Is Coinbase also a case of not your keys, not your crypto? What would be the best way then to have your keys and your crypto? I never really understood the whole crypto storage stuff and how to approach it.
Yes absolutely. Coinbase has terrible customer service, often ignoring support requests completely until you go onto social media and try to get their attention publicly before they'll even give you a response. I don't think there is necessarily a "best" way to have your keys and crypto, but usually depending on the crypto you use they usually have an official wallet that you can use where you'd be responsible for the key(s). This means that you act like your own bank though, so if you lose your private key you also lose your crypto. Therefore it is important to use utmost security, privacy and safety when displaying and saving your key.
A lot of people swear by hardware wallets like Ledger, and I think those are probably the best options for people that don't know a lot about security and crypto or possible even those that do.
Coinbase, a nasdaq listed company, handles customer support through its subreddit. What's more, a few weeks back a customer got scammed through coinbase's subreddit when his support request was answered by another user impersonating coinbase customer support, instructing the customer to move their coins to a wallet number they gave them in order to solve the issue. The customer lost $75k and there was nothing coinbase could do other than "sorry for your loss".
The support is bad but this was phishing: how is it coinbase their fault?
Not to mention that most big companies have kafkesque awful support, but if they offer better for $0.01/year more, all their clients will go elsewhere. Bad support is only noticed when you got bitten and just not that a big % gets bitten, even if support is awful for almost all that needed such support (you need support, the bot chat does not work for you (apparently it works for people) and then you need to have a bad experience).
> The support is bad but this was phishing: how is it coinbase their fault?
Because they chose a support platform that makes it very easy for other people to impersonate them? We would laugh at a bank that was running their support out of /~foobank/ on a shared hosting provider, but reddit is pretty much the same thing.
Yes, but so does no support at all at Google. We can, by now, for go the nonsense that it is a free service: they make money selling our data so we pay. And yet, no support. And there are more examples of huge companies not giving any or adequate support. Here in the EU Revolut is known for support horror shows too.
But yes, support via reddit is weird, I agree to that.
Google provides support roughly proportionately to how much you pay Google. Free-as-in-beer internet services tend to be offered as-is, and this is nothing unusual.
A financial firm providing support through reddit, on the other hand, is a bad joke.
Yeah but the services from Google are not free. So it is just what you put up with. But even when I was funneling 100s of 1000s of $ through then both ways (adsense and adwords), the support was nonexistent. But I see your point.
If the support would be good, reddit would not be that much of an issue, but yes, you are right that it is at least weird. Probably they think it is all OK in the free-spirited crypto world.
I smell a fresh wave of lawsuits in the crypto space with companies like Coinbase. Honestly, they just remind me of Robinhood during the GME fiasco. They are also a Y Combinator company too.
Yea they are terrible. They told me based on my state ID that I scanned and uploaded that my name was "wrong" -- i.e. if I'm "John L Smith III" they basically said my name is really "Smith Iii L John" and refused to fix it, effectively nuking my account because it didn't match my real (wrong?) name. Oh and it took them over a month to respond.
