The business account took a long time to get. Probably 2 months. The amount of information they asked for was quite surprising to me. As a founder, I had never given this level of detail to anyone for any purpose. I assumed that it was due to regulations Coinbase were under, but honestly, I do not know. The end goal was important enough that I was willing to go along.
Once I went through the onerous process, I linked our business checking and purchased some BTC and tried to transfer it. I was told there would be a 13 day hold on the funds before they could be transferred to my consultant. I went through support and was told to use a debit card and there would be no hold.
Since I didn't have a debit card, I had to get one. After it came, I tried to add it and I got the error: An error occurred / Business cards are not supported.
That was in mid-December. Here we are in late January and it is still not resolved. Here's a thumbnail of what has happened in between:
- I submitted an email ticket, where they sent me canned responses for the first week or so. They really never seem to understand the issue.
- After a few weeks they finally told me I had a personal account and I couldn't add a business debit card.
- I showed them screengrabs of my account proving that it was a business account.
At this point they ghosted me.
A week ago I tried a chat on the website. I explained everything above and it came down to this:
> A person can only have either a personal or business account, but not both
Let's ignore the fact that they let me open both accounts and never said a word about it. They even let me connect a debit card to my personal account and a checking account to my business account.
Next, they told me if I deleted my personal account I could add the debit card to my business account. I did that. No change.
I started a chat again and after a long time bumped it up a level and said someone would get in touch with me via email.
Yesterday I got an email that my new ticket was closed and asked if my issue was resolved.
At this point, I deleted my personal account and my business account is stuck in "personal" mode and I can't add a debit card, so the hold time means it's useless.
I just want people to know that Coinbase is a complete joke of a company. Don't use them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-05/coindeal-s-bentleys-weren-t-real
[2] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releases/pr202301041
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.
[0] https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releases/pr202301041
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.
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.
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.
Why not just use a payment method with a settlement period, instead of insisting on using a (new) debit card?
Why the ghosting/poor communication?
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.
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.
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 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.
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-transfers
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.
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.
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.
All you had to do is download a wallet and transfer your Bitcoin directly.
OP was trying to get the Bitcoin in the first place.
You could have easily substituted coinbase for chase bank here.
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.
https://vinibarbosa.substack.com/p/case-study-a-look-at-337-days-of
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?
https://newrepublic.com/article/94477/ron-paul-distorted-libertarian-ideology
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-pence-niskanen-center-ny-times
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.
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.
In that sense, a truly decentralized Bitcoin that people can actually make use of doesn't exist.
Heard about using Bitcoin as their only option from people who moved to EU from Crimea.
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.
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.
And BTC isn't exactly super stable.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Just use Bisq or similar P2P exchange. Much less fucking around.
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.
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.
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)
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>
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.
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&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang), 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&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment), 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.
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.
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.
Good luck.
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.
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.
As for Ukrainians: have you considered using PayPal? Since last year it's widely supported in Ukraine and opening an account is fairly easy.
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.
https://wise.com/gb/blog/wise-for-displaced-ukrainians
(no relation to wise besides being a customer)
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-protocol/dp/B08YQMC2WM
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.
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.
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.
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.