Coinbase’s philosophy on account removal and content moderation
blog.coinbase.com
blog.coinbase.com
Yes, they actually said that.
But let's look at Trading View for example. A social network built around trading software. They already have tight integrations with a few brokers, what if they did their own orders?
I'm no fan of Coinbase but this is a weak argument.
Plus, this helps decentralize in two ways:
Firstly, it lessens monopoly power over the NFT space by OpenSea.
Secondly, Coinbase itself is now introducing its first web product with decentralized logins.
This is good for decentralization, not bad.
Feels much safer than open sea which is constantly hacked and I trust more than GameStop who says they are also launching and NFT store.
These relatively new technologies and structures have consequences that we're only just beginning to understand, so it's no wonder that laws are lagging.
People all in here claim to be "anti-authority" and "anti-fascist" but can't resist their impulse to control others' behavior.
Coinbase is a business, and the primary goal of a business is to win ... financially.
Any tool or approach that furthers that is to be embraced.
It's not a moral or ethical argument, it's strictly financial.
And this isn't Coinbase's doing, it's the game that the Western world (particularly the USA) has dictated.
All Coinbase is doing is being better at playing that game.
This is simply one of the purest manifestations of the ethos of Corporate America ... voted into power by the good ol' citizens of the US of A.
Trading-view does integration with brokers because it earns affiliate money.
Coinbase does sharing of orders or whatever to hype pump and dump and expose they did it through Coinbase.
That's literally not on the same league.
They hired more moderators to no avail and ultimately shut them down.
> One of the most valuable features for institutions is the Terminal’s Enterprise IB Chat. This is essentially a Terminal-wide chat function that allows traders to chat with brokers, portfolio managers to talk with each other, or simply for intra-firm communication, perhaps to run something by compliance.
In short - yes. The chat rooms create a shared space and the ability to influence the opinion of others.
Not saying everyone should jump into crypto, just be aware that most things without physical value are based on confidence. Which I’m sure you understand.
- Gold is a naturally occurring substance and, while not abundant, exists in many parts of the world.
- Gold is inert.
- Gold is not radioactive
- Gold is durable, but malleable.
This is really not the only difference. As Elon Musk recently said, the government has a "monopoly on violence" and acts as an authority that arbitrates disputes (up to and including between countries), works to ensure proper controls and regulations through laws, etc., all of which helps to underpin the value of the currency. Cryptocurrencies are backed by no central authority with these powers.
Also important is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. It has social license by virtue of exercising violence to uphold social order. In the case of the economy that means its macroeconomic management to ensure stability and the public good. Clearly crypto woefully fails by that standard.
1. The vast majority of account terminations for individual (not public-facing) services by financial platforms is linked to KYC, AML, and other risks; banks don't wait for the government to tell them to shut down an account, they do so preemptively if they detect "suspicious behavior". There's plenty of stories of people with "unusual transactions" (e.g. freelancers who receive a few thousand £/$ in deposit) and get suspended by Revolut, with support that refuses to talk to them, because Revolut wants to cover their ass and ban people proactively even without hard evidence of fraud. You probably know someone who's been banned from a bank for "suspicious behavior" who don't even know why they were banned. Anyone who hung out around Bitcoin subreddits a few years ago has heard stories of this happening with Coinbase. The risk for Coinbase users isn't politically-motivated bans, it's bans for "no reason in particular".
2. They link to Cloudflare's famous "Why We Terminated Daily Stormer" article as further readings; but Coinbase terminated Daily Stormer months earlier than Cloudflare, for (presumably) an infrastructure, non-public-facing product. Presumably Daily Stormer didn't violate US laws. Here, they claim to only terminate private-facing infrastructure for illegal activity, so this marketing post about their "philosophy" doesn't seem to match their behavior.
Why?
In the TOS they (Coinbase) state your crypto will always be your crypto. You are free to withdraw at any time. That's BS. Not only was I told to FO by coinbase support but they said any further contact would result in the exact same answer (FO).
That said, I had a large ( like 2k usd) deposit (in ETH so no fiat) so I wasn't giving up. Was about to post on Reddit, or elsewhere but they finally unfroze my account after a month.
Most people in crypto don't use Coinbase except maybe the whales because there are incentives for whales. Smaller players get screwed.
"Section 230: Mend It, Don’t End It" https://medium.com/craft-ventures/section-230-mend-it-dont-e...
Which calls for corrections to the "liability shield" for platforms that host user-generated content, such that they remain shielded if they limit user-generated speech in line with First Amendment principles. The pitch is that 1A principles are more uniform and well-understood, as compared with each companies' own views on what constitutes "objectionable content".
I suspect it's a bit more like "hey, in case you haven't noticed, intermediaries' role is a pretty hot debate lately, as indicated by this range of views about it".
(Thanks for the tofu!)
E.g. pretty much any communication medium will (try to) ban spammers, even if 'spamming' is legal.
A liability shield isn’t much of a shield if every content moderation decision is potential liability under the extremely murky standard of American constitutionality.
Feature, not a bug. The concept of living law is one of the most important contributions of english common law to humanity.
The constitution and the court system with its legalistic approach if anything contradict living law, which is precisely law not by means of constitutions, statutes or courts.
I don't see how they have any other choice, and only having the walled garden effect the walled garden is more than a lot of other platforms are willing to do.
If you are an international customer you have ZERO support despite being able to sign up, make transfers and trading.
I don't recommend Coinbase to anyone outside the US.
Their ToS of course allows them to terminate an account at any time for no reason. Their support staff keep saying that I violated the ToS, but they can't specify which one because of course they have no option in their system for someone who was terminated for NO violation of their ToS.
Generally those get treated seriously by financial entities.
Guess who never reached out to me to ask why my bank was returning transactions? My employers.
When I called them to ask what had happened, their "Fraud Research & Gap Analysis" VP was shocked that this only caused a mild inconvenience to me (mainly because I split my payroll between a bank and a local credit union) and then pressed me to get the name of my credit union.
But what happened?? The suspense!
They closed my accounts, which, is something that they can do in the terms and conditions that you agree to when you sign up for an account. They did not disclose to me where the money in my checking account went to, because, according to them, they did not have to.
I realize that 40K isn't a lot to some folks on here, but, it was the money that I had set aside to go and do a fun project after COVID-19 had subsided (here we are, two years later): if the bank does something with your money that it doesn't have to a.) disclose what they did with it, and b.) be judge, jury, and executioner with it, I'm not sure a lot of folks would really appreciate that.
In the end, I was out 40K-ish, a few hours of my time, and a reply from the CFPB that didn't really solve my issue.
I can make more money.
I can't make more time.
People don't just get terminated for no reason.
Either you were doing something sketchy or you were acting in a behavior that is similar to previous fraud/criminal behavior.
I'm a legitimate customer and my credit card has been flagged for fraud numerous times at large companies (Steam, PayPal, eBay etc). Often temporarily, however.
(source: have worked in various fraud/risk departments)
“We can’t tell you what evidence we used to convict you because that would mean criminals can adjust their operations accordingly”
And then you hear someone say “people don’t get convicted for no reason”
I have no idea if the OP did or did not act fraudulently and I’m aware that we are talking about a private and not a government entity here.
After that all their support would tell me is that I need to call FedEx and trick them into changing the status on the package to "undelivered" and they would happily do a chargeback for me.
Once we had gone back and forth on this a few times they said they had decided it was better to just terminate my account.
Are we really ok with throwing away due process because it might help the criminals? Sure nobody needs that game but access to money services is a bit different. And what you also never hear about is being refunded for all the content paid for in the blocked account.
After working in risk and fraud, I've seen some truly horrifying stuff. An elderly woman threatened physically if she didn't let the attacker drain her bank account. Huge scams for thousands of dollars. Organized crime rings fleecing millions of dollars. Identity theft. On and on.
I would wager that society would accept some level of errors in exchange for drastically reduced criminal activity that actually hurts people.
Legitimate people getting blocked inadvertently are rare, and often of the stories you hear on HN and Reddit and other places, a good portion of these "innocent victims" are actually doing sketchy stuff when you dig into it.
Justice isn't and cannot be an exact science. Society agrees and accepts the risk.
In my experience, false positives in fraud and risk models are lower than 1%.
With GDPR such automated decision making can be stopped, and entities fined if not. Unless there's a big ol' exception for anything that falls under banking security & fraud.
Funny though - I tried to transfer the funds to my other Square account and it said "We cannot transfer funds to Square because of their excessive fees." WTF.
Americans are such a fragile, precious people. Second they feel slighted it becomes this stupid parade.
Meanwhile, your civil liberties and rights are being stripped by the people telling you bullshit like Facebook is the one treading on you.
You just can't write narratives like this
* The first amendment does not consider “hate speech” to be fighting words.
* The first amendment does protect falsehoods. The case mentioned from the 1970s was recently overruled.
The exceptions to the first amendment they mentioned are narrower than they are portraying them as.
It’s fine to use the first amendment as “inspiration” or a starting point. But please create your own list of exceptions.
Those exceptions are the point where you can be imprisoned, not kicked off a platform.
I think it is odd for Coinbase to actually have any carvout for a guiding principle levied globally. This seems at odds with their prior stance, but with the user generated content in their NFT marketplace it looks like they expect to have an issue. They literally probably are preparing a campaign with a bunch of divisive characters that exude opposing messages.
Not an expert, but I think, stable coins (including government-issued digital currency) and global payment rails built on top of it are going to be that killer financial app. And their proliferation the catalyst behind mainstream adoption of trading real-world commodities and assets on "defi" platforms.
So is AirBnb, but they have a content policy. It applies to any content you post anywhere.
I had my Coinbase accounts canceled more than 5 years ago. Despite my merchant account with them processing over 1MM USD a year in BTC, they refused to tell me why they terminated my merchant and personal account.
At the time, I was buying physical giftcards in bulk from official wholesale distributors for 90c on the dollar, scanning and OCR'ing the redemption codes, and was selling those for the BTC equivalent of $1.05 on the dollar.
At the time, some of those merchants had their own plans for digital giftcard distribution and said they didn't want to be associated with cryptocurrencies. I ignored their pressure because I was staying true to the law in regards to various resale doctrines.
I suspect some of the larger merchants pressured their financial partners to represent them and put pressure on Coinbase.
I didn't mind writing my own bespoke payment processing system to replace them, but the loss of an easy USD <-> BTC gateway did make life quite a bit harder. Since my move to NY, it's been even more difficult because there are few companies that are allowed to operate here.
Isn’t this kind of thing usually associated with criminal behaviour? Why would somebody buy $1 of gift cards for $1.05 worth of Bitcoin instead of using an exchange? Seems like the main appeal is avoiding KYC laws that the exchanges follow isn’t it?
Because the description 100% sounds like you were buying stolen gift cards in bulk.
In our case, the arbitrage operators would try to extract the money themselves by using gift cards to buy goods that retain value well (Apple products, gaming consoles etc) to resell. The company is taking a hit, but it's often not outright theft. Technically, they're just savvy customers.
As for this case, it sounds like he's buying from genuine wholesale distributors who get gift cards from below face value anyway.
Retail outlets would never agree to sell gift cards without clipping the ticket, therefore they aren't paying $100 for the $100 gift card they sell you.
This is a perfect example of the old adage, we lose on every gift card sold but we make it up in the long run.
Imagine,
Customer buys $100 gift card
Customer gifts gift card.
Recipient buys $89.99 worth of stuff
Recipient never returns to reclaim $10.01
Gift card expires
Company writes value of unused gift card off their books as profit.
There is a reason gift cards are popular, it’s a money making machine. There’s probably a stat out there but from memory 30% of the value of gift cards goes unclaimed.
Even if it was a few percent more, it's cool to be an early adopter of technology. I got all my bitcoins back then for free from mining anyway, so who cares? free games!