Coinbase to Waive All Fees on 11/29/13 in Support of Bitcoin Black Friday | Hacker News Reader

13 in Support of Bitcoin Black Friday

blog.coinbase.com

42 pointsmiles16 comments

Actually buying Bitcoin on Coinbase takes 3-4 business days for the bank transaction to clear and for you to have the Bitcoins to spend.

Unless you have Bitcoins already most people won't be able to participate in Bitcoin Black Friday deals.

Is this true? I am a coinbase customer and I've read that new customers can get their first 1BTC instantly, and they can process more instant transactions if they tie their account to a credit card.

I've never tried it (I'm not in that big of a hurry) but I did get that impression quite strongly. You can have a 3-4 day wait, or you can submit additional identification details and get the delay removed.

You can link your credit card and get your first BTC instantly. This is a new(ish) feature and I've not tried it but I do remember seeing it.

I tried purchasing part of a bitcoin on coin base last week, and 3-4 business days is generous. It says I'm going to get my coins tomorrow, a full week after putting in the order. I was incredibly disappointed by this, but there is nothing to do about it.

I'm not sure of the timeline of what you did, but you can appreciate at least that they're giving you the market rate at the time you bought it (right? I also remember about a week ago reading a message on coinbase that they were over their buy limit, and in order to buy right then you had to agree to pay the market rate at the time of delivery)

Cause right now, it's looking like you made approximately loan-shark many dollars off of however many coins you bought at coinbase, that you're getting tomorrow, for which your bank probably still has not debited your account.

Yes, you make a good point. I did get the market rate back then. The only problem here is that I had different expectations, and expected a more immediate turn around. I'm not sure if waiting a week is really sustainable as a purchasing platform, but I'm also sure as time goes by, that time will decrease.

Yeah, every time I look at my bitcoins and their value I think "that's way too high, I'm not buying at that price" but I hold out and don't sell, and every new day that comes it seems like the prior day would have been a great time to buy. I don't think this momentum is sustainable either, but I'll tell you one thing: I'd be a rich man (at least I'd be out of debt) if I had bought more bitcoins instead of spending the ones I had on preorder mining equipment from Butterfly Labs.

Not having fees is great... having a sane API would be much better.

What changes would you like to see?

Craig, is the zero-charge for bitcoins purchased with dollars? If so, is it applied when we place the order on Friday, or when the order is executed by coinbase?

1. Separate private and publishable keys (like Stripe does).

2. Get rid of the "create a payment page" nonsense and just let me send someone to http://www.coinbase.com/payme?mykey=FOO&amount=10.00&currenc...

Wasn't bitcoin founded on the belief that it should be a currency free from transactional fees? Oh the irony of this Bitcoin Black Friday schtick!

They charge commission when the transaction involves dollars. Bitcoin-only transactions are free.

There are little to no fees when making a transaction on the bitcoin network. But companies like Coinbase that buy or sell bitcoins are free to charge fees to cover their cost of operations.

You can not use them and build everything yourself, so I think we're ok.

No one promised free transactions. Bitcoin miners compete for transaction fees while transaction makers compete between each other for a place in the blockchain. Miners are interested in accomodating as many txs as possible (at least, to increase value of BTC as a whole which affects their own earning), but network latency limits the growth (too big blocks would have higher chance to become orphans if they propagate too slowly).

Bitcoin is a free market of validators and transaction-makers who try to find the lowest possible fees to support the most profitable operation for everyone.

PS. Hard-coded block size limit is not approached yet and will be raised by majority of miners when they see huge demand in transactions. If they don't they are undermining the value of the whole network and thus the value of their earnings.

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