Should minimally wait for something substantial, see if there was any actual wrongdoing
Pretty sure that's exactly what this is.
581 karma · joined September 24, 2012
Pretty sure that's exactly what this is.
I am quite familiar with banks having varying levels of comfort with different industries (ours being adult comics), but that didn’t stop us from finding banks that were okay with what we publish and working with them. You should have relationships with multiple banks for situations like this. The fact that your company is locked into a bank that can arbitrarily deny merchant accounts, based on how comfortable they are with each business, is concerning.
More concerning is the fact that the first support email we received tried to pass our account closure off as a FinCEN issue, which only showed how little research was put into our case before the account was closed. How much effort is put into defending your merchants in situations like this?
Instead of closing accounts of small publishers or artists you should be defending them. You’d no doubt have a lot more adamant supporters. If you really do care, and you’re not just commenting to save face, I encourage you to reach out to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (http://cbldf.org/). They provide legal support and counsel for censorship issues like this. They have legally defended countless adult publishers, artists, and readers over the years.
As the CEO of Coinbase you have the resources to make a difference and fix situations like this for the future. Don’t be afraid to stand up and defend merchants, publishers, artists, or whoever else decides to use your service. If you want to be another payment processor that’s fine, but you could be so much more.
For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers.
Edit: For transparency here is my back and forth with their support (http://imgur.com/CHeAEPP) and the link to one of our books on Amazon I shared (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1634420241/ [NSFW]). Ironically I've been waiting on a reply from them for 22 days and counting. They have about $5,000 in our disabled account along with all our customer/order information that we can't access.
Do not use Coinbase.
I really hope someone new comes along and makes a better site with the same premise (annotating lyrics).
Finally, instead of using the browser extensions (which are helpful), get actual PageSpeed installed on the servers!
Apache: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module nginx: https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed
Regardless, awesome stuff. Big fan. Much love.
Stopped reading.
Pretty sure the answer to that is zero.