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Comment by metaverse | Hacker News Reader

It's possible that they've been undercharging for their service, and as a result have simply run out of cash. With the recent price growth, their buy price sometimes fails to catch up with the current exchanges rates, resulting in losses for them that their fee of 1% does not cover for.

My friends trying Coinbase have raised concerns about the long delays as well, and I have a bitcoin transfer to my personal wallet that's been pending for multiple days. This needs to be resolved quickly to keep Coinbase and Bitcoins reputation.

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...their buy price sometimes fails to catch up with the current exchanges rates...

This is an existential flaw in their business. Why don't they just reject transactions at expired prices? (If they wanted to be slightly more evil, they could do this in one direction only.)

Or just raise more money hoping that the price of a bitcoin will stabilize in the near future. Their current system is very convenient for users.

I wouldn't characterize the experiences of the customers on this thread as "convenient". If a commodity-trading system works except in cases of 2-sigma volatility, then the system doesn't work.

I'm just responding to metaverse's reasonable hypothesis here. Coinbase ought to diminish speculation by providing information, unless there are legal reasons for them not to do so.

>Or just raise more money hoping that the price of a bitcoin will stabilize in the near future.

Using a business model entirely dependent on the best case scenario would not be wisest play they could make. Even if BTC did stabilize, we now know market prices like this are not guassian but fractal/power-law based. Infrequent but sudden unexpected extreme volatility is a natural characteristic of such systems.

A better idea would be to develop a business model that at least expects that and does not fail when it happens, or at best exploits it.

>This needs to be resolved quickly to keep Coinbase and Bitcoins reputation.

Bitcoin's reputation has survived much worse. Mt.Gox hacking, Bitcoinica hacking, and several others. Bitcoin has intrinsic value independent of the private company infrastructure that springs up around it, no matter the foibles of the latter.

Coinbase's reputation on the other hand, is another matter.

I don't think that exchange rates/fees is it. I've had some purchased coins in my coinbase account for over a month. Tried two days ago to transfer to an external wallet. Still pending. That shouldn't have to go through any cost really to transfer it right?

Seems unlikely. From their blog yesterday:

  This is probably as good a time as any to mention 
  that if you are in SF and are an awesome software 
  engineer, we’re hiring: https://coinbase.com/jobs

Companies that are running out of cash tend not to hang big, "we're hiring" signs in the window.

Companies that want to give the impression that they are thriving also hang "we're hiring" signs.

This will affect the response they get from "awesome software engineers in SF", even if they are actually thriving.

If they're letting you "lock in" a buy price and then waiting for the incoming funds transfer to settle up, then they must be floating funds somehow, right? It might also explain the whole "we can only sell so many Bitcoins in a 24 hour window" thing.

I'm wondering if this has bitten them really hard during the runup.

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