Coinbase blocks WikiLeaks Shop | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase blocks WikiLeaks Shop

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120 pointsmalvosenior84 comments

If you want full control, you've got to be in full control. But you can't do that if you delegate that control to a third party. That's the whole point of bitcoin.

Instead of complaining, WikiLeaks can set up their own payment processing server and do away with Coinbase altogether.

Can't do that with a bank account!

But it is good to know what is coinbase's moral compass.

Indeed. I’ll be moving my coins out ASAP now.

Coinbase has been fishy from the start... For example, I placed buy orders for some Bitcoins when they dropped sharply years ago (Coinbase just started at that time) and they canceled those orders after I placed them. Now what they do is that they bring the servers down when it happens.

They did the same with Bitcoin Cash, or maybe worst... (see stories about when they first introduced bitcoin cash)

Is coinbase becoming hegemonic over cryptocurrencies? So much for decentralization.

Not at all. There's plenty of alternatives to Coinbase:

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

> Now what they do is that they bring the servers down when it happens.

That's a pretty bold allegation. Do you have any evidence that this is the case.

No. It was just such a common occurrence that I could not come to a different conclusion.

If you need many examples, look for Reddit threads that talk about Coinbase created right after Bitcoin dips.

Alternative Hanlon's razor hypothesis: the system gets an abnormal amount of traffic during large price swings and they can't cope with the demand.

Sure, maybe, but if you have been aware of the issue for a year and it's still going on 2 years later it might be considered just a good excuse... How often do you get that problem trading stocks?

I don’t buy it.

Any serious software engineer knows about the CAP theorem.

And yet they allowed me to accidentally double-sell bitcoin cash from my account, leaving me with a negative BCH balance for months now.

Nice addition to my already decently long list of why Coinbase isn't worth dealing with. Thanks.

I'm no fan of Coinbase so don't mistaken me for a shill but I've also heard of countless cases of the opposite case (e.g. order gets declined and the coin drops drastically post order, resulting in a "gain" for the person whose order got declined).

It seems reasonable that these are genuine mistakes. It seems ludicrous for Coinbase to implement order cancellation so that they can do some risk-free hedging when something like that is ripe for some serious whistleblowing.

Less of a reading of moral compass, more of a consequence of jurisdiction.

If they block Wikileaks (=Putin's propaganda), they must be good.

They're essentially selling shovels in a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme gold rush, collecting fees in this new found "gold" as well; and with their Earn.com acquisition, they're trying to strengthen the ecosystem to help prop up the perceived value of the crypto-assets they hold/collect.

how hard is it to create a payment gateway? open source projects?

Yes, for example, BTCPay Server:

https://github.com/btcpayserver/btcpayserver

Wikileaks, rightly or wrongly, has essentially been declared an enemy of USA. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cia-wikileaks/cia-chief-c... I do not blame Coinbase

Declared by whom? Your cited article says:

> Pompeo, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a fraud” and “a coward.”

> “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” Pompeo said.

I wouldn't taken this particular statement as the official position of the whole U.S. Federal Government towards the Wikileaks organization.

The CIA director, a former Congressman and a Republican said that. I mean, you want to know what the Center for Disease Control and EPA think of Wikileaks?

Fun to see how bitcoin has come full circle in reinventing everything its cheerleaders initially railed against: fraud, then centralization, regulation, and now “censorship”.

I guess the lesson here should be about the primacy of law, and how you won’t succeed in using technology to undermine it.

The problem I suspect is that a are real company (eg incorporated legal presence - not dismissing other companies, just distinguishing them as things that have government identity), and so must abide by the laws set by their host country (USA), and the policies of banking corps, etc that they interact with.

Assuming they need a bank (liquidity, etc) they need to follow their bank’s rules. Given all us banks hammering WL it would be unsurprising if they were pressured to do that.

That said I despise Wikileaks for a number of reasons, but don’t feel like starting the firestorm that is arguing about them in a comment forum :)

> I guess the lesson here should be about the primacy of law, and how you won’t succeed in using technology to undermine it.

What? I think the lesson is that centralization and regulation are necessary to prevent undesirable outcomes amongst large groups of people. That's literally the reason we invented governments...

Sure governments are fallible, but they're still a more effective tool in ensuring stability than most other paradigms we can think of (and certainly more so than anarchy).

It's not really Bitcoin's fault that people are using Coinbase.

But the fact is, there's always a price to decentralization. Centralized services are fast and can be cheaper! It's not a huge surprise that something that seems bulky and annoying to deal with has sprouted companies like Coinbase.

How do you convert non-bitcoin currency into bitcoin without a trusted entity?

If masses are expected to do so then there will likely be a sort of centralized "trusted few".

Coinbase is not bitcoin.

This is a Bitcoin service provider, not Bitcoin, in the same way that Paypal!=USD.

Don't be so defeatist. You can realistically sidestep law a few ways, eg.

(1) by being fervently multi-jurisdiction

(2) by being transparent and high-profile and community-popular enough ("think of the children!") to resist attempts at regulation

(3) by throwing the dog a bone (ie. making it profitable for a jurisdiction not to legislate against you or interfere)

(4) by being nominally jurisdictionless (ie. darknet only)

Morally and progressively speaking, I suppose the last is the superior option. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow banking integration, so speed of settlement, scaling and trust become challenges. Hacker quest: solve them and win big money.

I was being triumphant rather than defeatist. I believe democratically enacted laws are far better than power being exerted by those with technological might against those without.

Why yes - democracy in the idealistic sense and anarchism in the free sense are not so dissimilar. Such a pity about the small reality of human behavior!

I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took weeks to get a reply and it was always unhelpful.

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.

Do not use Coinbase.

I had my personal account blocked from buying without explanation and customer service was a brick wall. They did answer, but refused to provide any explanation, recourse or escalation.

Had they wanted additional verification of my identity, citizenship or ownership of my bank account, I was ready to provide it.

What is the use of coinbase? you can accept payments directly

I think that the barrier to entry to accepting bitcoin or cryto payments in general directly can be fairly high, depending on the ecosystem. It's been intimidating to me.

I'd love to see a collection of crypto tutorials to get started accepting payments and buying coins in any ecosystem.

Maybe another commenter has a good source?

Why do you even need a payment processor to accept money via BTC? Can't it be sent directly from one address to another?

Yes but processing is useful for invoicing, e-commerce, etc.

https://globee.com/ accepts multiple cryptocurrencies and pays out in either fiat or Monero (the closest thing to digital cash there is). They are based in South Africa with different laws.

Last year they went in 50/50 with the Monero community and worked on https://www.projectcoralreef.com/ which is the implementation of many famous music artists accepting Monero in their online stores.

This is why we need decentralized exchanges... It was only a matter of time before Coinbase started acting like traditional payment processors / PayPal...

Exchanges like Coinbase are going to continue to lock themselves down. Then regulators are going to get into bed with their favorite companies. Then They're going to make love and use tax dollars to send guns to the exchanges that do not meet "sane requirements."

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