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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Coinbase feels more and more like PayPal

> Coinbase is prohibited by law from doing business

The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here. Or the US attempts at global jurisdiction for KYC, take your pick.

Paypal is not gratuitously bad. Every annoying decision they make is because they're backed into a cost-minimising corner by fraud and compliance problems.

The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.

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> The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.

Well said.

> The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.

This is misleading, because majority of coinbase's job, the part that is their most difficult task, is to deal with correctly handling fiat currencies (dollar, euro.)

Try using something like shapeshift.io (which doesn't handle fiat currencies) and you'll find a much more pleasant end user experience there than with either paypal or coinbase.

Fact that ShapeShift is a Swiss company likely plays a role:

http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2015/08/13/u-s-warns-...

> The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.

I'm not expecting Coinbase to do illegal things and I'm happy to provides documents when needed (as I mentioned in the original post). They also have my ID, passport and bank statements on file, so they could've checked that. Instead, I was perma-banned when I contacted their support to see how I could unlock the account.

Please be careful when dealing with this company, there are better alternatives whether you live in the US or not.

>The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.

It does. Coinbase != Bitcoin. Conflating the two is like conflating Gold with EZPawn.

>and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft

Source? I buy things with bitcoin quite frequently. With even a modicum of judgement, it's easy to sniff out scams. This is also what reviews are for.

Using bitcoin to send money to Iran from the US remains illegal even if there's no institution in the middle.

Source for theft and fraud: https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/

> The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.

> Source for theft and fraud: https://magoo.github.io/Blockchain-Graveyard/

The site you've linked seems to be talking about thefts, similar to losing your credit card and someone running rampant with it, not purchase fraud.

In the case of credit cards, someone's still paying for it, it's just not you. There's no reason why this same system can't be applied to Bitcoin, without having to change anything in the protocols. It's just an extra intermediary in the middle who suffers the loss instead of you.

Got any sources that relate to purchases per your original?

It's illegal but you can ignore the law. The same does not apply to PayPal, coinbase, western union, etc. The system will not let you choose.

Do you think banks never get stolen from? I had to cancel a credit card recently because someone skimmed or stole it. The bank had to pay for that.

> With even a modicum of judgement, it's easy to sniff out scams.

But the point was that the scams exist, and are plentiful.

It's like saying that there's no spam/fraud done over email, because it's easy to identify Nigerian scam emails at a glance.

What fraud or compliance problem did Paypal face when they banned the Wikileaks account? They did it because they "violated terms of use" in that they "encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”. But as far as I can tell, Wikileaks itself didn't do anything illegal, and didn't operate any differently than any other journalistic enterprise.

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