Stripe and Coinbase apparently can't find my Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Stripe and Coinbase apparently can't find my Bitcoin

blog.perennate.com

113 pointsperennate86 comments

Just my own opinion one of the strong points of cryptocurrency is controlling your own private keys and funds, when you give up this power to a 3rd party you loose absolute control of your money. Yes there are advantages to coinbase but this shows the disadvantage quite clearly. I hope you get this resolved in a timely manner and keep using Bitcoin!

On the other hand, if the payments weren't internal he would have also paid about $5 in fees with current bitcoin network fee rates.

Which is part of why Ether is quickly catching up to bitcoins market cap.

Indeed, I would be amazed if at least part of the recent price movement of bitcoin wasn't due to people moving fiat -> BTC -> ETH

> Indeed, I would be amazed if at least part of the recent price movement of bitcoin wasn't due to people moving fiat -> BTC -> ETH

Can't be the case because of simple laws of supply and demand.

You would see BTC being hammered; meanwhile all 3 main currency out there right now - BTC ETC LTC are on a huge over 100% rise in last 45 days or so.

ETH is not singled out but its the youngest so IMHO get the most potential to shoot into $2,5K of BTC level (obviously don't take my advice, blah blah not a lawyer on analytical specialist)

I think as this currency is getting more squared away in terms of laws and regulations all around the world, many big fish are jumping aboard, including some hedge funds and other investment powerhouses. Remember they make money even if coins go down to $0.000001. I can imagine even if they see huge risk of a swing +50%/-80% on crypto, if they got clients keep calling them all the time about "that cool online currency that i can make killing off of", then they just follow market and offer wallets/investment in crypt, of course not taking any risk themselves :)

Bottom line... with all 3 major currencies not seeing the hill yet, most likely buckle up for a huge ride up, as most of the world still needs to "catch up" and get some of virtual currency in their own portfolios as well.

*not an investment advice.

Anecdata: more than five people in my network bought bitcoin only so they could then buy ether.

Weird. Coinbase allows you to use your debit card, credit card, direct wire of USD from your account (at least in USA). No idea why would they do that -- am I missing something?

Maybe it's because we're outside the USA, but it's much easier to buy bitcoin directly using other services than Coinbase, and we haven't found one yet that does ethereum.

Maybe they would rather use another exchange like Kraken or poloniex in order to also trade pairs like BTC/XRP or BTC/VTC.

That's a huge reason. Look into the declining total % of bitcoin and increasing % of all the other altcoins.

Market cap is kind of a BS indicator though. If I release a new altcoin and "pre-mine" a billion coins, and start selling small amounts of these for a penny, the market cap of my new coin is around $10m.

And look at how much of that is occurring on Poloniex. And then try and find out who runs or owns Poloniex, or how they are licensed, or how they store customer funds.

I'm paying cents or even fractions of cents for every transaction. I think confirmations are overated anyway, since you could check e.g. on blockchain.info if double spending happend.

> I think confirmations are overated anyway

First they defend the crazy high fees, then they say that miners aren't important, then they say that confirmations are not really important... what's next, they'll try to rewrite Satoshi's white paper?

Oh wait... https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1325

> $5

If you want the transaction to be confirmed within 25 blocks the fees are at around $7. About $20 if you want it within the next block. Bitcoin's fees are killing it.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ shows a median size transaction would pay $3 for the very next block, $1.40 for within 25 blocks (which is also what my local Bitcoin node estimates).

You are naming figures 7x higher than reality.

My figures are per Kb.

(I work at Stripe.) We take issues like these very seriously, and are working with Coinbase to make sure they get you your Bitcoin. We'll follow up on our email thread as soon as we have an update.

Please see my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14523935

It really appears to me that Stripe's default behavior for an overspend is severely flawed.

Hi! I just responded on your original comment.

The real hero.

This is amazing :D

If a bank somehow lost your money, would you say "this is amazing" when they responded to bad PR by saying they'd look for it?

This is basic customer service, and it's a sad statement about the current state of things when people think that companies providing it are somehow going above and beyond.

Yes.

You overestimate how willing people are to say "It is morally unjust that squeaky wheels get the grease" when they could say "Squeak".

no but stripe is a hip sf startup that people want to work at :)

Really amazing that their customer support system is done through HN rather than the support form and email?

I think I didn't make it clear in the blog post, Stripe has been responding consistently (they replied the day I e-mailed them and then followed up a couple days later) and they have been pretty helpful (in the follow-up, they said they escalated the issue with their partners, presumably Coinbase). I'm just frustrated it takes so long to get to the root of the issue, and also partially concerned because from my side it didn't sound like either company was actively looking into a permanent solution for this problem (i.e., Coinbase user making overpayment when paying via Stripe).

Well, if they're tech, you can use HN to name and shame. If they're elsewhere, you use Twitter.

It's the new "Fedex to CEO" solution, where now everyone sees dirty laundry regarding grievances. And the companies what these things to disappear quick. Lingering issues = bad press.

I mean, look at the last dumpster-fire here, FireBase. That was a travesty on how crazy and stupid that was. But they ghosted him, and it took Medium/HN to actually get a response.

What part of getting on the front page of HN to get support from a private company is amazing?

Sure it's great that they respond here but when it gets to the point where public shaming is your only venue for support on a regular basis then something is systemically wrong.

> when a source is charged, any unused bitcoin received in excess will be returned to the customer automatically

Wait, what?!

That seems like a pretty big flaw. Incoming transactions to a platform provider like Coinbase go to addresses that belong the the wallets of individuals. Once confirmed, they're then typically consolidated into shared wallets owned by the service, most of which should be offline.

When the customer send Bitcoin outside the platform, the actual address from which the coins are sent is arbitrary - it's just whichever storage wallet is currently hot. If, as a recipient, you send money back to the originating address, there is no way to figure out for certain which wallet on the platform it should go to. The money isn't "lost" - it's incorporated back into the hot wallet - but it's not routable to a customer within the platform.

In short, this seems like Stripe's fault. They should be assume that an overspend should be sent back to the address from which it came. There are all kinds of reasons this is a bad practice.

Hi! I work at Stripe on our Bitcoin solution.

We do not send funds back to the originating address but instead allow merchants to programmatically supply a refund address or alternatively handle this part for them by contacting the customer over email to provide a refund address to send the over-payments to.

Hope that clarifies this particular point.

Additionally, to compute over-payments, we rely on Coinbase notifying us of the amounts received on a receiver bitcoin address. In that instance Coinbase erroneously notified us that they received BTC .00231463 (~$5 at the time) instead of BTC 0.1154481, leading to our overpayments logic to not be triggered.

We're investigating with Coinbase on what happened on their end and we'll make sure that the root cause gets fixed.

Does Coinbase really use the same hot wallet for multiple users? Because that is a really bad practice that I thought we had stamped out long ago. You should never send payment to a third party directly from a shared wallet, you must always transfer it to a wallet controlled by the user first. You don't even have to wait for a confirmation, because you're only trusting yourself. Honestly, I expected better from a company with over $100 million in VC funding. It's not like they're some sketchy Russian exchange incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

Why is that bad practice? Creating a duplicate transaction only doubles your transaction fees.

The best way to do this is probably to force the customer to specify a refund address at time of purchase, which is what ShapeShift does.

Stripe sends an email to the customer asking for them to provide a refund bitcoin address: https://stripe.com/docs/sources/bitcoin#refunding-bitcoin-pa...

Coinbase took $50 from me two weeks ago and never gave me my coins. I have filed and updated a support request every day since then and haven't received a single response.

An absolute scam of a company, I'd strongly recommend people avoid them if possible.

I'd add my experience. I filed a support request about missing coins last month, and more than a month later, just as I was about to give up, I got a reply, with everything sorted out. So there's that.

Looks like they're receiving many support requests because of everyone getting in because of the recent bitcoin price surge. It's not excusable, but there's some reason as to why this is happening.

Their twitter support is worse though. Didn't even receive a 'We have received your message, please wait' message. Just plain ignored.

Duh this totally look like when a pyramid scheme start imploding. But I think someone will quickly pop in to explain that I didn't get it because of the block chain automagical cryptosecurity... meh

Are you sure your credit card was charged? During a period of 3 days they had the UI show confirmation but the order never went through and I was not charged on my credit card.

> Unfortunately, for transactions between two Bitcoin addresses that are on the Coinbase network, Coinbase will perform an internal transfer of funds. The transaction is never pushed to the blockchain, avoiding the need to pay Bitcoin fees, and making payment confirmation instantaneous.

Wait... what? how does this work? didn't the wholepoint of using Bitcoin is that there is a public ledger for every move? Looks like Coinbase find a way to act like a real bank on the bt network.

> didn't the wholepoint of using Bitcoin is that there is a public ledger for every move?

There is a public ledger for every public move. If you move money within your own organization there is no publicly visible effect.

It's actually a pretty nice value add - you don't have to pay transaction fees, nor wait for confirmations. Of course, this assumes the implementation is competent, which seems to be under question in this case.

I came here to say exactly this, and before doing so thought to ^F first. Heh.

The other two comments I see in this subthread are practical and pragmatic, but I also agree with your view as well. I would far prefer to pay the fees and have all transactions processed via the blockchain.

Although at the end of the day, pragmatism makes money...

The problem is that when you are putting money in Coinbase you are basically loosing your biggest asset on the btc network... trust; You have to fully trust that Coinbase won't transfer your btc's to another "internal" account.

Coinbase has the worst customer service EVER. I once got locked out of my account, emailed them to their customer support line, three times. Never received any response.

I mean, we're not even talking about some trivial technical issue here. These guys have my real money, and I can't access them, and I try to reach them multiple times, but they just don't respond, I don't know how they get away with this behavior. When this happened I did some googling and looks like I'm not alone.

I ended up resolving it on my own somehow but have been looking for a different, safer service.

> Coinbase has the worst customer service EVER.

You clearly weren't a customer of Mt.Gox.

They had good support. You can both have good support and run a scam. In fact it helps :)

Zing

> I don't know how they get away with this behavior.

They followed PayPal's lead.

I have experience with PayPal's customer service but that's nothing compared to this. My account got locked once on PayPal because I was making an international transaction and they thought it was suspicious. They froze my account and I couldn't touch the money for weeks until I sent my proof of identity and all kinds of stuff back and forth. But this is understandable at least. The customer service did respond when I called.

Coinbase had absolutely zero response from their so called customer service line.

Coinbase’s problem lately is that they can’t keep up with their growth. See this recent post:

https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e...

For me, PayPal and GoDaddy have the worst customer service I have ever experienced. It is hard for me to pick which one is worse.

Hopefully we can all agree that Amazon has the best though :)

> I ended up resolving it on my own somehow but have been looking for a different, safer service.

Similar situation here. How did you get it resolved? Did you contact attorney? I assume if you keep serious cash (anything above $10k will do), then you find lawyers who take this pro bono. I doubt with all risk involved in cryptocurrency, Coinbase is looking out for bad PR.

Two things are going on here.

Firstly like everyone else they are currently experiencing absolutely ridiculous growth thanks to recent interest in Bitcoin/Ethereum/ICOs and it takes time to scale up support. (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-09%202...)

Secondly, they are practically required to have terrible customer support in many situations due to banking regulations and practices, which they have no choice to abide unless they want their bank and credit card connections to be instantly shut off (as has happened to many Bitcoin businesses http://www.coindesk.com/wire-transfer-bitcoin-exchange-bitfi...).

> they are practically required to have terrible customer support in many situations due to banking regulations and practices

What do you mean by that? What are some examples?

In the case that they have any suspicion of illegal or even simply suspicious activity, even though they may be wrong, they must err on the side of caution and freeze and/or close accounts. "Illegal activity" may be something as innocuous as selling Bitcoin to friends, as that could run afoul of MSB laws. As another hypothetical example, accessing your Coinbase account when you are overseas could be seen suspicious as Coinbase may not be able to tell if you are there temporarily or have moved without telling them, and in the latter case all sorts of laws may apply.

In the case that they are forced to freeze or close accounts, they are probably not allowed to say why or give any recourse, which is incredibly frustrating for the person who may be wrongly affected.

Pretty sure what the practices you described have 0% basis in law/regulations and 100% ass-covering/terrible customer service.

That may or may not be true but it's the banks imposing these kinds of requirements, not Coinbase. Coinbase has no power to change banking practices so they must simply do what the banks require. Coinbase would probably love to let anyone do anything with their Bitcoin, but they would be shut down immediately.

This happened before the recent Bitcoin hype.

Also they have no excuse for not even responding in any way. I didn't do anything shady. I simply forgot my password so I tried to retrieve one. Unless trying to retrieve your forgotten password is considered a crime it doesn't make sense.

Hopefully Coinbase isn't using MongoDB anymore for handling transactions.

I've seen no evidence they were ever using Mongo for transactions. The only references I've seen is that they were using it for the API and such. That could result in things like incorrect balances and improperly telling the user that an action is confirmed or rejected, but it has nothing to do with the actual transactions.

I remember back on BitcoinTalk in 2014 or so when this cropped up, there were people reporting they initiated a withdrawal and their external bank account was credited or debited multiple times with the exact same amount. It wasn't just the API their website was built on.

I was there during that time, and don't recall anyone actually being able to confirm that those issues were due to the underlying DB, but I'll go back and check now that you mention it.

I will say that while I know almost nothing of Coinbase's internals, I have seen enough of two separate exchanges to require a signed NDA. I was intending on working with them to suggest a solution to an issue they were having, and in both cases once I saw their platform I turned around and ran the other direction as quickly as possible.

One of them, I don't mind saying now, was Cryptsy.

you're kidding right?

He's not kidding.

They had to make it webscale!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382

And to think Coinbase wants my photo ID. Yeah about that, if I can't trust you with simple transactions I am definitely not trusting you with my photo ID. I say "Good day to you Sir!"

I wonder if this post on YN will make some movement towards resolving this. I wonder what is the issue and it sounds like a bug in their system which can cost their customers a lot of money.

Stripe is waiting on Coinbase and I don't think Coinbase cares enough to speed it up. I sort of regret posting this now, I didn't expect it to get more than a few views.

Coinbase's support is... erratic.

For various reasons, I have to work with them. Occasionally, they reply immediately to my requests. On other occasions, I have to wait for months.

you've done the right thing by posting here. try /r/bitcoin if you haven't already.

On a side note, I like the styling of your blog or rather lack thereof :) its refreshingly simple and your writing is clear.

It could use a little styling.. -- I don't like the full width aspect, I don't like to read that close the margins so giving some padding on either side would make it still bare-bones but more readable.

Yeah, I agree. I went into the Inspector and added "margin: 0 auto" as well as "max-width: 800px" and I was happy.

I prefer understyling to overstyling, though.

Say no to Off-Chain State Channels, kids. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like we're already starting to see how State Channels add a lot of potentially breaking complexity, that is, complexity that makes it easier to break bitcoins checks and audits.

A $195+ mistake by not triple checking your btc destination address, and the amount being sent is an expensive lesson to be learned.

You seem to have not read the article.

Yeah, he probably did not read it, but he does bring up a good point which is that this is only an issue because there are third parties involved.

If you were sending a Bitcoin payment on your own and you by accident sent too much, there is nothing you can do about it. That money is gone for good.

At least here it is nice that there is a chance to get it back.

That is true, and there is also the point that if I copied the address incorrectly instead of the amount, it would not be recoverable. (But this is more difficult since I can copy and paste the address; I'm actually not sure why the amount can't be copied to clipboard from Checkout.js.)

Although, in this case, I was in some sense paying myself, so I would have been able to just do a reverse transaction (and eat the fees).

It's been 3 days, give them a break...

Two weeks, but I'm curious - how many days must pass before you think that the people you paid owe you the goods and/or services you've paid for?

It's been 17 days - it happened on May 23.

Might I recommend my alternative bitcoin exchange? http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com

Bitcoin Sex Change?

LOL. Same thing happened with IEX a.k.a Investors' Exchange. They wanted to have the domain name investorsexchange.com. Someone pointed out the obvious! I think it is mentioned in the book Flash Boys as well.

What? No! Bitcoins Exchange. Can't you read??

expertsexchange had the same problem, in the Bad Old Days before Stack Overflow.

It turns out that DNS does not preserve case.

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