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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution.

That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.

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I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.

But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.

That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day.

It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?

But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.

It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.

You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the business is partly illegal and bookkeeper is cooking the books. Therefore they don't even notice honest mistakes. I have seen same thing happening over and over again. People don't care about money. And this is business as usual.

Reconciliation is a fundamental operational procedure of financial entities. It's how they find system failures, process failures, fraud, etc. You take feeds from various systems and correlate them. It's not super complex, but it is fundamental.

I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.

You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks.

No way. Not on fin-co ops.

That's like a car tire store without a pressure guage in shop.

If this is really is business as usual, then it might be acceptable for a widget selling company but completely unacceptable for financial services. In financial services the same actions that you describe are gross negligence that (depending on jurisdiction) can mean personal liability, possibly including criminal charges, for the relevant CxOs, and a lifetime ban from running any other financial companies in future. You can't entrust consumer's money to companies being run like that, it's pure nonsense.

You think that Goldman Sachs, for example, had exactly 263,674,000,000.00 of cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2012? You don't think that's likely rounded to at least the million?

In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.

Auditing standards at large banks have a materiality threshold. At a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, that threshold approaches half a billion. But that's at the top layer, on top of many other layers of accounting. At the level of individual customer accounts, even small discrepancies would be caught.

Any sort of financial account should be ACID safe. You can't just receive money on one end, and then it magically doesn't enter a client's account.

Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.

Except things like ATMs are not. They use eventual consistency.

Very few financial systems are ACID. Why do people still think banks run on bloody MySQL?

I love a non-sequitur as much as the next giraffe, but what does banks using MySQL have to do with banks choosing not to go ACID?

Nothing at all other than the ever surfacing assumption by a lot of people that financial traffic is done on ACID like principles (rather than eventual consistency which it actually is). MySQL was a random example as should have been somewhat obvious.

MySQL is a random example of financial traffic not following ACID principles? I still don't understand.

Is this a reference to MySQL, pre-InnoDB, not being ACID compliant? InnoDB's been around for a decade and has been the default database engine for years.

That makes no sense. It is self-regulation. Balancing the books is in their best interest.

You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.

I'm keen to learn more about self regulating free markets. Please provide an example.

I saw somebody today snarking about Bitcoins being Dunning Krugerrands. Coinbase appears to be making their point for them.

Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs.

Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.

That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.

Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo.

Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations.

Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.

Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.

As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel.

No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.

Yeah, so, you don't work on financial infrastructure. That stuff is almost exclusively eventually consistent. And I wasn't arguing that you should use MongoDB or anything else instead. Merely that claims that ACID is the holy grail of financial software is a myth propagated by people that do not know how international financial traffic works.

> Auditors will "find"

Does Coinbase have external auditors?

MtGox is something like 5 months behind in withdrawls with no confirmed date of when it will occur. I'm waiting on $600 since beginning of Sept...

If this is not some sort of error, MtGox is a ponzi scheme.

I can't remember where I read this and I don't remember all the details, however: As I understand the problem is mainly with USD withdrawals to USA, and the problem is not with MtGox but rather with the bank they use having some legacy issues and that they can only process X transactions a day in batch. Or something to that effect.

For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.

No. The joke is that people are demanding a product so badly that theyre doing business with kiddies who dont know how to run a financial institution.

This is literally an economy of "shut up and take my money," but no one wants to play ball.

I know this is bad, but financial institutions haven't exactly been reliable, honest, faultless or good, particularly the last few years. My own experiences have been bad, but the world still hasn't pulled out of the hole that the financial industry dug, so I'm pretty well off and lucky if I'm compare myself to the average. I'd suggest a different standard to hold this company to.

Having spent some time in financial institutions, I can only agree with lastlogin's point. It's important to remember that there are many such mistakes in large financial institutions every day.

If I could post on yc and quickly get a response from my bank, I'd be a happy customer.

One time I had almost 1 million extra dollars show up in my Waterhouse Brokerage account. I thought, "huh, that's interesting." It disappeared 4 days later.

Yup, it wasn't as much, but I magically had 10k show up after I made a deposit through a bank teller that stayed there for 2 weeks before finally disappearing.

My father withdrew cash from an ATM a while back, he got less than he asked for but had the asked for amount deducted from his account. He complained. The manager of the bank nodded knowingly when he complained. He wasn't believed. He was told that at the end of the month they would do a stocktake and see. Some months later it was credited back. This is about the best of my bad banking stories. The time our deposit for a house got lost was stressful several years of hard hard saving vanished during a transaction.

I suppose that even with this, bitcoin banks still appear to be far more reputable establishments at the moment than say, either RBS or the Co-op, unless Rob Ford has founded one recently.

Wait! One of the founders was a currency trader at GS?! Doesn't that make them trustworthy?

0. This is exactly why auditing (internal and external) and settlement processes exist elsewhere. But it's impossible to have a startup deploy every single control at the very beginning. There are costs (time & money) to get things done, those control don't just magically appear. Eventually, with scale, the growing pains of business process debt (like technical debt) will come due. That's a good thing, because building every single control into an experimental venture that might not survive could be a very big waste. Just like a successful venture is a series of experiments, the business side gets built incrementally. As a company gets bigger (whether $ or buzz), it's susceptibility to being targeted increases because the bulleye on its back gets larger.

1. Let's suppose I employ an old gambit: process a large transaction through CoinBase, receive the coins and say "I never received them." I'm sure they have at least enough controls in place to avoid double-credit fraud.

Giving coins for USD is their primary use case. Monitoring transactions should be the only control they have in place if they must cut corners.

As a coinbase customer and someone who manages a team and large complex distributed systems, this is an oversight I would not expect from an industry leader and makes me nervous to continue doing transactions with coinbase.

How can we be made comfortable that this won't happen again? $50 isn't the root cause fix and could have cost the OP $15,000 due to the delay. What if those BTC was going to be used to make a purchase? He is left holding the bag, leaving a sour taste.

Coinbase is ultimately a double-ended marketplace. But to add more complexity to the fire, one's own systems count as yet another source of truth. So what the sellers say, what buyers say and what we say have to reconciled. It's these reconciliation processes that are the hard part...

I've had to deal with micropayment reconciliation for a minor handset mfgr (multiple currencies, payment processors, timezones, products, on and on). Sometimes the credit card processor up and changes the API without notice, and a whole slew of payments have to rerun. This is where fields in the local reconcilation db start to creep in and all sort of weird flags get made. What the heck is flag F? (IOTW, document the heck out of the db schema AND have lots^10 unit tests.)

A customer of bitcoin shouldnt have to care if the service you provide is hard. In fact, thats why they come to you in the first place.

Complaining about the complexities does not instill faith that you have a solid grasp on your product. Tell me you dont work at coinbase, please.

Agreed. The biggest growth area in banking and finance is compliance & legal. A startup doesn't have the financial resources to make a bulletproof compliance and customer service department.

That is the same thing that shocked me when I run into a bunch of different entrepreneurs in the last few weeks, creating local exchanges here, bitcoin ATM, thinking about colored coins and interesting transactions enabled by bitcoin.... and when I talk with them about the technical side, they never even know how a transaction is verified, what are bitcoin scripts, how the network works in general.... I know that I know quite little about bitcoin and it confounds me that people honestly believe they can get away with not knowing how things work. Due diligence, man!

And a majority of the (previous) big players have been compromised on more than one occasion. It's a big kindergarden.

The wild west of currency, with everything that entails.

> We have no idea of their technical expertise

why, we do - a team who could quickly build a rails app and connect it to third party payment processor.)

Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place or organizations that assess companies like this and determine whether their transactions complete and such. The downside of the Bitcoin market, pretty much.

> Likewise, unlike banks, there is no legal system in place

There may not be a well-developed specialized regulatory system in place with authority over some bitcoin firms, but in most of the places that bitcoin firms operate there is a legal system in place, and entering into a sale contract, accepting payment, and then failing to deliver the product is the kind of thing that is well within the scope of competence of most of those legal systems.

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