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Comment by merinowool | Hacker News Reader

But it is good to know what is coinbase's moral compass.

Less of a reading of moral compass, more of a consequence of jurisdiction.

Coinbase has been fishy from the start... For example, I placed buy orders for some Bitcoins when they dropped sharply years ago (Coinbase just started at that time) and they canceled those orders after I placed them. Now what they do is that they bring the servers down when it happens.

They did the same with Bitcoin Cash, or maybe worst... (see stories about when they first introduced bitcoin cash)

Is coinbase becoming hegemonic over cryptocurrencies? So much for decentralization.

Not at all. There's plenty of alternatives to Coinbase:

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

> Now what they do is that they bring the servers down when it happens.

That's a pretty bold allegation. Do you have any evidence that this is the case.

No. It was just such a common occurrence that I could not come to a different conclusion.

If you need many examples, look for Reddit threads that talk about Coinbase created right after Bitcoin dips.

Alternative Hanlon's razor hypothesis: the system gets an abnormal amount of traffic during large price swings and they can't cope with the demand.

Sure, maybe, but if you have been aware of the issue for a year and it's still going on 2 years later it might be considered just a good excuse... How often do you get that problem trading stocks?

I don’t buy it.

Any serious software engineer knows about the CAP theorem.

And yet they allowed me to accidentally double-sell bitcoin cash from my account, leaving me with a negative BCH balance for months now.

Nice addition to my already decently long list of why Coinbase isn't worth dealing with. Thanks.

I'm no fan of Coinbase so don't mistaken me for a shill but I've also heard of countless cases of the opposite case (e.g. order gets declined and the coin drops drastically post order, resulting in a "gain" for the person whose order got declined).

It seems reasonable that these are genuine mistakes. It seems ludicrous for Coinbase to implement order cancellation so that they can do some risk-free hedging when something like that is ripe for some serious whistleblowing.

Indeed. I’ll be moving my coins out ASAP now.

They're essentially selling shovels in a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme gold rush, collecting fees in this new found "gold" as well; and with their Earn.com acquisition, they're trying to strengthen the ecosystem to help prop up the perceived value of the crypto-assets they hold/collect.

If they block Wikileaks (=Putin's propaganda), they must be good.

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