Coinbase Leads Charge In Bitcoin’s Consumerization | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Leads Charge In Bitcoin’s Consumerization

techcrunch.com

61 pointsdsugarman20 comments

It's too bad that Coinbase is one of the harder exchanges to work with. Coinbase consistently cancel transactions right before they are supposed to go through because they "appear to be high risk". I loved Coinbase when I first used it, but Bitinstant -> Mt Gox is far more reliable.

I've had this problem and have stopped using them. Since then I've been using localbitcoins and that's been fine. It's surprising to me that after $5 million in investment they are unable to figure out transactions.

Being able to link your bank account is a big deal; everyone wins if Bitcoin becomes more "a currency you buy to buy stuff" vs. just something your speculatively hoard -- including hoarders, ironically.

How does that really work though? If you're arguing for BitCoin to become the next PayPal, in what way is it not a worse PayPal? (Fees for senders, confirmation delays, no fraud protection, etc)

How about not having your wallet locked because you failed to notify paypal that you were going to receive large amounts of money in the near future?

Bitcoin gives you flexibility that PayPal doesn't. You can't opt-out of protections that PayPal gives you in order to streamline your process; you either use PayPal or you don't. Bitcoin allows you to potentially chose any number of companies to provide services to you, or just roll your own solution.

Bitcoin transaction fees are a tiny fraction of the amount of fees PayPal charges. Confirmation takes about an hour and there is no possibility of chargebacks. As far as fraud protection, if you purchase groceries with cash what kind of protection do you have? Hopefully the reputation and integrity of the seller is enough in most cases. If you can't trust someone, use an escrow service (which still costs less than PayPal fees).

The main problem I see with BTC as compared to PayPal is that transactions can't be cancelled, as they are added into the blockchain.

You consider it a problem others see it as a feature

There are probably ways for "wallet providers" to retrofit much of the problems with base bitcoin, including the ones you mention.

But then it's not Bitcoin. It's another fucking dodgy 3rd party payment provider.

Point is you always have the option of sending the old fashioned way if you want. You don't have to use a 3rd party unless there's a specific function they provide for certain specific cases that you want. You don't have that option with regular money. You have to use some service to transfer money for you.

You can't have fraud protection without a 3rd party.

Of course, but 3rd parties are not all the same. Bitcoin 3rd parties have historically been incredibly untrustworthy.

I tried adding a Coinbase button to one of my sites a few days ago, but it took ages to load the JavaScript button.

Maybe one of their next moves should be finding a fast CDN for such stuff.

I still could not get my head around, what happens when Coinbase are hacked and i have no way to trace back the money i lose.

Awesome to hear! Congrats to Brian and Fred

I can't see myself using Coinbase after hearing they had directory indexing on the directory with all the payment confirmations. Others may see past this, but for me it's an unforgivable mistake on their part.

They weren't payment confirmations - they were public merchant checkout pages that were linked from other pages on the internet.

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/47198421272/data-on-merchant-p...

We just saw the US Government shut down the Dwolla to MtGox link. What's keeping Coinbase from having the same problem here? Is Coinbase doing more proper reporting under PATRIOT rules and etc?

Bitcoin is going to go up in flames, and all these people buying worthless bits are going to be out quite a bit of money.

And many will laugh, because we all told you so.

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