Coinbase Shows Balance as 0 (opens in new tab)

GitHub is also a centralized service that defeats the purpose of using decentralized technology. People will use centralized services when they contribute value in excess of the loss of value from being less decentralized.

The point of crypto isn't to force decentralization, it's to permit it. If you'd like to keep your crypto on a service like Coinbase, you have that freedom. Alternatively, if you'd like to self-host your crypto, you also have that freedom. The option is the whole point.

Either way most people still need somewhere to buy it if they don't have any, which is what Coinbase is primarily for.

You assume people buy Bitcoin because they care about decentralization.

That is an incorrect assumption.

People buy bitcoin because they want to make financial gains.

> But coinbase, isn't it a centralized service that sort of defeats the purpose of crypto/bitcoin which is supposed to be decentralized?

Dollar cost average in, say, every month, on Coinbase, withdraw the BTCs immediately to an address you control (for example using an hardware wallet).

Do that 20 times and you never have more than 5% of your cash at once on the centralized exchange.

Some call it "on ramp / off ramp".

Now I don't doubt some people use Coinbase as their wallet: both for the on/off ramp and to store their coins (that is: without bothering to ever withdraw to an address they control) but nothing forces people to do that.

Yes, it’s utterly nonsensical if you truly believe in the original goals of Bitcoin.

There has to be some system to exchange crypto and real money.

I mean, it's for speculators speculating on the price. Crypto is too volatile to use as a currency. Like would you buy a pizza with your NVDA shares? No. You just hold them in the brokerage and turn them into cash when the price meets your target. People are using Coinbase to do exactly that with crypto.

Correct. You trade security for convenience.

Tinfoil is unnecessary, Bitcoin hit 64k, all the retail investors are seeing the news and logging in.

Hey, this is Coinbase, not Binance.

Ehh Coinbase is the only exchange that doesn't seem to be a complete grift. Also why would an increase in price result in them being insolvent? I doubt they're net short crypto

Yea I've switched to calling them "CoinBS" for this reason, and I've been with them since the GDAX days.

Between the suspiciously inconvenient outages during market volatility and their forced switch-over to Plaid for bank account verification (during which they unlinked my previously verified accounts), I'm pretty much fed up with their absolute garbage customer experience over the past 3-4 years.

Problem is Binance is not any better either. If someone rolled out a boutique crypto exchange that offers a quality customer experience & phone support similar to TDA/ThinkOrSwim I would gladly sign up in a second.

What is the crime being committed when Coinbase allegedly has technical issues.

Coinbase has been investigated for criminal activity. For example,

https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releas...

https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/17222-us-coinbase-to-pay-100-...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-coinbase-insider...

I think it would be interesting to look at whether Coinbase employees and insiders are able to cash out at these price peaks when millions of customers are not, due to alleged "technical issues".

All of the decentralized exchanges have been running just fine.

Once you onboard fiat -> crypto, there is no excuse to use coinbase any longer unless you want to go crypto -> fiat.

If you really want to sell to fiat during a bull market where centralized exchanges are failing, sell to a stablecoin of your choice and wait until things calm down for a bit to convert that to fiat.

You suggesting this has echoes of robinhood?

Believe it was named in at least one complaint against them by the government.

I mean it seems to only be Coinbase. Hard to imply conspiracy when 1 site is having issues out of many.

Google trends has Bitcoin searches at 4x where it was 24 hours ago.

Ha. Nice!

Bugs and mistakes happen, even with traditional banks:

https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2023/10/10/wells-fargo-customer...

Banks aren't much better either.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/06/timeline-of...

HN has a long history of impartiality on ycombinator matters, so I don't think such accusations should be made without evidence of a pattern of it happening consistently.

As the OP, I had the same thought and conflict of interest assumption.

It has made me query the moderation as you could squint and class it as low-quality content, however, I feel (agnostic of being the OP) it's highly relevant news to the HN audience.

The amount of friends I have with non-trivial amounts of bitcoin they are unable to access anymore due to “self custody” says this isn’t always the best idea either.

I don’t know what a good idea is when it comes to storing your bitcoin. But if you’re gonna go with one of the major players, at this time, Coinbase seems relatively safest.

I've got a couple thousand bitcoin in self-custody, mined out of curiosity a couple days after Satoshi's initial announcement.

The key is of course lost, but not to worry; I printed it out on a sheet of paper, which I buried in the garden of my dead grandmother's home. It's underneath the chicken coop. Anyone want to go digging?

That makes no sense. Exchanges make their money when people trade. Sell offs are by nature high volume days.

To boot internet play money is on a rip up 8 percent in 24 hour to near ath.

Yeah, it took them about 10-15 mins to report it on their status page despite already trending on Twitter and downdetector having 8,000 reports.

I use it b/c some vendors accept btc, and they do an easy payment option. The discount for using btc outweighs the fees.

It's because it's a great place to HODL for me, since they seem vastly more secure than all the sites that have gone down in thievery and flames over the years.

I think it'd be disingenuous to suggest that there is any safer place to hold crypto, given they are publicly traded, have excellent engineers, have insurance, etc. I even think it's more likely I'd fuck up personally custodying my crypto than letting Coinbase hold it. I've had friends lose so much money trying to keep their crypto in private wallets and on shady exchanges.

does not look like that

> Coinbase has suspicious crypto hedging

Any source on this? I've never heard that

> during huge crypto moves, generally to the upside, they have "outages"

Price increase -> increased web traffic -> outage

"Behind the scenes", Robinhood's broker/the DTCC casually flashed a revolver from under the table.

https://qz.com/2184431/robinhood-nearly-defaulted-during-the...

not your coins!

It has been happening since 2014.

Hopefully Coinbase learns from this to add a "Sorry we're experiencing issues" screen rather than showing the wrong data.

It is showing zero for me in Eth but I don't have any BTC.