Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

Meanwhile, I needed to pay folks who have fled the country, and now are located in Kazakhstan. I used... Western Union. Surprisingly, it was without any fees, I sent the exact amount in dollars from the US and they received exactly the same amount in US dollars in minutes.

I don't know why Bitcoin today is something people want to use, since you can send Western Union or use other payment methods (like Wise) to almost all countries.

Western Union being free is the outlier here.

I'm not sure if it is free. They may have made money from the exchange rate

Absolutely, this can be seen in the broker's spreads.

it's definitely not free. There's a fee but even if they waive it, they make more money from currency exchange rates.

There was no exchange rate conversion. In my case they received the exact amount in USD.

True, but then the stuff Western Union charges a significant margin for is the stuff which is a very useful service (getting spendable local cash in someone's village). If you can get that at all with crypto, the guy in the village exchanging cryptos for local currency is going to charge even more...

not really, El Salvador switched from wire transfers to BTC exactly because the fees were lower.

No, El Salvador switched from wire transfers to BTC because the president wanted to.

Which doesn't has anything to do with the fact that if you've got Bitcoins in a village in some random developing country, you need to find somebody that's willing to give you local banknotes. That person is usually going to charge more commission than Western Union for the privilege of doing so, because they can.

> El Salvador switched from wire transfers to BTC because the president wanted to.

The country switched to using BTC as legal tender because it was already being used as local currency because the people were using it for payments due to the lower fees.

> That person is usually going to charge more commission than Western Union for the privilege of doing so, because they can.

It seems like you're assuming this to be the case without having any real knowledge of the situation. BTC was adopted by El Salvadorans exactly because they were able to spend less on fees over the competition.

My limited experience with Western Union and MoneyGram was awful. This was a decade ago, so maybe things have changed.

Some countries have capital control and thus cannot send money from there easily.

I lived in Vietnam for a while; there is lots of WU for people abroad sending money there, but it’s really hard to send money out.

But in the end expats usually just swapped the cash with each other and sent the money in Revolut. That worked (for small amounts anyway)

+1 for Wise. I regularly send funds to Zaporizhzhia and they are received almost instantly.

That would be my first thought. Never had a problem with it.

I’ve personally had nothing but terrible experiences with Western Union. In contrast, sending money with crypto (not Coinbase which is a nightmare centralized layer which defeats the purpose of crypto) has had 0 issues for me.

Would love to hear your story of your simple easy decentralised cryptoasset money sending as most people I know who do this end up telling me a story that is not exactly a user experience delight but more like a nightmare of key management, shady random exchanges, incomprehensible jargon, bizarre gas fees and so on.

The fee is the y-intercept, and the exchange rate is the slope. These businesses make money by manipulating either or bother of these numbers.

Agreed. I saw it also happen for "reputable" stock brokers. They claimed no fees but always had a appalling exchange rate.

This applies to all goods and services. If everyone else is charging a fixed fee on top of a proportional one, and then one vendor advertises having no fixed fee, you can be certain that they're recouping it some other way - be it a steeper slope, non-linear pricing, or just a bunch of extra fees that will materialize after they lock you into a contract.

Did you know in advance that there would be no fees on either end? Was this an exception or is this just their standard offering?

Years ago I used bitcoin to avoid having to use western union. How the table has turned...

I think this level of heavy-handed measures are a result of cases like this [0] where a Sony employee embezzled $150 millions and converted them to BTC using Coinbase. Probably their silly security flags went up thinking you are trying to steal your business's money using BTC?

Edit: people who want to know more about the case, here's a Money Stuff article by Matt Levine [1], jump to "Coinbase compliance". Bunch of related links there as well, like NY Department of Financial Services release [2]. Summary from that:

> In the spring of 2021, an individual purporting to be an employee of a corporation (“Corporation A”) was able to open an account on behalf of Corporation A without authorization from that corporation, and without the appropriate personal identification documentation required by Coinbase policy. As part of a sophisticated fraud, the individual was able to submit an online request form to raise the daily withdrawal limit by 50 times, which was granted despite a total lack of account activity and, therefore, no evidence that the existing thresholds were insufficient for the customer’s activity. Then, on a single day, the employee transferred more than $150 million from Corporation A’s bank account (that the employee had also gained unauthorized access to) into Corporation A’s Coinbase account. The employee then immediately converted the fiat funds into virtual currency, then immediately moved the virtual currency to a wallet off the Coinbase platform. Coinbase did not become aware of this activity until six days later, when Coinbase was contacted by Corporation A’s bank. Coinbase assisted with the investigation of law enforcement, which ultimately led to recovery of the funds.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/united-states-files-civ...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/coinde...

[2] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releas...

Well, the accounts share nothing in common other than me. And, I deleted my personal account, like they asked. They seem unable to move forward after that.

As a developer myself, it's clear that request (delete personal account) was a hail mary. They had no idea if it would work.

And, the amounts of money involved are very small.

Sure, but how does coinbase know that? For that matter how do we even know you’re telling the truth now?

Well yes, I completely agree that they seem to have set up a series of security flags that they do not understand themselves, even though the flags were mandated for a legitimate reason initially. Coinbase paid $50 million in fines for that (see [0]) so they would rather lose some business from people like you than risk a fine like that again.

[0] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releas...

Yup, maybe coinbase being PTSD-level gunshy explains something.

I had an account made years ago, linked to my company's business bank acct and did some exchanges; all went fine. Then after a few years of inactivity, I tried to make a small transaction, and kept getting error messages, then questions of verification - the whole invasive lot as you described. I had no problem complying, went through half a dozen++ separate tickets that kept ghosting me and/or proposing non-working solutions (yet another invasive verification...). Finally after ~6 MONTHS of this nonsense, I suddenly got verified and it started working -- on the same damn account that had previously worked.

And crypto was supposed to be so easy and replace banks.

Coinbase's landing page blares out: "The future of money is here"

Right. It's still forking vaproware and worse than ever a decade and a half later. So much wasted potential. Ugh

EDIT: Aaaannd, I just signed in for the first time in many months, and the only thing I can access is an Account overview screen and some transaction data. No evident way to see my current holdings, prices, or way to cash out. But they do have a convenient [Close Account] button at the bottom, with a warning that it is irreversible and should have $0 balance

Nice.

I would like to get into crypto (for transfer, not for asset speculation) but can't understand the point of using a decentralized ledger and yet using these centralized exchanges which control the on/off ramps.

Isn't the whole idea not to rely on gatekeepers? There's been news (Canadian truckers incident) where the government told Paypal/Visa/Mastercard etc to stop the flow on crypto currency.

Am I missing something obvious, or is localbitcoins/classifieds really the only way?

As Ron Paul once said about the Federal Reserve system, "If that doesn't make any sense to you, then you understand it just fine."

You may quote me on this "If that doesn't make any sense to you, then you probably heard if from Ron Paul".

https://newrepublic.com/article/94477/ron-paul-distorted-lib...

What ignorant tripe! Author fancies himself the self-appointed arbiter of "the libertarian creed," yet his criticisms are the usual boring and disingenuous ad hominems of "racist" "sexist" "privilege" I'd expect from a leftist.

These are the points he seems to take issue with: 1. Private property is important to liberty. 2. The solution to racism might just not be more racism. 3. Open borders are good in theory but have problems in practice.

Some may disagree with these points, particularly on their nuances, but to conclude that they are somehow incompatible with libertarianism is completely brain-dead.

I wonder what this learned author and philosopher is up to these days... Oh, that's interesting: https://www.foxnews.com/media/will-wilkinson-lynch-mike-penc...

So he has an opinion that is different than yours. Sometimes it is good to read an alternate opinion. I had an English teacher in 8th grade that taught me how to read a news paper. She was from Eastern Europe and had escaped from the Soviets. She was very adamant about using multiple sources. Understanding the motivations of the writer, getting other sources of evidence. I think she was wise and I will always be indebted to Mrs Holtzman.

AFAIK the function of the Fed is pretty understandable. Whether you agree that they make the correct decisions that is another matter. It seems to me that in an economy that is producing new things that did not previously exist being able to adjust the amount of currency in circulation to reflect the total value of things in the economy makes a lot of sense.

Suppose the 350 million of us had to share the millions dollars that was in existence when the country was founded. There would not be enough for each of us to have a single dollar. That would make the currency pretty useless.

How else would decentralization work besides being peer to peer? Of course it’s more inconvenient that’s why centralization always seems to win.

Okay sure, but this seems kinda janky, no? I have to go to a cafe, hand some stranger some cash for btc and sit around for what an hour with them, so it can clear/propagate.

If you buy a ton of Bitcoin you'll wanna wait for more confirmations. Anything under $100 you can reasonably just wait for 1 or 2 confirmations (10 to 20 minutes). All about managing risk.

Or you could buy from a Bitcoin "ATM" there's probably one close by if you're in a decent sized city.

Otherwise you pretty much have to deal with an exchange or find an escrow service that will facilitate the transaction or something.

Try Bisq. Its a P2P exchange system that acts as a good "on ramp".

what you're missing is that Bitcoin is still a prototype. The intent was for it to be decentralized but people are still trying to achieve that, and once it became popular, it became overrun with scams and get-rich-quick schemes.

You can critisize many things about bitcoin, but it is definitely decentralized...

Unless you use an exchange. The best way to handle payments would be direct transfer from one personal wallet to another. No exchange necessary. No red tape. Buying the Bitcoin with fiat so you can put it in your own wallet for direct transfers is the problem. You generally need a centralized exchange for that. Also, the person you transfer btc to will generally need a centralized exchange so they can convert to fiat and actually use the btc. The whole ecosystem is a mess for people who just want to use it as a way to transfer funds.

Hm, there is https://localbitcoins.com/ or https://coinatmradar.com/. It is way cheaper than moneygram or similar services, just check out the options... from where to where do you want to transfer? You would even find people on meetups which would help.

Interesting. I didn't realize Bitcoin atms were so prevalent.

Their point is that the current decentralised Bitcoin is functionally unusable and simply not ready for mass use.

In that sense, a truly decentralized Bitcoin that people can actually make use of doesn't exist.

That is definitely not true. As mentioned there is local bitcoins, atms, meetups, bisq, just to name a few options, were you can exchange bitcoin for fiat. The options are there, are used and are even mature.

Centralized exchanges provide a lot more essential facility than fiat to bitcoin conversion. In particular, they provide acceptable transaction fees and acceptably fast transaction turnaround time.

Because crypto is a solution looking for a problem and 99% of the people involved are in it to scam you.

It is literally illegal in the US to provide unregulated/unregistered “onramp/offramp” services.

Have you tried Wise (formerly TransferWise)? I don't know if they have issues with transfers to Ukraine, but in general they have provided an excellent service for paying contractors in foreign currency.

We also use Deel and I can recommend it. It's $50/month for contractors which is usually sufficient depending on employment law (FTE through Deel is more expensive ). They handle all payments and we just connect our bank account. Contractors can choose to be paid in their currency which is facilitated through Wise.

I haven't. To detail the issue, going through the banking system, there seems to be a non-zero chance that the transfer will be parked at a bank in NY. No one knows why, but everyone assumes it's because the US government decided to look at the transaction. Sometimes the money is returned, sometimes it's forwarded on... I haven't been able to talk to anyone at that bank or in the government, to tell them why I'm sending money to UKR.

I definitely recommend Deel. Your payments will be to one company and they'll handle everything else.

I can't comment on whether they work well for payments to Ukraine because we don't have any contractors there. But we've had no problems in the countries where we do use Deel.

That could be a reason to use Wise. You send money to Wise (in the same country), and they transfer money to the account in the other country. I think it works in part by assuming that they have currency in that other country, so they can avoid conversion fees.

Although I have no idea if that works for Ukraine. This page has some interesting bits: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932349/guide-to-uah-transfer...

You could also consider offering your contractors payment in Euro, if they're able to setup an account that can receive it. That way you'll avoid the issues caused by exchange rate volatility, although you might still run into KYC issues due to recipient location.

In a previous role I used to pay contractors all over the world - Estonia, Kenya, France, Italy, Spain, Peru, South Korea, China and the UK just to name a few.

TransferWise was awesome at what it did, and it was pretty quick too. In some cases I could send money straight to my employee's phones - particularly in Kenya (via M-PESA) and China (via some sort of Wise-WeChat partnership). The fees were very competitive & reasonable, and their customer support was great in the few times I needed it to be. Can't recommend them enough.

Huge fan of Wise.

I use Wise to transfer USD to CAD and pay friends/family via Interac (Canadian electronic bank transfer where all you need is someone's registered email address).

It's a brilliantly smooth experience, perfectly acceptable fees given the alternatives. Being able to go US bank account -> Canadian interac is worth a lot to me. I'm grateful they exist.

Centralized exchanges should only ever be used to convert between fiat and crypto. Once you've bought your crypto, get it the hell off the exchange.

I also had a terrible experience with Coinbase once in the past where they locked my account for no reason and wouldn't let me purchase or sell. Thankfully it self-resolved in a couple days, but left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, though I haven't had any incidents since then.

Unfortunately centralized exchanges all seem to have atrocious customer support and are a risk. Not sure what can be done as a customer other than to minimize exposure to them as much as possible. Coinbase definitely needs more serious competitors in the U.S>

Coinbase is terrible. I’ve tried signing up and they won’t let me because they’ve tagged my SSN with fraud but won’t tell me why. CS is nonexistent. But it’s okay, thanks Coinbase for helping me avoid you. Terrible company and service.

The good news is this HN post could possibly get you the traction you need, which is also sad. Why is it that so many companies' customer support fails to function until someone squawks loudly on a high-traffic public site or social media?

> Why is it that so many companies' customer support fails to function until someone squawks loudly on a high-traffic public site or social media?

customer support is very expensive from the site's point of view, and filtering through squawking on social media is a way to reduce the number of support tickets. If particular social media channels become clogged with too many "what about my case" postings then those channels will lose eyeballs and no longer function as social media that "gets noticed"

A lot of things in life are stochastic in nature, and so are the responses.

As someone that runs a support organization, there's a big difference between efficient and inefficient customer support. It's very clear that Coinbase is extremely inefficient. Not only did they waste lots of time on a known issue, once identified they had no response so I kept wasting their time. In OS terms, they were thrashing. They could have prevented me from signing up for the 2nd account or had a process to change the account type. Instead, they're just wasting precious resources.

I agree with OP here. Coinbase as a company is almost as shady as the entire crypto industry (not the blockchain technology). The CEO didn't ever know how to treat employees well and the culture has always been toxic.

The company was always run with the mindset of pumping money into a bag as much as possible and allow investors to check out with profits just the way crypto did to people at one point.

I'm done with Coinbase too. I first started using it in 2017 or so, things went smoothly until I sold some crypto and tried to cash it out. Transaction was stuck in pending with no way to contact anyone or fix it. I finally got a resolution through some Coinbase employee's social media account.

Then I mostly purchased and sent very little of my crypto out of coinbase, using them as my wallet. Over a five year period I spent (sent out of Coinbase) maybe $500 or so of completely legal purchases around the web.

Last year I wanted to send my crypto to my own private wallet and they wouldn't let me (account restricted, no explanation). They claimed my account wasn't verified, when it was. By then they had chat support, but chat support couldn't help me, they just told me to verify my account again and again and again in some kind of loop of insanity.

Thankfully they let me sell the crypto and transfer the USD back to my bank account and leave that awful platform forever.

Funnily enough, I actually had issues with Coinbase today as well. All of a sudden they wanted to block me from using cards (no idea why, I've been a customer for at least two years).

I got told the change was due to security and irreversible, unless I delete and register a new account. I did that, and short story it worked for a few hours. After that I started failing ID checks (using the same information I registered for Binance).

Soon enough, I couldn't top up either by card or bank. They sent me an email telling me to use "alternative methods" when they literally are none - except directly transferring crypto over which kind of defeats the point.

I filed a complaint (different to a support ticket), so we'll see how that goes...

PS: Binance has been giving me issues as well. They owe me 5 USDT, and they told me to keep the chat open for approximately eight hours. Not as bad as Coinbase, but definitely not without issues.

I can't update the post any longer, so I wanted to add:

No contact still from Coinbase. I've emailed them like 5 times since their last email contact.

I called Kraken and talked to someone. Very helpful. I can't stress enough how important it was to talk to someone, before starting the account signup process.

Of course, I don't know of Kraken will be better, but already I've gotten more than I did with Coinbase, a live human. She also sent me a list of documents (URLs) in a followup email, which support what she told me on the phone. That was unexpected. I can't remember the last time I got something like that from _any_ support person.

Coinbase is a hit & miss.

1) For a corporate account, try Gemini or Kraken.

2) Also you should consider paying in USDC (I see in your response that recipient requests BTC), but paying in stablecoin will make your accounting life much much easier. The recipient can convert to whatever crypto they prefer after.

3) There are multiple companies that can help with international payroll. If you don't need your own crypto account and don't want to manage it, consider a service like Bitwage (https://www.bitwage.com/) to handle payroll for you.

https://remote.com/

there are dozens of services/agencies like this. not sure why you'd try to do it the hard way.

the problem isn't payment, which seems trivial via a mutually agreed upon cash app or western union or literally mailing cash or cash-convertible cards. the problem is tax compliance, for which BTC payment won't help you at all.

i have never and never would use coinbase. (not your keys, not your coins.) however i find your criticism misplaced.

I recommend Kraken, especially for corporate accounts.

They actually have real support that cares. While I was trying to set up my account they kept asking for more and more information into the corporate structure.

I told them "guys, this is just a corporate account, we are going to be trading a limited balance, this is not a market maker, why are you asking us as if we are going to be trading millions monthly".

They actually empathized and proceeded to open the account without ridiculous scrutiny.

This is likely what I will do, even if they resolve the issue.

Fuck centralised exchanges.

Just use Bisq or similar P2P exchange. Much less fucking around.

https://bisq.network/

Similar experience here. Tried to open an account. Took two weeks sending verifications and what not. Gave up and opened an account with Kraken. Took half an hour. Everything works like clockwork over there.

I had an account with Coinbase back in 2015. It was a humble simple exchange: ACH in, BTC out and vice versa. What happened? IPO happened. You can't sell humble simple exchange to stockholders, you must be Masters of the Universe.

Glad to hear that, as I'll probably start that process fairly soon. Thanks!

Sounds a little rough, and the support times aren't the best, but admittedly Coinbase is designed for consumers, and for large-volume traders with their institutional products. This low-volume business case is pretty edge. They could do better but for most people in most cases, the product works very well.

They were recently fined $100 million [0] for compliance reasons (essentially not moving quickly enough on a few cases), and the amount of info they collected was already heavy before that. When you can't make a mistake or you get fined millions, the edge cases on any money transfer system, especially one involving crypto, will probably default to not letting you get through rather than letting you skirt through easily.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/business/coinbase-settlem....

Coinbase has not been a bitcoin company since 2017, when they were on the losing side of a debate on whether the protocol should be modified to support commerce at the expense of decentralization.[0]

Since then they have gone all in on Ethereum and the 10,000 other tokens, encouraging users to try their luck on which one of them will blow up in price like bitcoin did. (Meanwhile they collect trading fees on the way up and/or down.) For them, bitcoin is a legacy product and a thing to say they have to get normies' feet in the door, so they can steer them into daytrading the other tokens.

As a result I am sadly not surprised that they were wholly useless for a person actually trying to buy and use bitcoin. For that I would highly suggest a bitcoin-focused company like Swan, River, Strike, or even CashApp.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blocksize-War-controls-Bitcoins-proto...

Ok, Coinbase isn’t a payments platform, they are a consumer speculative investing Ponzi scheme, aka, an exchange.

Coinbase is really a pain to work with. I tried to open a business account for my i401k and eventually just gave up due to the same dual account issue. Even just a straight forward personal account started causing me issues. Every step in the process is so much more complicated than it needs to be. I switched to Binance US as my fiat to crypto on ramp and have had no issues so far. I have no idea if Binance US even supports business accounts though. Last time I properly used coinbase was years ago when they onboarded chainlink and there were massive arbitrage opportunities for several hours. Price on Coinbase was 25 - 45% higher on coinbase than other exchanges. I spent hours just buying chainlink on other exchanges, sending it to coinbase, selling it, sending those funds to the original exchange and repeat.

Imagine having your salary drop 70% year over year because interest rates are no longer zero.

I would assume their salary is consistent, and denominated in USD. The payment is just made in x USD of BTC. Its up to the recipient to then exchange that BTC for their local currency.

Nobody is being bound to hold BTC once the payment is made. Nor needs the salary amount be contractually specified in BTC.

There are currencies that are similarly unstable (I was unable to get actual rates for UAH, but the official/pegged rate dropped 20% suddenly mid-2022), but unless the salary is denominated in BTC, the only thing that matters is short-term fluctuations between the point where the amount is converted to BTC and the point where the recipient converts it to local currency.

The advantage of BTC here is the decoupling of the sender and recipient exchanges: Instead of having to find one company that handles the whole transfer end to end (i.e. is active in both the sender's country and the recipient's country), it shifts the problem to finding one trustworthy exchange usable by the sender and another trustworthy exchange usable by the recipient.

Unlike banks or classic money transmitters, there is no need for trust/coordination between the two exchanges.

You want to use Bitcoin to make international payments without headaches... so you open an account on a custodial service? I don't understand what you expected to happen.

All you had to do is download a wallet and transfer your Bitcoin directly.

> and transfer your Bitcoin directly

OP was trying to get the Bitcoin in the first place.

That doesn't seem correct. It's pretty simple to buy BTC on Coinbase and then transfer it to another wallet. Then you can do anything you want with it.

I hope you read the post, where he says that he can buy on his personal account but not his business account.

That is correct. I don't want to hold BTC at all. I want to purchase and send. Period. As a business, I just don't want the headache, which my accountant says I will not have if I merely use it as a transfer medium.

It sounds like their money was in fiat and they needed to convert it to crypto

My guess is that it is a challenge to pay them because they live in Crimea or Donbas and carry a Russian passport. There are no issues sending money to Ukraine using conventional methods.

Completely untrue. They all are UKR citizens, mostly in Kyiv.

What is the issue then? I have colleagues in Ukraine and bank transfers at least from EU work just fine.

Heard about using Bitcoin as their only option from people who moved to EU from Crimea.

The explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444085

Part of this I would attribute to the general collapse of western civilization that we seem to be witnessing. I think it helps to recognize this is what is happening.

As for exchanges, I would recommend Bitstamp [1]. It is the oldest crypto exchange & never been hacked (that i know of). The original owners sold out a few years ago, but it's still going rock-solid.

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/

Does TransferWise support Ukrainian account owners? If so, they could get personal accounts and you could use a TransferWise Borderless business account.

https://wise.com/gb/blog/wise-for-displaced-ukrainians

https://wise.com/borderless

(no relation to wise besides being a customer)

This is not atypical. Unfortunately this is true for both Coinbase and Gemini. I had Coinbase support tickets that went 8 months without being responded to. I had Gemini support tickets that were being ghosted for a few months and then closed. These companies operate in a different dimension of customer care.

As for Ukrainians: have you considered using PayPal? Since last year it's widely supported in Ukraine and opening an account is fairly easy.

Also done with Coinbase, took all my funds out finally last week. They were arbitrarily blocking the movement of my assets.

Every time I would log in to transfer some cryptocurrency to another wallet, it would fail and an error message would say I was blocked.

Then I'd call support, get a human on the phone and they would not be permitted to tell me why, and claim there is nothing they could do - I had to wait 14 days until it was lifted.

So I waited a month, and tried again. SAME thing.

I call support and get the same reply - need to wait 14 days. I managed to get support guy to give me the exact timestamp which the block was automatically set. It coincided with either my login or my transfer attempt.

So they are just trying to prevent assets from leaving Coinbase with opaque reasons.

I waited another month and before I logged in I got support on the phone.

"Is there a block on my account?"

"no"

"Ok so i'm going to login now and transfer this asset to my own wallet elsewhere. Can you see a reason why this would be blocked?"

"no"

logs in, transfers assets

Then I tried to get all my USD cash back to my bank account. I'd click their OWN BUTTON which says "all funds" or whatever, and withdraw to my attached bank account - Denied, insufficient funds.

Called support, they said "there's a fee, you need to reduce the amount you're trying to transfer". So I did to simulate, and got to the next screen - there is no fee! OF course, this is my money. I want 100% of it back. But whenever I listed 100% of the value, it would be denied.

Support stuck to her story of there being a fee, even though there isn't.

I rounded off the cents, and whole dollar value worked. They can keep the change.

In both of these cases, the human on the phone presented an immoveable wall to getting access to my own significant assets with no reason (or the wrong one) and no hope for alleviating it. NEVER AGAIN will I trust them with my money. In fact, I'm incredibly suspicious of any new company handling large amounts of my money. I'm sticking with banks/brokers that have decades experience.

Given up on Coinbase long ago. As a crypto user, it literally stops working during periods of price volatility.

Kraken is my go to, but I have no idea about their business account support.

You also should use Algorand or something imo and avoid sending BTC. USDC is a good option to send dollars, if you use AVAX network it should be nearly instant.

But honestly like others said best option is likely Wise. I get paid through there from my U.S. employer, never had any issues.

I mean, it sounds like something a US based crypto exchange is going to AML/KYC the shit out of you for, imho but I'm American.

I have extracted more value from Coinbase than most though. I had (and had to wait through) my withdrawal limits being raised during the 2017 bull run.

Hammering your bank daily for 30+ days because of withdrawal limits ain't cool.

For whatever reason, back in 2017 my Coinbase account was flagged and then eventually banned for "moving around too much crypto".

I've been on this hidden "blacklist" ever since. It's 2023 and I still cannot create an account without immediately being sent an email saying "you're banned, we cannot do anything, SOL"

Yikes.

Coinbase sucks but this isn’t the way bitcoin was meant to solve your issue. You can buy bitcoin anywhere and send it freely. You don’t have to use a dumb exchange. It is not decentralized anything at the level you are doing it—you are simply using coinbase to act as an international banking platform

> You don’t have to use a dumb exchange.

where do you buy bitcoin that's not an exchange? hand cash to a guy in a park? (I suggest that because it was actually suggested to me)

It's been a looong while since I've used them, but I found I was able to get a quick response to my issue through their subreddit. Not sure if the subreddit is still an effective avenue today, but it may be worth a try if you want to close this out.

Good luck.

Why not use something like Deel or Remote if your goal is to pay international folks?

Probably because there is a war happening in Ukraine and the people OP is trying to pay do not have easy access to banking

1. Use Kraken 2. Use Nano

https://vinibarbosa.substack.com/p/case-study-a-look-at-337-...

Why do people insist on using Coinbase when Kraken has none of these issues?

Coinbase is well known. I agree, in the crypto community everyone avoids Coinbase (for many other reasons). It’s amazing to me that they shit the bed with business accounts tho.

For years, Kraken didn't support US ACH deposits and withdrawals, IIRC. Coinbase was the only option for that for a long time, then I think there was Gemini. Might be different now for Kraken.

Coinbase has crazy R&D spending like more than one billion Dollar in last year. Robinhood is also very similar. On the other hand Tesla only had 3 billion Dollar in last year. Really mind-boggling.

Coinbase is the biggest oxymoron to me when it comes to Crypto. isn't Crypto supposed to be De-centralized while Coinbase is everything but that ?

There has been a glut of customer-support-as-last-resort posts to HN lately, leading to pushback and complaints from HN users, so I promised to start downweighting these posts more.

Although these situations are rightly important to the people experiencing them, such posts are not of general intellectual interest. Mostly they use HN as a sort of desperate trampoline to attract attention from somebody-anybody inside inscrutable $company. Or perhaps the desperation has already metastasized into rage.

These feelings are understandable and we all share them (hence the popularity of these submissions). I've got a couple stories of losing $BigCo accounts myself, which boil my blood whenever I think of them. But we're trying to optimize for exactly one thing on HN: curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and this isn't it. In fact it's the opposite.

Such threads invariably turn into a generic referendum on $company, and eventually a generic dumping ground for ever-expanding indignation. Generic/indignant threads are the opposite of intellectually curious conversation, so this is important.

The goal is to keep HN for its intended purpose: curious conversation on intellectually interesting topics. For this, we have no choice but to treat the YC-related customer-complaint posts similarly to the others, because a glut of complaints about Stripe, Airbnb, or Coinbase isn't any more on topic than the equivalent material about Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Normally I wouldn't comment about this, but when the company is YC-funded, our principle is to moderate less (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), so there's a tradeoff here. Without an explanation, people understandably have perceptions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320001, even though we don't moderate HN that way.

Other recent explanations on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34282052

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192

Edit: Btw, it's the same with Tell HN: It is impossible to disable Google 2FA using backup codes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34441697 - although I downweighted the Coinbase thread quite a bit less, in keeping with the principle of moderating less when a YC startup is the story.

Well, I personal found a lot of value in that "Google 2FA" post. If it had been downweighted and I never saw it, that would, IMO, be a bad thing.

On the issue at hand, I run a software company. A very old one. I'm pretty forgiving about issues with support, etc. What I've been through with Coinbase has really been shocking and I thought the community should know.

Bitcoin exists exactly so we don't have to deal with this kind of bullshit. Find another app/service to send BTC.

A couple of things:

1. Banks a notoriously bad working with Crypto exchanges. A lot of credit/debit card simply does not work.

2. Prefer DAI/USDT/USDC over BTC. Stable coins appear to be what you actually want in your situation.

3. Run it on polygon or another L2 to get cheaper gas fees.

4. There are several much easier ways to acquire dem – try looking through the options provided by your metamask wallet.

Re: 2 and 3.

I'd stick to USDC over USDT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-whuXHSL1Pg&t=194s. USDC still has capitalisation statements. USDT doesn't.

Eth is indeed slow and expensive, but more people (as in: active wallets) use Solana (a fast and cheap layer 1) than the any of the eth layer 2s these days.

Coinbase staff have been caught front running their customers on new tokens listings multiple times now, even after they promised to actively stop it. Whatever's going on in Japan is going on in Japan. Don't trust other people with custody of your funds.

> more people (as in: active wallets) use Solana (a fast and cheap layer 1) than the any of the eth layer 2s these days

Except for when the developers shut down the blockchain like in the past, then you have to use an actual decentralized blockchain in the meantime

Solana currently has the highest Nakamoto coefficient (level of decentralisation) of any blockchain.

https://twitter.com/ChainflowPOS/status/1564014741214973958

BTC was the request of the recipient.

Even for personal accounts, KYC regulation implies all personal data go to a handful of centralized exchanges, which incentivizes malicious hackers.

In Romania, I will resort to notaries and LocalBitcoins/classifieds for trading BTC. I would probably get a better deal than the ridiculous exchange spreads (if you include deposit/withdrawal) as well.

Coinbase is not the exception here. The entire cryptocurrency industry is a joke.

This isn't coinbase, this is the exact regulations that everyone is screaming that are necessary in cryptocurrency land.

You could have easily substituted coinbase for chase bank here.

Ukrainians aren't under any kind of sanctions so why not just use a service like Wise?

As for anything related to crypto, most of it is a scam so it comes as no surprise that the few companies trying to be legit in this field are under so many restrictions it's incredibly inconvenient to use them...

Anyhow, everyone I know transfers money to Eastern Europe with Wise.

One issue could be, let's say the war turns and it looks like Russia will gain a lot of territory and drastically reduce Ukraine - their currency will then crash and the payments made to the contractor might become nearly worthless. At least with BTC it will be mostly unaffected by the war.

With Wise you can do any currency...

And BTC isn't exactly super stable.

I did look at Wise today because it was mentioned. It's not cheap, and certainly a lot more expensive than wire transfers or crypto.

What do you mean? I use Transferwise all the time and it's within 1% of the cheapest options.

I'm on Coinbase's side. From their point of view, this story reads like "I am trying to launder money".

Why not just use a payment method with a settlement period, instead of insisting on using a (new) debit card?

While I agree that the process could have raised red flags with the customer's behavior, why not have a human look into it and verify that it's legitimate?

Why the ghosting/poor communication?

Because humans are expensive, and you (the customer) aren't worth the effort and expense unless you're a major client with lots of money.

I am not on coinbase's side, because the advent of cryptocurrency, should it work - will make it trivially easy to avoid nasty letter regulation as it exists today.

They are taking steps to comply with a regulatory policy that is not voted on, nor written by legislature, and failing to make their case to the people that they should own their own money.

I understand why, but it bothers me that the CEO is pro crypto, has tons of money, and yet consistently fails to fight for the user.

You're on the side of the company with crap support ghosting its customers? For your users' sake I hope you're never in charge of running a business.

Some customers are more hassle than they are worth. Clearly Coinbase has some business customers, and they have responded to this guy multiple times.

They have no obligation to keep responding to someone who isn't even a customer yet, and appears incapable of transferring money to them in a legal way that their policies support.

I read it like you read it. But I'm just a stupid American who gambles.