Take it EASY everyone! They made a mistake, took responsibility for the error, resolved the issue, and compensated the user for his inconvenience. Good for them!
1) stopped replying to support emails even though there was a clear issue
2) only addressed the issue when the victim decided to submit his issue to HN (and only after it sat on the front page for nearly an hour
3) blamed a server upgrade and offered $50 of BTC when the actual loss was well north of $12K
4) only made the customer whole after many HN comments pointing out that the offer was paltry compared to the loss (and that they may potentially be pocketing the difference)
I applaud them for resolving the issue in a way that the victim wanted: "deliver the coins at the exact market price that they are at the moment you are crediting the account". However, this and similar issues in the past have raised red flags that haven't be adequately addressed:
A) why did customer support go dark? I suspect the reaction would be different if they were more proactive
B) as mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930748 , why doesn't Coinbase have the infrastructure to detect these issues? This is really basic accounting, and if they can't get it right on a small scale why would anyone trust them with more money?
C) what steps were taken to prevent this from happening in the future? I imagine that there will be more server upgrades as Coinbase expands.
D) What is their future policy regarding similar issues? Based on their initial reaction, one should not expect much if any compensation.
E) Will it take an HN post in the future to get their attention?
And looking back at some of the comments in a conversation from 270 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985) it seems that Coinbase hasn't actually learned from the previous issues.
I think joezydeco said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985
> You have a company trying to start up in a very tough space where you need to be super-reliable and super-transparent. Coinbase's actions this entire week were neither.
That part only happened after many people criticized the original response: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930109)
> Edit: your bitcoin credit has now been processed. It looks like as we were performing server upgrades last week a handful of jobs didn't run as normal. We should have certainly caught it and responded sooner so that was our fault. My deepest apologies for the delay and trouble on that. We've credited $50 worth of bitcoin to your account for the trouble, as a small way of saying thank you for bearing with us.
This was understood to mean that Coinbase would honor the original price (868.91) and not the current price. The general impression was that Coinbase made the purchase at the current price (roughly 550) and is honoring the other price (868.91), which would mean that OP lost about (868.91-550)*40 = 12756.40 (and Coinbase would be pocketing the difference).
People correctly noted that Coinbase's move was entirely inappropriate, and they were forced to change course (note the "Edit2"):
> Edit2: we'll push through the bitcoin credit at today's price instead of the original buy price (which should be in your favor) since the mistake was on our part.
The general policy with most financial firms is that firm errors should be resolved in a way that benefits the customer (so in this case, if BTC actually increased in price, Coinbase should honor the original trade price)