So the #1 problem is that people who want to buy some cryptocurrency cannot. They wait days or weeks to get verified. And the exchanges and money changers want to provide the virtual currency to the hungry customers, but they cannot afford to hire enough people to process all the verification applications.
Given this extreme bottleneck, I don't see the significance of news about how much easier it is for people to spend virtual currency.
Ironically, Coinbase is one of the most complained about in terms of slow verifications.
Now they want me to go through the Photo ID process, but I don't have a US drivers license, only a permanent resident (green) card for ID. Which should be fine, after all it works as ID for literally everything else I could need ID for in the US - including flying. Support have been fairly responsive, but they keep sending me back to through their photo verification process, and I keep telling them "but this is not a driver's license, please look at the pictures!".
It's really annoying - this is a federally-issued photo ID I'm required to carry with me, and yet Coinbase seems to be struggling to accept it. In the meantime my money is stuck and I don't know how to get it back.
Kind of like they opened the door to unlimited new subscribers and sobbed that they were overloaded. With some of the HN crowd playing the violin music of poor, fast-growing start-up (the "growing pains" cop out).
Naughty (greedy) Coinbase.
It's annoying, but requiring a state-issued ID instead of a federal ID satisfies some of their legal requirements and makes the verification process much easier on their side.
Could they do this with a federal ID? Probably. It'd be a completely new verification process - not automated. They may need to request recent bills for proof of address, plus the necessary tooling to store/verify these.
It's the same reason you can't wander into a bank with a green card and be like "open an account". You need proof of address, state residency etc.
If 1 or 2 fails, which they do often, you're back in human land.
I am genuinely curious as I own some REQ, believe in the team, but also like what Coinbase has done to bring crypto to the masses (minus the outrageous fees of course).
So we a situation where people can't even construct something from their imagination that is virtuous in all concerns. & people want financial technology to meet that bar? Seems unlikely to me.
Could there be some money laundering? Probably. Will there be attempts by the owners of the payment processor to stop such a thing? Probably. Will there be perfection? Probably not.
From what I understand, most money laundering occurs in the traditional financial system. Does it follow we should tear it down?
& besides, I thought crypto(assets) were a fad. A bubble. A figment of the imagination. A plaything for greater fools. If that's true, it's hardly worth worrying about.
1. This is very, very, very bad for security, but is only possible because US interbank transfers are way behind the rest of the world (including 3rd world countries). Everywhere else, all you need to transfer money is the name of the bank, account holder and account number.
2. see "Products" on https://plaid.com. Plaid provides Coinbase's bank integration.
There must be some confusion on my part, because I consider this product (https://plaid.com/products/income/) as selling the income data, I'm guessing it's unrelated to Coinbase.
In any case, are you able to unequivocally state that you do not collect this data for coinbase users, even if it's not for reselling? I know you might have good intentions, but there's no telling where that data will end up once it's collected (past the point of your 'exit' event).
Actually here only the IBAN account number is required (and it's used everywhere). Bank is inferred from that and it's not stricly necessary to give account holder's name.
I'm curious where you got this bit of information? All I need to transfer money in the US is a routing number and account number.
While this is true, Routing + account numbers are less useful as this information can only be shared with trusted parties because anyone with this information can trigger a debit(!) against your account. For all the other countries I know, the worst anyone can do is deposit money into your account.
You're welcome to accept bitcoin payments without using coinbase or any other payment processor.
Under "Prohibited Businesses" you can see "Adult Content and Services" being listed. Source: https://www.coinbase.com/legal/user_agreement?locale=en
It just goes to show, as long as the world runs on fiat currency, and you need to convert from cryptocurrency -> fiat to live your life, the conversion point (e.g. Coinbase) will always be a point of failure and regulatory capture.
Also not sure what the Coinbase Commerce account is even for since "Coinbase Commerce is not a hosted service".
[0]: https://commerce.coinbase.com/legal/terms-of-service/ [1]: https://commerce.coinbase.com/faq
What happens if you buy something and pay, then when the merchant receives the bitcoins the value of them has dropped say 10%? Does the merchant take the loss in this system?
I just checked and the time between my order and initiating the sending of BTC to bitgo in Electrum to newegg saying the payment was accepted was just a little under five hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXe-wQyrWw&feature=youtu.be
No conversion to fiat at a guaranteed rate?
Can't you game this with such rapid price fluctuations? Time buying a high priced item during a crash maybe?
I also fully expect to get downvoted to oblivion for this opinion based on what I have seen in the past.
GDAX is one of the best companies out there in the field.
Note to others: a portion of the internet seems to relentlessly attack Coinbase because they listed Bitcoin Cash (BCH) months ago
Worse, coinbase is dragging their feet improving their Bitcoin technology stack. At this point it appears intentional.
> the amount of different currencies they accept is also very limited
They cover the 4 primary ones. I'm not sure as a business I'd want to accept any other ones... besides maybe ZCash and Monero for privacy reasons.
I have been using bitcoin for a while, I have payed for real goods and online services with it and I've following the crypto ecosystem for a few years. I really can't see the reason for more than just a handful of competing cryptocurrencies becoming mediums of exchange.
Request's goal is noble, but I think that they'd be better off working on implementing payment gateways for existing cryptos. The first mover advantage seems to be huge in this space, and I really can't see how Request, or any other crypto can scale fast enough to dethrone bitcoin or the rest of the big competitors.
The end goal is a decentralized payment gateway that will accept any crypto or fiat and payout in the desired currency. Request will handle the swapping of currencies and everything else in a decentralized manner. Obviously, likely quite a ways away from that, and there are a lot of scaling issues that need to be solved with blockchain tech itself before this can actually exist in a usable way.
I am really on the face regarding bitcoin though: it is the grandfather of all those crypto projects and massively moves the market, but I don't quite understand how it could ever replace a currency given its very limited supply and astronomical unit economic price: it was not supposed to be a store of value like gold when it started.
Ultimately, I think a few projects with much higher coins in circulation and faster transaction times will end up becoming more valuable due to greater usability.
It's a shame it feels like REQ is a bit late to the game, but they do have ambitious plans, one of them is to enable cross-currency transactions (including fiat). No-one has yet gained the first mover advantage in this space so the jury is still out.
re: Value change during a transaction: volatility is a fundamental problem with any currency. Adoption and volume will decrease volatility, which this announcement is moving towards :) Ripple's value-add to the banking industry, for instance, similarly relies on adoption in order to create an international pool of liquidity in order to facilitate efficient cross-border currency exchange. The more volume, the less volatility there is, which means less cost to banks using XRP as a payment "bridge". The same is desirable for merchants and consumers.
Ethereum will colapse on itself sooner of later, no one managed to sync a node recently.
†Not sure what the attack vectors are here.
Let's say you're applying for a loan via a lender that's a Plaid customer and you want to verify your income. In that case, you'd have to link your bank account with that lender (via Plaid), giving that lender permission to collect data about your Income. There's no way for that lender to get your income (or any other) data from Plaid without you explicitly connecting your account.
I understand why they did not pre-announce. They would have been attacked by rabid BTC fans, plus a bunch of astroturfers and bots.
I also don't believe in the convergence of coins with enough dexs. There are a lot of design features that people will want that are incompatible across coins, but still useful. Some coins will fail sure, but people still trade bitconnect(200k volume yesterday).
> You agree not to use the Services in ways that:
> Are illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, intimidating, harassing, hateful, racially, or ethnically offensive, or instigate or encourage conduct that would be illegal, or otherwise inappropriate, including promoting violent crimes;
Depending on who you ask, "obscene" and "otherwise inappropriate" can cover adult entertainment.
Guess it's impossible for us to guess, unless a case goes to court.
A new payment processor advertising the ability to accept completely anonymous transactions as a key benefit over the traditional ecosystem is going to attract a much higher ratio of money laundering to legitimate merchant accounts, and even without that, marketing Lack-of-AML-as-a-Service is sort of thing that gets regulators interested in shutting you down...
I'd agree the traditional system would probably have less money laundering. It also has less freedom, & could have significantly less innovation in the future.
> marketing Lack-of-AML-as-a-Service is sort of thing that gets regulators interested in shutting you down
I think they're run from South Africa, so I'm not sure if regulators could shut them down. Crypto is global & crypto is on the internet. Wherever cryptocurrencies go, human minds will follow. People will create them with their computers (mining) & transact with those who accept them.
Coming down hard on crypto assets could create a parallel economy. Untaxed & no regulation. Then what do regulators do? Nothing, because they just lost their jobs & any control over anything.
The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero used by hardly anybody and attractive primarily to money launders. Because if it's predominantly criminal businesses using them, it's not really making regulators' jobs more difficult.
Buying fiat with crypto is another issue but as long as crypto coins are accepted widely there will always be ways to buy goods, services and even fiat.
If you wanted to sell a saucy story, how'd it work? Essentially a hot wallet with a webhook?
The more people who use cryptocurrency, and accept payment in cryptocurrency, the easier it is to live your life with minimal exposure to the likes of Coinbase.
Even if South Africa shut them down, I'm sure others will find a way to run such payment processors. Where there's money, there's motive.
> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero used by hardly anybody and attractive primarily to money launders.
People who launder large sums of money would likely do it through the traditional financial system. How does one launder, say, a billion dollars through a Monero today? I don't think they could. That type of money is being laundered through the banking system[0].
> The real question is to what extent is it beneficial for non-criminal businesses to invest in the capability to handle niche currencies like Monero
If it's easy to implement & their niche likes to use them, then I would say it's probable.
Crypto can win bit by bit. Country by country. There are some jurisdictions that seem to be embracing the tech (like Japan & Switzerland).
That's some people using it. If it continues to grow & you know it's going to grow faster than any other asset it makes sense to do some speculation. Then with that speculation, you start to learn about crypto. It starts to spread as people become aware of returns, & it continues to grow, & so on.
It's resilient. I like resilient assets. I think a little bit of crypto can be a good investment. If anything it's fun. That's one of the reasons I think young people like it.
Do it for fun, spend it when people accept it. People even give discounts for buying in crypto.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-...
Edit: To clarify, yes, some mined blockchains feel faster now simply because they are less busy. They are still doomed to Bitcoin's fate at scale unless distributed systems techniques like sharding (or Nano's block lattice) are used. I'm not saying that the less busy blockchains are any better.
Yes, and for now it's not proven in practice that Nano will also stay responsive when it hits the same scale/busyness.