. Now that the price of bitcoin is not skyrocketing, they should have some slowdown in new accounts and can catch up a bit on the service side.

This guy needs to take a Stats 101 class. Taking a biased sample of Reddit posts and claiming that it must equate a liquidity crisis at the world's largest crypto exchange? Please.

80% of the problems Coinbase and every other exchange has are dealing with "Finance 1.0" banks & payment processors who still move funds around by having their employees manually type in numbers and sending transfer records via FTP. Seriously.

In a sense, Coinbase and other exchanges are moving money out of the traditional (fragmented) banking system and into a digital one. That takes friction and dealing with fragmented systems.

And personally I'd trust Coinbase over any of the other ones any day of the week. Have you dealt with Kraken/Poloniex/etc? Terrifying.

Integrating payment is one of the most complex work to be done and operate, so yes this will fail every once in a while. In particular across different banks in the world. Coinbase must have grown 10-50x times last year so yes keeping your systems performant will be hard. Are you trying to go short on Coinbase?

How likely is it that Coinbase has blown through their latest $100m funding round in under a year? https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase#section-fun...

>... one of the world’s most popular and reputable exchanges ...

Honest question: is it really? Every time I've peeked at Coinbase stuff over the years I've steered very clear. They seemed alright ~2+ years ago, but not since, and oh heck yeah does it look like amateur hour. It's far and away the most well-known from what I've seen, but in the bitcoin world that rarely equates to "works at all".

Anyone know of any alternatives that seem alright? Gemini is on my radar since they seem to be doing things by the book, but I really haven't looked closely enough yet.

Yeah my phone number was forced to change after my phone bricked now its like a season in hell trying to get them to let me back into my account. Authy 2 factor authentication is super painful why can't they hook into my google account, google has sane and functional 2 factor authentication. Authy is so painful to work with.