The Coinbase Android App Has Launched | Hacker News Reader

The Coinbase Android App Has Launched

blog.coinbase.com

100 pointsbarmstrong31 comments

I sent Coinbase the following email:

I paid for bitcoins on Feb 27, 2013. My natural assumption was that bitcoins will be deposited into my account in the next couple of days. It did not happen: the transaction was marked "pending". After a week, I suddenly hot an email saying: "Unfortunately, we have decided to cancel this order because it appears to be high risk." I must say that this response is quite disappointing. Accusing an honest new customer excited about your new product of potential fraud as the first communication from coinbase.com is probably the worst thing a company can do for its PR. This has been a valuable lesson for me that accusing customers of fraud before they actually commit it is not a great way of promoting a new service. I saw posts to this end on news.ycombinator.com (i.e. do not use Coinbase to purchase bitcoins), but I ignored them and tried anyway...

The result was: "we have white listed your account", so now I am free to buy bitcoins at 30% more than what I wanted to. I cannot explain to them that the attitude "guilty until proven innocent" will cost them more in good will of new users long term than the actual money lost on fraud otherwise, had they relaxed their insane risk controls.

I know there's some justified suspicion on the Bitcoin forums that Coinbase are cancelling orders if the value of Bitcoins rises between you paying and them actually delivering the coins, meaning that they get to profit from any rise in the Bitcoin price whilst dumping any loss if it falls on the purchaser.

Score one for open-source apps for a for-profit company. I did something similar with my company's Android and iOS apps. They're both open-source and I have a number of users who have improved the app experience for everybody because they were both technical and inclined to improve their own experience. And it's so unlikely that a competitor will do better than you by using [a mangled form of] your app that you get to weigh the benefits as winning out over the drawbacks of open-source.

Interesting idea. I could potentially make this happen at a for-profit university, but would need to sell the idea to some executives.

Where could I read more about the risks and challenges that a company attempting to do this would face (open sourcing a customer facing app)?

Just signed up and downloaded the Android app. I saw this in your EULA:

When buying or selling bitcoin, you are buying or selling from Coinbase directly. Coinbase does not act as an intermediary or marketplace between other buyers and sellers of bitcoin.

What's the effective exchange rate for customers? You already say you take 1% of each transaction; is the exchange rate tied to the current trading price of one of the major exchanges, or are you setting that yourself (like retailers do for foreign currency)?

I imagine you're doing some of your own arbitrage, here. That's fine as long as prices keep going up. What happens if prices crash and a bunch of people put in buy orders? I assume this is where the 48hr window you give yourself to "retrieve offline funds" comes in. In that event, what price do your customers pay? The market rate when they put in the buy order, or the rate 48 hrs later when you deliver the bitcoins?

It's an intriguing and exciting service, but I fear you're either leaving yourself open to massive liability, or are going to be forced to screw over your customers in the event of rapid swings in the value of BtC.

Someone on another HN thread said that they bought some bitcoins at a certain price, price jumped by a couple of dollars and five days later Coinbase cancelled the transaction due to 'lack of supply'.

One can only assume that in the reverse case they'd have pocketed the difference. So it seems like it might be the latter.

That's unfortunate. It'd be nice to be able to buy and sell BtC with the same app I use to transfer them, but I'm not letting them use me for arbitrage just for the sake of convenience.

Didn't they already have an Android app? I'm pretty sure they had one that didn't do much, so I was using blockchain.info instead. Their app (and site) is fantastic.

EDIT: Actually, can someone tell me the advantage of Coinbase over the Blockchain wallet? The latter syncs to my Dropbox, the app is ridiculously more featureful (even has push notifications on payment receipt), and it's been around longer. I don't understand why we keep hearing about Coinbase but not Blockchain.

The iPhone app is lacking. You can only view past/current transactions. The web version of the site is way more useful as it has all of coinbase's features.

Major props on open sourcing the app! My only complaint so far is having to build with Ant, but that's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

I have to wonder how hilarious it would be to get paid in only bitcoin with the amount of volatility. Your contract starts at 10K BTC/year worth $30000 at the start, and after a year of 14000% increases you are being paid $440000 in BTC. Seems like a huge hedge would have to be built in.

The contract would be priced using paper money like USD. At least until the BTC volatility calms down.

FWIW, I've found Coinbase to be pretty decent and reliable. And definitely the open source app is a quite surprising (in best terms!) decision. I haven't seen many (good) open source Android apps out there built on the latest design specs and API…

Looks nice! Open source and with NFC, too. I could see this as being the de facto Bitcoin wallet in the (near) future.

Does anyone know if Coinbase did this in-house or if they contracted out? Just curious...

The blog post describes this at the end:

  In particular, Isaac (a Coinbase user in Canada and previous Google intern)
  sent us a nearly completed Android app totally unprompted,
  and was kind enough to open source it.

Also relevant:

"and brought him on board to continue working on it."

Sorry, I missed that. Thanks for the info. And cool that he got hired.

Not a single mention of the BTC market crash today on HN, interesting.

What market crash? I don't see it[0].

0: http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price

There was an intraday drop from $49 to $33. It later went back up to about $40. That chart isn't granular enough.

Well it's about $44 now. Not really a crash in my view.

When the stock market plunges more than a few percentage points during a single day, every publication on the planet calls it a crash. During the last "flash crash" the market recovered within minutes; it was still a crash, covered internationally and garnering its own Wikipedia page. The bitcoin market losing 33% of its value in an hour is a crash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

Call me naive and oldschool, but this is my biggest issue with bitcoin - essentially all of the coverage comes from people/groups of people with (what are now) large investments / conflicts of interest in bitcoin, so any negative (or objective) coverage is glossed over.

There don't seem to be (m)any experts looking at bitcoin either (maybe I just haven't looked) and so broader problems with the whole system aren't being raised or addressed, all of the writing and analysis that is out there seems amateurish. It's no surprise to me that aside from some minor trolling, there's no-one writing about the crash.

Cool beans. Are you monetized yet? Or, more pointedly, are you grabbing any fees from me for using this app?

You pay 1% in and out don't you? Says that on their website.

Just saw the FAQ, thanks.

Why is the camera icon blinking (GN4)?

They shouldnt allow you to buy the coins untill your funds have cleared.

Great job!

If I buy bitcoins now but it takes 10 days to be approved/settle, what price will I be locked into?

If you purchase at $30/bitcoin, and by the time the bank transaction goes through the price has risen to $32/bitcoin, you still get them for $30.

Similarly, if the price drops to $28, you still pay $30/bitcoin.

So you're locked in at the exchange rate at the time you place the order.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com