I've been more than pleased with the service Coinbase provides. I have been a customer for almost three months and have bought and sold several thousand USD worth of BTC in that time.
How do you know these posts show the truth? What if these poor experiences we see posted on Hacker News are occurring at a rate of 1 in every 1000 Coinbase transactions or even 1 in 10,000 transactions? I agree that with money the error rate should be low, but BTC is the wild west.
You're taking on risk wherever you buy and sell BTC these day. As a US citizen, I'd rather take a little bit of risk with Coinbase, a US-based company supported by reputable US-based VCs, than take on the risk of sending my money to Slovenia or Japan -- not to mention the extra fees to do international wire transfers to/from those countries.
You cannot really believe that a few posts on HN, whether they are positive or negative, really are a good indicator of Coinbase's reputation, can you? Anyone can post anything and the more negative it looks the more people upvote it. Upvotes do not correlate to truth or accuracy.
For example if I were to post that I have used Coinbase multiple times with no problems I wouldn't expect to see a single upvote. It isn't news.
These aren't simply customer quibbles, Coinbase is literally causing customers to lose thousands of dollars of their own money. They clearly are an untrustworthy company, and people should be informed - especially when there are large sums of money on the line.
I'm also glad people are posting about Coinbase. Thankfully I've only entrusted them with 1 BTC...but I will surely not be using them for anything else.
I'm glad to see these posts. Well, I'm not glad these things are happening to Coinbase customers, but if they are, I'm glad reports are showing up here.
