The Coinbase iOS app has launched | Hacker News Reader

The Coinbase iOS app has launched

blog.coinbase.com

70 pointsninthfrank0730 comments

This is good news, but it's important to remember that the way Coinbase works is for Coinbase to keep the private keys. A Coinbase "wallet" is really more like a Coinbase demand deposit account. That means you are trusting Coinbase to hold on to your bitcoins, thus losing one of the key benefits of bitcoin, which is that you hold your money. A better alternative is the Blockchain.info app, but from my understanding this is not available for un-jailbroken iPhones (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Correct, I go as far as to not even really consider Coinbase a wallet, even though I know that's what there shooting for. I still like using Coinbase to buy when dips occur, It's the easiest way for US residents.

Blockchain.info web interface I believe works on the iPhone, albeit It's been a while since I've been there. If you really want to embrace Bitcoin, build from source https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

Agreed... Coinbase is simply a mechanism to purchase and move Bitcoins through to my bank account. I never felt right storing coins in anything other than a paper wallet.

You can easily export and import paper wallets in the coinbase interface if you have a printer and a webcam.

When you export a wallet by printing it, what happens to the digital copy?

they delete it afaik

Sure, they say they delete it.

What's the business incentive for keeping the keys and lying about it?

Deleting things is hard. Especially if you have backups. It's much easier to set a flag saying it's deleted.

I think the key benefit of bitcoin here is that you have a choice as to who holds your bitcoin for you, as opposed to there being only one option: storing your money with a bank. You can store bitcoin with an online wallet or on your home computer, and there are risks in both cases. E.g. if you are afraid of getting hacked, or accidentally destroying your own keys (common enough to be a real concern), you may determine that storing your bitcoin with a service like Coinbase is better for you personally in your specific context.

The advantage of bitcoin is being able to have that option, not that it's always necessarily better to store bitcoin on your own.

This is good news. Congrats to Coinbase guys.

If you are new to Bitcoin apps, you may want to check out Gliph. [1]

The app lets you view your Coinbase, Blockchain.info or BIPS bitcoin wallet and send Bitcoin to people easily.

[1] https://gli.ph/ (I work on Gliph.)

Wow, I think that's a really nice looking landing page, nice work!

Wow, sweet. It seems though that the "send me a link" feature doesn't work with non-US phones? It would be nice if you had a friendler message when someone enters a non-us phone (essentially, a number beginning with "+", and not with "+1")

Coinbase already had an app... At least I had one installed from way back. It had the exact same icon and name. It was basically just a list of transactions and you couldn't take any action. Maybe they aren't counting that app. Interestingly, this new app must be using a different bundle if because I now have both Coinbase apps installed next to each other on my phone.

Am I wrong for having a moment of panic were I wondered if I had been tricked into installing an app that was not actually Coinbase's all those months ago?

You're right, this is a new version we rebuilt.

Wow. This seems like big news in the Bitcoin world to me. This means Apple is giving the green light to Bitcoin related apps in the iTunes store.

I wonder if Apple will start allowing entirely phone-based wallet apps now...

Look at the Blockchain app.

Why is it that Apple doesn't allow Bitcoin wallet applications, but does make an exception for Coinbase?

there is a blockchain app as well, and someone mentioned gliph in this thread

I'm still a novice to Bitcoin but I thought the lure of it was so that there is no way to track/audit money transactions in as far as who was involved.

The top screenshot seems to show such an audit trail. I hope it is stored on the device (never on Coinbase's servers) and only temporarily.

It's not a private wallet it's an interface to a coinbase's shared wallet obviously they track it. If you didn't want that you would use one of the many local wallets / blockchain.info's wallet.

Thanks for the info!

The blockchain is a public ledger of most every transaction made with bitcoin. It includes sending and receiving addresses and the amount transacted.

You can think of the Coinbase app as a contact book that attaches a name and face to a bitcoin address. This is exclusive to the Coinbase servers. No one else but you can see the identities of the people you have transacted with, only the addresses and amounts.

No, bitcoin has a global history of all the transactions and how much at what time was sent from what account to what other account. There is most definitly a way to track the money (ish).

However you (or anyone) can set up lots of accounts for free and unless you tell someone, people can't easily match up account to actual person.

Finally! Now when the inevitable "Coinbase is shutting down" post appears, I'll have some idea of what they're referencing...

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6573455 )

Coinbase taking over a lot of the bitcoin ecosystem makes me nervous. They seem to have great engineering skills, but have the morals of PayPal. It might be better to push for other services that seem to be pushing for the betterment of the whole bitcoin community like inputs.io

Do you have any specific examples of behavior to illustrate your low opinion of Coinbase?

Hm... this seems nice (while the Android app is just their website packed with Phonegap or something like it).

For those curious: Yes, there is already a wallet app available on the App Store called "Blockchain". It's a thin client app, which is usually more secure than using Coinbase (which keeps your private keys). It supports sending, receiving, etc. from your phone. The UI is so nice that I prefer using it to all other Bitcoin apps, be they mobile or desktop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com