Mint now lets users keep track of their Bitcoins | Hacker News Reader

Mint now lets users keep track of their Bitcoins

thenextweb.com

100 pointsplingamp73 comments

This integration is NOT SECURE.

Mint asks for your API key, which Coinbase implements rather poorly. Your API key will grant any application FULL ACCESS to your Coinbase account, so if Mint gets compromised, the attacker can send your Bitcoin to another account. And Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.

Yes, you do give Mint your bank account credentials, but if someone steals your username/password and use it to send a transaction, you can get it reversed.

Mint can easily fix this by using Coinbase's OAuth API instead of using an API Key, which allows for selective permissions (read-only) to be set.

Why do they need Coinbase? Just give them your address, which is public information anyhow.

I think if you are using an exchange your coins are not really in a known address. The exchange probably stores your coins, along with others, in many of its wallets.

However I do see how the ledger comes into play for your personal coin addresses. That is actually a powerful concept and pretty cool.

From a Mint perspective adding meta-data for coin transactions would be a good start to help categorize coin spends/receives. Another approach would be well known receive address sets. For example 'Grocery Store X' would have one (or multiple) well known 'receive addresses' that Mint could categorize appropriately.

The coins in your address should be "mostly" visible to Mint - your address is still a public address even if it's hostd at Coinbase. However, that said, any internal Coinbase-to-Coinbase transfers don't hit the public blockchain (for a number of reasons) so if you have a lot of those then your balance would be incorrect. Any transfers from outside of Coinbase to your address or from your address to outside of Coinbase would be visible on the public blockchain.

At Coinbase, this is not true. You own your addresses. There is no "Hot Wallet". This may not be true of coins you just bought, that have just been added to your balance, but it's certainly true of coins you received as payment (to an address that you knew / gave to a customer / used in an API payment button on a website).

What Mint can't do without access to the API is know all of your owned addresses and aggregate their balances into one. Now as for the rest of your ideas, I'm not from California, but I honestly don't see any vendors signing up to use Bitcoins. Everywhere I go will take the Paypal card, but nowhere is offering to take bitcoin via NFC or QR code. Maybe "if you build it they will come."

I would like to have a way to export a global public key from my private key, such that customers could generate their own receiving addresses (for my wallet) without any sort of access to my private key, or third party. I have no idea if this is even a thing, but I also can't say for sure that it's not possible. If it were possible, I think it would also make it possible to pin the exact balance of a wallet, so I suspect it's not possible/an undesirable idea.

The thing is called a Master Public Key:

https://github.com/kangasbros/electrumpos

http://acceptbit.com/

Thank you! I see it takes a certain kind of wallet, a "hierarchical deterministic" wallet. That sounds reasonable.

I wish they'd add support for not double-counting my credit card purchases instead.

Ha, yes... and support for not counting money transferred from savings to checking as income would be nice too.

And the money withdrawn from PayPal account to bank account.

And realizing that my credit card bill that's due Feb 2nd was paid a month ago.

This is my biggest issue with them: bill payments. They don't match up bill reminders with transactions. So, as you said, something you've paid still shows up as due and once the due date goes by, if you haven't paid it, it just disappears off your list even though it's still outstanding. They really need to fix this.

Is your savings account tracked by mint? Because I do this all the time and I don't see it listed as income, it's a transfer.

Maybe it depends on specifics. Mint must have some heuristics that attempt to discern whether or not a transaction is a symmetric internal transfer and they work for some and not for others. It's not an easy problem, given the zillion variables and different banks etc. but after all these years and witnessing the choices they've made on where to allocate resources it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you keep categorizing transaction from, say, checking to credit card or savings to checking as transfers it'll pick up on it after a bit and automatically categorize them.

All JPY transactions in my paypal are reported 100x too large in USD ($525 per month recurring bills instead of $5.25).

I did report it once and got back a message saying "sorry, we can't fix your existing records", but they clearly made no attempt to fix it for new ones either.

For me they seem very duplicate happy. I have to mark about 5 items per month (out of 20) as dupes.

Quick plug, but https://www.BudgetSimple.com handles this correctly.

Along the same line of thought. How about a cash flow forecast?

Should read "Mint now supports tracking Bitcoins in your Coinbase account"

I like that they're still referred to as a "startup" even though they exited for $170m nearly 5 years ago.

good point, duly updated [author here]

I don't recommend anyone leaking info about the amount of Bitcoins you have or spend to any third party.

Does anyone think there is room for a new mint-like service?

I've been thinking about that for a while. Besides a different design and time to reach feature parity, what would be the "unique" thing to solve the problem of managing one's finances?

As a hobby project, I'm working on a tool to help improve spending habits. I'm not crazy enough to imagine I'd ever reach feature parity with mint, but I personally know plenty of folks who use the well known personal finance tools yet seem to make a lot of careless purchases they later regret. And while mint is fine for what it does, I don't think it really points you in the direction of disciplined, thoughtful spending. If you want to stick to a budget but you find it hard, I think there's an opportunity for a more focused tool.

More than simply building a savings account, the other side of the coin is making your spending more meaningful by reducing impulsive buying. Saving a few bucks here and there with coupons or promotional discount is way too easy to spoil with just one thoughtless purchase.

I think gamification of "saving habits" would be very interesting - something to encourage you to save more. But it shouldn't take a lot of time to set-up or be confusing. If it would be automatic, even better.

The set up time is important- it seems to take too long to really get Mint set up to the point where it's useful, and then you still spend a lot of time recategorizing transactions so that you can know where your budgets really stand. I know that's not an easy problem to crack, but something with less detail that can encourage better overall spending/earning/savings trends would be pretty useful.

I don't know if this exists (as someone who uses Mint but doesn't know the space well), but I would kill for a service that aggregates and simply reports my monthly bills for me. I don't need Mint's level of granularity and feature parity: I need a service that reminds me about the $5/mo I'm paying on a subscription that I haven't used in two years.

Boom. We can build this.

Ever heard of mergepay.com, not public yet but is basically a Mint.com-type service for business.

We do this rather well at MergePay (thanks for the mention twofishies) We give you a broad overview of you income, bills, and expenses daily/weekly/monthly and aggregate all your recurring bills and remind you either via email, SMS, or push if you use the mobile app, before they are due. I built it because I had the same issue.

Projected cashflow/account balances.

Yes. There's a ton of room for innovation and I don't have a lot of faith in Intuit to do any of it. I feel like I'm constantly thinking of things I'd improve about Mint.

Yes, yes, and one more emphatic yes. Mint.com never satisfied my needs. I'd like a double-entry ledger, and proper non-USD asset support[1] please.

[1] Not even GNU cash gets this right. See: http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html

open your linked blog article and see the note at the top ;)

Need all that? You might like to try Quicken.

Agreed. It's not the end of the world to pay for software if it meets your needs, IMO. I just picked up Quicken, myself.

Quicken is a single-entry ledger, and therefore by nature doesn't handle non-currency and foreign currency assets properly either..

One that supports England would be nice.

Really, one that supports any other country that isn't the US.

moneydashboard somewhat does, but I'm not sure how good it is.

You could try ontrees.com or moneycenter.yodlee.com

Sorry to plug it twice in this thread, but I've launched one, https://www.BudgetSimple.com would love your feedback!

I think mint does budgets well, but fails hard at tracking investments and assets. I looked at budgetsimple before, but this is what turned me off.

I use wikinvest.com for tracking investments and assets.

I tried wikinvest, but it really just for brokerage accounts. I'm big into real estate. Currently, nothing fits my use case better than mint and mint is not ideal (e.g. can't do cashflow).

Also, I want a single place to see my networth as it's a huge factor in understanding my progression towards retirement. Having multiple interfaces makes this difficult.

I too have not found a solution for this, so I use a good old fashion spreadsheet. That said, I really wish something existed that did not require a monthly update on my part.

Good ol' Yodlee MoneyCenter is pretty decent at tracking net worth. https://moneycenter.yodlee.com.

I don't log in much nowadays, but I remember it is pretty easy to add asset values and get them figured into net worth. You have to keep manually-input stuff updated, of course.

Several of the companies that offer bank feeds ("add your account") use Yodlee's data.

Going to say you should post to http://beta.techendo.co/ to get feedback and users to test out your product.

If you're serious about financial tracking and don't mind paying $100 a year, there's a site called PocketSmith [0] that's a beautiful, clean, and fuller-featured version of Mint. They have a free version but it only supports credit card accounts and 12 budget categories. I just started using it two days ago and it blew me away.

[0] http://pocketsmith.com

Does pocketsmith do auto loans, mortgages, brokerage accounts, 401k, and home values (e.g. via zillow)?

Where most online tools fail is with investments. Especially real estate (rentals in my case), which is where most of my money is allocated.

They do have mortgage and investment accounts, but I've not been impressed with their investment planning tools. There isn't much in the way of historical trends, etc. Regardless, the checking / savings / credit aspect is incredibly detailed so it works well for me (not much real estate). It is pricey, but I am willing to pay to escape Mint's interface.

www.hellowallet.com

If anyone is interested in an account with us for user research, leave a reply. It's normally $100 a year. I'll circumvent that.

I'd like to give it a go.

I'm interested as well. Thanks

I'd be interested in it as well. My email is in my profile.

I'd love to try it out. Even if you have a demo/trial somewhere, couldn't find one.

You've piqued my interest. If the offer is still up: <--@gmail

See my comment above. Where most of these tools fail is with investments (brokerages, 401k, and real estate). If yours can do that, I'm certainly interested.

Really, there's nothing out there for the power user. I believe that market would pay for a good product that doesn't try to push stuff on them (ahem... wealthfront).

If you're looking for a user with real estate assets, I'd be interested in helping by being a tester.

You are right. That there isn't much out there for the "power" users.

We (HelloWallet) are much more focused on holistic financial wellness. But we are working on some very exciting investment-oriented products as we speak.

It still would be interesting to get your perspective if you want to create an account:

https://my.hellowallet.com/PublicHWWebApp.html?p=hackernews#...

Budgeting isn't really an issue for me (managing my savings and investments is). Until I can find a better site that supports mortgages and investments, mint works the best. Though, I'd be happy to try hellowallet once there are some more advanced features.

I'd like to try hellowallet, too. Thanks!

I'm curious. Thanks! <hn_handle> @ gmail

follow this link to get a free account. limiting to 20 people max for now.

https://my.hellowallet.com/PublicHWWebApp.html?p=hackernews#...

Nice. You should post to http://beta.techendo.co/ if you're looking for users to help with research!

I'll forward that link to our User Research Lead. Thanks!

Looking to try out Hello Wallet as well. Signed up using the link, but not sure if it had hit the limit or not. There's nowhere inside the website to hit "upgrade" or see my account status.

I'd be interested, my username at gmail.com

YES! One for power users would be great.

http://check.me (formerly PageOnce) is doing good things in this space.

Would be nice if they decided that cashflow forecasting (Microsoft Money and Quicken Online both did that well-ish) was important to add. That's the single reason I haven't gone with Mint.

I think they should be focusing on opening Mint up into new markets (namely the UK) rather than this!

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