Coinbase Blog

Coinbase (http://www.coinbase.com) is a platform that facilitates the easy conduct of the digital currency Bitcoin for consumers and merchants. This includes the buying and selling of Bitcoin, secure storage of Bitcoin in the cloud, and a suite of merchant tools. Since the start of the year, user base has grown 25x to over 250,000 users and consistently achieve weekly revenue growth rate in the double-digits. We're looking for the following roles: * Full-stack generalist * Frontend engineer * Mobile engineer (who is interested in working on web too) * Security engineer We are a team of 6 consisting of people that have worked at Airbnb, Google, Goldman Sachs to OkCupid. Check out some of our recent progress on our blog - https://blog.coinbase.com/ We're also looking for a: * Chief Compliance Officer * Customer Support Specialist * Office Manager If you're interested, head over to our careers page and email us at [email protected] with links to your Github, resume or any personal projects.

I do think there's an issue with companies like Facebook owning peoples' data. Instead, with Web3, the idea is that people own their own data, can verify who they are (they own their private keys), and can choose to interact with services on the web and share their data as they see fit. I agree with you though that it's great to be able to download movies or music (even though the trend seems to be moving more and more towards streaming). I don't think Web3 means that everything is arbitrarily limited though, it means that it's more user controlled [1]. [1] https://blog.coinbase.com/understanding-web-3-a-user-controlled-intern…

It looks like the entire blog got deleted? https://blog.coinbase.com/

Anyone know if the 60 employees, who didn't agree with the mission focused approach, kept their shares? https://blog.coinbase.com/a-follow-up-to-coinbase-as-a-mission-focused…

> Does anybody here think that even adopting and correctly practicing all practically deployed recommendations of the security industry that a system could resist such an attack? There are multiple examples of organizations successfully thwarting advanced attacks by following (and exceeding) industry best practices. Most of that stuff isn't disclosed to the public unfortunately. Coinbase incident from the last year is one such example: https://blog.coinbase.com/responding-to-firefox-0-days-in-the-wild-d9c…

It depends on what your threat model is. If you are a high value target, clicking on a link could definitely get your hacked through a browser vulnerability, e.g. https://blog.coinbase.com/responding-to-firefox-0-days-in-the-wild-d9c… and https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/20/alleged_dnc_hackers_six_zerod… . Most people are probably not worth the effort of this, but I could imagine a source code hosting company could be, as a step to try to compromise some other software...

> AFAIK there aren't really any good solutions to prevent this problem https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-views-proof-of-work-security-f4… > Coins at the greatest risk of 51% attack are the ones where there exists large amounts of hashpower not actively mining the coin that could begin mining and disrupt the coin’s blockchain. Also, Ethereum's upcoming transition to Proof of Stake is not contentious, it's a large-scale project years in the planning and execution.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/sections/360001508894-Custom-domains Other popular publications that use custom domains on Medium: https://m.signalvnoise.com/ https://medium.economist.com/ https://blog.coinbase.com/ It's now deprecated for new services, though.

If you had bought $10 worth of bitcoin starting on Oct 21, 2015, and continued to do so every month for the next four years, your total investment of $480 would be worth around $3,337 today — a gain of 595% (as of 10/21/19). Coinbase: https://blog.coinbase.com/charting-the-course-of-bitcoin-11-years-and-…

It's worth noting that quite a lot of the VCs in question had already written off their investments in 2017-2018 shitcoin ICOs. This is why said VCs were suggesting to Coinbase last month that they list all these shitcoins that nobody even trades now, but which the VCs just happen to be holding massive bags of: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-continues-to-explore-support-for-ne…

Coinbase mentions a few reorgs without double spends, and a quite a few more with: https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-classic-etc-is-currently-being-51-a…

They're going to give new tools to institutional traders. Co-location, FIX market data, lending & margin financing products, professional crypto secure storage ('coinbase custody') etc. etc. They'll be faster than non-institutions and have trading options unavailable to the rest of us. Read this https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-institutional-deea317d23af Right now, the institutions have to play on a level playing field with us one-man teams. This suite of products will give them their pay-to-win advantages to keep us little guys from being the fastest and best in the market. I have the fastest bot on GDAX right now, that will only last until these new services are introduced -- since I can't afford to pay $XXk a month for the privilege. Edit: If you're reading this from your chair at a HFT firm, send me a message if your company is interested in the fastest bot :)

I thought it was hilarious that the Coinbase blog announcement of their tax reporting explicitly states that this reporting is completely useless for the 99% of Coinbase users who have transactions on other exchanges and ICO's. https://blog.coinbase.com/new-tax-tools-on-coinbase-4d2598544d9e I'm founding www.ZenLedger.io to help crypto investors and CPA's to comply with IRS law, aggregate ledgers across exchanges and wallets, and make everything easier. We also undo things like Coinbase falsely classifying all coin movement off their exchange as a taxable sale when they know it's most likely a non-taxable transfer. So, we help you pay less taxes. Check us out please. We have a great team of developers and business/finance professionals working hard to get it all done for you.

Point of clarification: there was no prior announcement that Coinbase would support trading of BCH. In the blogpost to which you likely refer, it is made clear in the last two paragraphs that they would enable withdrawal of existing BCH balances but trading support would be determined at a later date [0]. This closely follows how they enabled the temporary withdrawal of Ethereum Classic after its fork in 2006 [1]. [0] https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-bitcoin-cash-8a67a7e8dbdf [1] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2524725-ether…

In the end, the majority would continue the established brand. For example, you can argue that Ethereum Classic is the most 'pure' implementation of Ethereum, however, Ethereum (ETH) gained much more support and kept the name. In the case of Bitcoin, it's not clear yet who it's going to keep the name at the next fork. You can see Coinbase blog post about this https://blog.coinbase.com/clarification-on-the-upcoming-segwit2x-fork-…

Coinbase’s problem lately is that they can’t keep up with their growth. See this recent post: https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-customer-support-139d99e72876 For me, PayPal and GoDaddy have the worst customer service I have ever experienced. It is hard for me to pick which one is worse. Hopefully we can all agree that Amazon has the best though :)

You might find it interesting to note that USAA is partnering with Coinbase to give account holders a view of their Bitcoin balance along with their USAA accounts. It seems the partnership between banks and bitcoin is already happening. https://blog.coinbase.com/2015/11/03/usaa-and-coinbase-partner-to-help… The next phase would be for people to buy bitcoins through USAA directly. Banks are notorious for being "monkey see, monkey do". How quickly did Mobile Checking Deposits take off when banks starting putting these into their mobile apps? Coincidentally, it was USAA who helped develop the technology which allowed mobile deposits in the first place. Once a few banks begin to incorporate bitcoin, the rest will follow.

On Coinbase's official blog they recommend a third-party iOS app on the iTunes store. This seems a bit more lax on security than I would expect from a wallet provider. The unofficial app on the App Store uses Coinbase's name and artwork, and doesn't say that it's unofficial [2]. It's seen updates since Coinbase's blog post, where the author could have added this but hasn't. I also wonder if they've been making sure that they're still willing to say that they believe it to be secure and safe to use after the updates. This is concerning to me, as a Coinbase user. 1: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/64824441934/the-coinbase-ios-app-has-lau… 2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coinbase-bitcoin-wallet/id886427730?mt…

Use digital cash- no chargebacks, no middlemen. The best option today if you don't want chargebacks is adopting Bitcoin for payments (like how Reddit did for Reddit Gold with Coinbase). http://blog.coinbase.com/post/40131065845/hosted-payment-pages-email-i…

Is this real? There's no mention on their blog: http://blog.coinbase.com/

"Coinbase now offers Two-Factor Authentication" http://blog.coinbase.com/

Haven't signed up, but http://blog.coinbase.com/ does mention 2FA is supported through SMS or an app called Authy. In case the founder sees this, was there any reason why Verisign's VIP app (which has native apps on more devices and seems to be the de-facto standard for banking sites) was not used?

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more grizzled this time around, so I think this mindset is slowly becoming the norm. College grads seem skittish, but they always are. People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable. It's probably true that no Armstrong, no Coinbase, and 10% of Coinbase is the prize. EDIT: It's actually 14 weeks: https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-cofounder-br… Three and a half months of dev salary is pretty incredible.

Their whole blog is gone https://blog.coinbase.com

I think it would be worth understanding how Bitcoin works first. It's designed to be more robust. It doesn't change as often (some criticize it due to that), however, it could also be seen as a strength. You could read the Bitcoin white paper [1]. If you wanted to learn more about programming Bitcoin, you could also check out Mastering Bitcoin 2nd Edition - Programming the Open Blockchain by Andreas M. Antonopoulos [2]. Ethereum was created after Bitcoin. It was designed to be more of an open programming platform. It was designed to be Turing Complete and enabled the use of "smart contracts". The DeFi space runs on smart contracts and Ethereum kicked off DeFi. This is the Ethereum white paper [3]. Mastering Ethereum by Andreas M. Antonopoulos & Gavin Wood is another book you could check out [4]. Here are a couple of introductions to DeFi, as well [5][6]. The hack that everyone is discussing here was on Poly Network, which a layer 2 solution for Ethereum [7]. Layer 2 solutions were created due to lower the high gas fees on Ethereum, as well as increase transaction throughput. Ethereum itself is also working on moving to Ethereum 2.0 which would help address the issues that layer 2 solutions are trying to solve [7]. Edit: Poly Network actually appears to be more of a bridge between different networks (Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain) [9], so it's worth noting that this wasn't a direct hack on Polygon, which is a layer 2 solution for Ethereum. [1]…

From the linked article on Coinbase's compensation ( https://blog.coinbase.com/how-coinbase-is-rethinking-its-approach-to-c… ): > Because our standard offers are world-class, we are officially eliminating negotiations on salary and equity from our recruiting process. > We are OK if we lose some candidates due to this decision — the best candidates for Coinbase are those who are looking for a highly competitive package and are ready to let their contributions speak for themselves. I'm sorry but that's a self-contradiction (even oxymoron). "highly competitive package" these days is after negotiation, period. If you're 100% firm on the offer when asked, then people seeking "highly competitive package" (after balancing all other factors of course) can and will simply walk. As for the "let their contributions speak for themselves": For (especially early stage) startups, any promise to raise the compensation later *cannot be trusted*, period. It's not written on your offer (except for maybe "guaranteed/target bonus"), and the management could always come up with "budgets" --- basically handing out far less than what would make up for the initial compensation deficit, maybe except for a few people in the "inner circle". Having been both in and out of the "inner circle" myself, this difference can be significant over time. Also as the startup goes through funding rounds, company policy will change and the people who "promised" you will inevitably leave,…

> Okay please share what made it click to you as a "fundamental global revolution" There's a lot going on right now in the decentralised finance space. A couple of things that interest me: 1. Payments. Stable coins (backed by collaterals) like DAI (by MakerDAO), USDC (by CENTRE aka Coinbase, CirclePay et al), Libra (by Facebook, Shopify, Uber et al) have a potential to replace the current payments system and those rent-seeking middle-men. In DAI's case, the currency is truly autonomous and decentralised, so there's a good chance it ends up uncensorable and unregulatable. USDC and Libra offer a great way for folks not in high inflation countries with weak currencies to lock up cash-in-hand in USD. Libra is poised to see a broad adoption once Facebook makes it common place on Instagram and WhatsApp, where most of the commerce is moving to. It remains to be seen how Stellar ends up doing in response to Libra. 2. Banking. Banks, like eco, dharma, and onjuno, built on top of Ethereum altcoins can offer higher interest rates than traditional banks. Other things I'm excited about and looking forward to: 1. Anonymous assets. Monero enables truly anonymous transactions. It isn't a stable coin, so that's a bummer. MobileCoin, which I believe is built on Stellar, is private but I don't think its anonymous or stable. 2. Web3. Storage (FileCoin, Sia), Compute (Golem, ElastOS), Network (Orchid, Mysterium), Content (IPFS)... may yet emerge as a credible distributed alternative to the…

> Companies publish investigator reports of bias and discrimination somewhat regularly. Are you thinking of a specific example? I don't recall ever seeing this apart from sometimes a short statement on an outcomes (which Coinbase has given us - they found the complaints baseless [0]). > ...but they can certainly commission a new one that they can disclose. I did mention law but this isn't fundamentally a legal argument. I was just saying I'd expect there to be a law, given what releasing a detailed report would entail about employee privacy. I'd be ropeable if someone did that to me after I complained to HR and the story got international attention. Companies have no role at all in airing internal dirty laundry of employees to Hacker News. Coinbase's position is an employee made a baseless claim - in my book it would probably be a very poor precedent for them to start broadcasting details globally. Best case, utterly unfair because of the power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Worst case, a smear campaign. All cases, unhelpful except for the enjoyment of pundits Hacker News comment threads. [0] EDIT Rather than replying - "all of whom found no evidence of wrongdoing and concluded the claims were unsubstantiated" https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012afc25d27

While this is a fairly balanced description of Bitcoin Cash, there are a few glaring errors that should be addressed. It's about 1000% better than most though. Kudos to the author. > It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to distinguish itself from Bitcoin It has made a number of subtle but significant changes to survive as a minority hard fork until it can attract enough hash power to take the network. > This has lead to nearly 2,000 Forks of the Bitcoin network Almost all of the 2000 "forks" referenced here are forks of the codebase. Bitcoin Cash and only a few others are forks of both the codebase AND THE BLOCKCHAIN. When the blockchain is forked, the new coin contains the same transaction history and coin distribution up until the fork point. > However, the person most directly connected to the currency today is Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin adopter and investor. This could not be further from the truth. When the censorship started in r/bitcoin, multiple teams started working simultaneously on separate clients to fork the network. The team that was first out of the gate is said to be affiliated with ASIC manufacturers Bitmain. It took months before Roger Ver even spoke about it. It wasn't until the Segwit2x fork failed on the Bitcoin Core network that Ver actually put his resources behind it. He was even criticized for not supporting it immediately. > A brief history The history goes much further back. See the following links -…

Do a search for "Coinbase transaction fees." You'll see theres no major announcement that in April 2017 Coinbase changed it's policy and stopped paying for up to 25 transaction fees on the blockchain. Now I have no problem with this practice in itself - it was a great feature - but my problem lies in that I didn't find out until my API payments started failing. Here's where they actually announced it: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821 In the middle of a blog post that's far out of sight. For a policy change of that effect I cannot believe how they conducted it. Then there's the multitude of API problems over the years. I would send payments and the response indicated success, but I would login and see the payments were never sent from my account. The volume of payments I send through Coinbase is far too high for two months to go by and still not know why their API just fails from time to time. They collect enough fees from instant buys and transactions that I would expect reliability and due diligence. Especially when the security of my business depends on it.