
Stripe and Coinbase apparently can't find my Bitcoin - perennate
http://blog.perennate.com/20170609_coinbase_stripe.html
======
solotronics
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!

~~~
jerguismi
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.

~~~
Phlarp
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

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

~~~
Jach
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.

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edwinwee
(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.

~~~
virtuexru
This is amazing :D

~~~
659087
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.

~~~
floatingatoll
Yes.

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

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LyndsySimon
> 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.

~~~
spolu
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.

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Mizza
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.

~~~
ktta
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.

~~~
Twisell
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

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SadWebDeveloper
> 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.

~~~
i336_
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...

~~~
SadWebDeveloper
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.

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cocktailpeanuts
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.

~~~
kcanini
> Coinbase has the worst customer service EVER.

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

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

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

~~~
spinlock
you're kidding right?

~~~
tcoff91
He's not kidding.

~~~
cortesoft
They had to make it webscale!

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pthreads
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!"

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TimeToFly
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.

~~~
perennate
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.

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atemerev
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.

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isubkhankulov
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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
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.

~~~
striking
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.

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dahoramanolo
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.

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

~~~
nullc
You seem to have not read the article.

~~~
craigc
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.

~~~
perennate
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).

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

~~~
pavel_lishin
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?

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bitJericho
Might I recommend my alternative bitcoin exchange?
[http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com](http://bitcoinsexchange.itmustbetrue.com)

~~~
ryanmarsh
Bitcoin Sex Change?

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

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

