Status as of Friday, January 12, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• We released several fixes yesterday that customers will be pleased to find out about. First, there was an issue with displaying the error message on the website when a worker had an error. Previously, it displayed a red dot with no text; now, we fixed that so that the message is displayed. Second, we added a feature to make it much easier for Constance to review account data when answering support tickets.
• Of most interest to some people might be that we resolved another of JiveTonto's bugs. It turns out that his issue with duplicate blocks was, fortunately, a display issue. When a block was found, the share that found the block would be associated in the database with a coin someone else was mining, or a merge-mined coin. The reason why JiveTonto believed that blockchains were not advancing was because, by chance, a merge-mined coin that had the same block was being recorded despite the primary blockchain having correctly advanced. This issue had wider-reaching implications, because every query that tried to find which block a share found had some probability of returning the wrong coin. We released a fix last night and verified that the issue was resolved.
• Now that we resolved that issue, we have been able to discover that there are still some coins that, like Bunnycoins, return success on block submission even when the block is invalid. I've identified five coins that have that problem and scheduled them for discontinuation.
• All services will be offline this Sunday evening for the Meltdown security updates. We posted a notice of the updates in the "News" forum.
• Chris received a call from Comcast Entrprise and they moved forward with the installation process. The next step is for their installation contractor to contact him and schedule a time for them to dig up the ground for the fiber line. Once the contractor installs the line, he leaves both ends disconnected and there is a second visit that is scheduled by Comcast to set everything up.
• Coinbase has placed our bank account "in review" through some sort of automated process. They're holding $66,000 that is owed to the IRS and unless we can find a way to get this money out and get a new exchange, we will face critical problems a month from now when our coin holdings will exceed our tax liabilities. We would then be earning profits that we could potentially never be able to sell 50% of to pay the IRS. In addition to applying to Gemini and Bitstamp, Chris submitted a support ticket to Coinbase four days ago, but unsurprisingly, their hundreds of customer service agents haven't responded.
• I find it amazing that we are somehow able to answer all the tickets within a few days with one person working 3 hours per day on them, and Coinbase has about 1000 times the manpower and has not resolved issues like this for 60 days with some people I know. Plus, who freezes accounts before performing an investigation, and what more legitimate reason is there for using a Coinbase account than to pay taxes? Coinbase has surpassed UnitedHealthcare for the worst customer service of any company in the world, and I'll be writing a post over the weekend detailing the action we're going to take against them if they don't release our funds immediately. In short, never leave money in Coinbase; buy or sell quickly and assume that your account will eventually be locked and you'll need to go elsewhere.
• The website keeps running out of memory and restarting. Lots of exceptions are being printed to the logs. We know of two issues - one with password reset requests and one with invalid password attempts, which we're fixing now. There also seems to be a problem with the block explorers, but it's being overwhelmed by these other errors.

[bmhamlet]

Steve, Thanks for the recent updates.

With what you're mentioning here about Coinbase and the challenge that you mentioned recently with Poloniex regarding holding funds, is there a reputable exchange that is worthy of our business? Or do we just need to wade through the growing pains of the industry until things smooth out? Thanks again.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Steve, Thanks for the recent updates.

With what you're mentioning here about Coinbase and the challenge that you mentioned recently with Poloniex regarding holding funds, is there a reputable exchange that is worthy of our business? Or do we just need to wade through the growing pains of the industry until things smooth out? Thanks again.

I think that Poloniex is reputable. They resolved the issue after we made that post.

Coinbase has never answered any support ticket we've ever sent them. I know people who have thousands of litecoins stuck there who have had to transfer them out.

I think that Bitfinex, Coinbase, and CCex are the three exchanges who are shady and I would stay away from. Poloniex is one of the good guys. I'm cautiously optimistic about Gemini, given how other people have had good experiences with them, but they have yet to reply to our application, so I can't recommend them until they either approve it or politely decline it.

[buster442]

I'd suggest looking at BitFlyer exchange, although they currently only offer BTC (other coins supposedly are coming). I have had nothing but smooth sailing getting registered and approved to buy, sell and wire to/from our US bank account as a BUSINESS (not personal) account. The only other exchange I've had luck getting setup with as a business has been Kraken (took a month, lot's of manual intervention by non-existent customer support). BitFlyer took a week, mostly automated. BitFlyer is a Japanese exchange that recently was approved for business in US. Kraken was nothing but a horror story, although their 'losing' our wire transfer for 3 weeks saved us from buying Dash miners, aka doorstops.

[spauk]

wow, i had no clue coinbase was so disreputable. i might need to pull out.
lots of good work on the servers, keep up the good work
on a side note, are you sure it's the real IRS? i've heard of IRS scams and that just seems wrong to me to just freeze so much assets out of the blue.

[Steve Sokolowski]

wow, i had no clue coinbase was so disreputable. i might need to pull out.
lots of good work on the servers, keep up the good work
on a side note, are you sure it's the real IRS? i've heard of IRS scams and that just seems wrong to me to just freeze so much assets out of the blue.

The IRS has nothing to do with Coinbase.

Coinbase just froze the account. We need the money to pay the IRS the taxes. The sole reason we used Coinbase was to sell half our profits to pay that 50% to the IRS and all the other agencies we owe taxes to, since they don't accept cryptocurrencies. The rest of the profit stays in ETH and litecoins.

The issue is that they have frozen money without providing a reason or answering customer support tickets as to why it was frozen. If we could contact their support and tell them that we use the account to pay taxes, I don't know of any more legitimate reason to use an account than that. But we can't get in touch with anyone at Coinbase at all. If their customer service representatives actually looked at the account, they would probably resolve this issue immediately.

Coinbase continues to accept new customers without first shoring up their support. My guess, which is meaningless of course, is that they have three months before they end up mired in lawsuits and have to cease business. As I said in another post, if I were a Coinbase investor and the founders own less than 50%, I would be warning them that they need to deal with the customer service issue or that they will be replaced by someone who will take care of it - because the company is reaching the brink.

[meinerkey]

Steve, sorry to hear about your experience with Coinbase - my business account with them took literally 4 months to be set up properly - and I started that effort in May 2017, before the crypto craze went totally nuts in fact. I wish you luck with it, it frustrated me for months so I know the pain.

On another note, I wanted to ask if you could add XRP (Ripple) as a payout coin. I was surprised to see it not listed.

Lastly, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bittrex as a reputable exchange. We love them and use them routinely, never had a serious issue whatsoever. Also, your audience might want to consider getting GDAX accounts directly rather than just Coinbase (even though same company runs them both). Reason being, you can often convert via GDAX from things that are slow to move like BTC - so a use case would be converting a stash of BTC to say BCC on GDAX (low low fees for that), and then moving BCC to your chosen destination, and then converting it there to whatever you want. When speed is of the essence, it can save your ass. So, for instance, convert on GDAX from BTC to BCC, then move the BCC to Bittrex, where it will credit immediately, then start trading it into other currencies. Make sense?

Wish everyone the best.

[AppleMiner]

I've not had issues with coinbase...YET, but I was approved for 100K per day account access clear back in July, so Ive never had any issues with the level of access I had there.

Poloniex on the other hand...whats the limit there 2500 PER DAY or something crazy small?
and in 10 months of using them, never been able to get that limit increased enough to make me want to do any business through them.

[Eyedol-X]

I've not had issues with coinbase...YET, but I was approved for 100K per day account access clear back in July, so Ive never had any issues with the level of access I had there.

Poloniex on the other hand...whats the limit there 2500 PER DAY or something crazy small?
and in 10 months of using them, never been able to get that limit increased enough to make me want to do any business through them.

Curious, Did you get this approval because of the amount of business you do with CB or did you request it somehow?

[AppleMiner]

I did a request and was initially turned down.
Then after doing business with them for 3 months, I applied again and like a month after that got approved.
I can now move 100K per day on coinbase to my bank tied to my account.


Who wants to laundry some money?