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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Note the title is a bit misleading. They say 650,000 users but the next sentence they state

> "we crossed more than 650,000 consumer Bitcoin wallets"

I'm not familiar with their service but I have 20 or so wallets that I've accumulated over the past 20 months, so I'm guessing its entirely possible for a single user to have multiple wallets, infact its so common that I'd label it the norm.

I wonder what percentage of their users, and wallets hold any bitcoins?

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You have 20 Coinbase wallets? Unlike regular bitcoin wallets, there's no reason to have more than one Coinbase wallet. A Coinbase wallet can have an unlimited number of Bitcoin addresses and it is generally tied to a real name with a bank account and/or credit card for purchasing and selling bitcoins.

You don't really have a choice in some cases. Coinbase creates new wallets for referrals and maybe other transactions rather than use the existing wallet

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Coinbase does not create new wallets for any transaction. It creates new bitcoin addresses, but all addresses are contained in one wallet.

Fair enough. Wrong word usage but I think thats what the original commentator meant. If not, my fault. That said, unless you have multiple Coinbase accounts, then I fail to see how you could have multiple wallets if they are not synonymous with addresses

What is the point of having multiples of any wallet? Which wallet would be less effective on its own? Don't they all produce a sufficient (indefinite?) number of pseudorandom addresses?

You might want multiple wallets for security reasons. For example, you could have one wallet on your phone for everyday transactions, and a separate wallet on a computer that's normally disconnected from the internet (a "cold wallet"). You can also store bitcoin wallets on USB keys or even on paper and put them in safe deposit boxes. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage

Since all Coinbase wallets are the same in terms of security properties, there's no reason for an individual to have more than one Coinbase wallet.

Having hot wallets and cold wallets separated does make a lot of sense.

Probably to avoid people associating ownership to one person as easily?

If you're worried about the association of your wallet with your identity, then almost all of Coinbase's services are off limits to you. There would be little reason to create a Coinbase account.

Coinbase use things like font fingerprinting to identify their users. Having multiple accounts is useless.

You probably mean you have 1 wallet, containing 20 Bitcoin addresses.

Not sure why Coinbase uses the terminology "consumer Bitcoin wallet", but it is pretty clear they mean "user accounts", where each account is associated to 1 wallet, each containing possibly multiple addresses.

Presumably to differentiate them from "business Bitcoin wallets".

https://coinbase.com/merchants

From what I can tell as a Coinbase user, for someone to have multiple wallets they would need to have multiple user accounts. Ie: each user account has 1 wallet.

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