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Comment by shams93 | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate how coinbase is addressing this like Chase has sent nothing about this, coinbase in contrast is telling you how they handle transactions to minimize the potential damage and what they are doing to mitigate the issues on their end. Big thumbs up to coinbase for being aggressively and open about their response to this threat.

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... Perhaps because your money at Chase is safe regardless of the bug.

Can you elaborate on how this differs from Coinbase? My understanding is that they are insured. If you are a US customer your cash balance at Coinbase is insured by the FDIC (like it is on Chase).

If someone gets into your Coinbase account and transfers everything to their wallet there is no recourse and you're out all your money. If someone gets into your Chase account and transfers all your money out there is a recourse and you get all your money back.

Essentially if Coinbase loses all your USD it should be covered under the FDIC, but if Coinbase loses all your BTC there's nothing you can do.

Right, a strength and weakness of cryptocurrency is that you are your own bank.

This post was mostly about what Coinbase is doing to mitigate the risk in their architecture (like AWS) I thought you were implying that Chase's vulnerabilites were different in some regard.

>If someone gets into your Chase account and transfers all your money out there is a recourse and you get all your money back

There is? My understanding is that fraud and theft are not covered by FDIC insurance.

> There is? My understanding is that fraud and theft are not covered by FDIC insurance.

It's covered by the bank themselves. You might have to wait a little bit, but you won't be held liable for fraudulent charges. I'm sure there are horror stories, but the vast majority of cases result in someone other than you eating the loss.

Needing help from the FDIC is sort of a worst case scenario for banking, it's extremely uncommon unless there's a 2009 style banking crisis.

Ah then Coinbase is the same in that regard. Chase has the opposite strength and weakness regarding theft: you must rely on them.

No, it's not the same. If someone spends your BTC there is no recourse and it's gone forever. Coinbase specifically does not insure against this.

I meant only that the subject of the article, Coinbase's architecture's vulnerability was the same as Chase's, instead of "your money at Chase is safe regardless of the bug."

You are correct, as they mention in the first paragraph of the article you are responsible for securing your own machine and wallet.

Your USD is insured and covered by the FDIC at Coinbase and Chase. Theft is not covered by the FDIC at either.

Perhaps they could also be as attentive at sending their customers their money.

Take a gander at http://reddit.com/r/coinbase and weep...

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