I just had an experience with coinbase and crypto.com that seems to exemplify some differences in an exchange acting in good faith for their customer and being a good steward of their position, and an exchange using intentionally deceptive practices to bilk their customers out of what I assume is much more financially than my piddly little transaction. Here’s the cliff notes on how it went down:
I have two bobcat helium hotspots that I’ve been playing with just to see how they earned and what I can do with them. I haven’t been making a ton of money in my perpetually light in hours job as a chef since well you know lock down turned any reliability on employment in that field on it’s ear. I generally try and save the HNT I earn as I have faith that they will eventually be worth much more than they are right now. Sometimes I have occasion too withdraw a little of it to my crypto.com card and buy a pack of smokes or turn them into another coin for various reasons. My standard formula for that has been
) Withdraw helium to my crypto.com HNT wallet.
) Sell desired amount of HNT for CRO
) Use convert dust feature on remaining HNT
) Sell my CRO to LTC
) Withdrawal LTC to my coinbase LTC wallet
) Listen to Jeopardy!'s ‘Think’ music approximately 1,384 times depending on blockchain speed.
) When LTC arrives at coinbase convert all to DOGE
) Withdraw my 15-75 DOGE to my favorite Satoshi dice degen site
) Listen to Jeopardy!'s think music nearly one time through
) By the time that has all happened I have likely reached zero on my Satoshi dice wallet balance
) Enjoy the last 4 minutes and 38 seconds of my cigarette break before returning to keep cooking steaks and burgers
I’ve tried a few ways of putting this process on a little bit of a diet. Helium is only convertible into a couple different coins on crypto CRO and BTC being the ones I like to use to manage these micro style transactions. Cro became the choice as a convert dust feature allows me to clean up the last couple pennies worth of whatever I’m working with before my final convert to LTC to ship to coinbase. LTC is what I finally settled on using for that move due to its relatively decent speed and very very small transfer fee.
The 18 or so DOGE send fee was too high for what I was doing and coinbase only charges 1.44 so working with just these two it was obvious and needed a way to ship from crypto to coinbase without consuming a dollar’s worth of my three or four dollars of fun money.
Thought a couple weeks ago that sending my CRO to coin base with eliminate me a few steps and be cheap and very fast so I waitlisted my cro wallet address from coinbase which I found in the standard wallet spot on the coinbase app. Pulled up the QR copy the address figuring I’d try it out tomorrow reserving a small skepticism that coinbase and cro might be a little tricky to coax into getting along as I figured some competitive roadblock between the two companies had to be lurking.
So a couple weeks passes and I still hadn’t tried to sniff out the competitive roadblock and finally got to it this morning looked at both sides checked with the fee was going to be everything seemed up and up to give it a shot. Still I fortunately decided I’d try about the smallest allowable amount first which I believe is 3.85 cro to send from coinbase. So I shipped 4.20 CRO to my previously white listed coinbase address and went about what I was doing for a while till I thought of it again and had a minute to check it. 3 hours and I hadn’t received any notifications on my client base account or seen my balance go up so I was a little disappointed as this won’t be faster than LTC. Looked at my crypto.com wallet and had no cro. Check the transaction crypto.cpm says sent, coinbase wasn’t showing pending or anything anywhere.
I used the cronos explorer to see what was going on. It showed that it was sent, received, transaction time of 6.86 seconds, and 3 hours after the initial send it was sporting about 1100 confirms. Double checked my receiving wallet address against my coinbase wallet, checks out everything should be good. I give it another 2 hours come back to it, nada zip zilch. Okay I guess. Contact support open the windows start the chat. Give the TX and receiving addresses to the coinbase chatbot I thought my name was sorry and then proceeded to tell me he did not know what I was talking about repeatedly. So I asked 'Ol Basebot to give me one of his flesh and blood bot colleagues and you told me to wait and someone would be with me.
It bears mentioning that the support chat on the app really did not want to stay connected if I did anything else with my phone including letting the screen display go from portrait to landscape, switching to another already open app, or pulling my down my top bar to just my brightness on my screen. I never remembered this happening before my last update though i don’t contact support terribly often. For some reason Mr Bolton’s voice from my 8th grade computer programming class back in '94( or some similar year where we were still learning about the Gopher protocol, programming with logo and these neat things called Java applets) popped into my head. “It’s not a glitch it’s a feature” I thought whoever made this feature to keep people from contacting support
on coinbase must have had Mr Bolton at some point. But I digress… That’s not the way that they’re subtly trying to screw the masses I’m here to talk about today.
The support agent comes on goes through my information I provided him instructs me to hold for a few minutes I say no problem. Next thing he had for me was that he could not find the transaction in question. He proceeded to direct me to obtain for him the TX the receiving wallet in question. He sends me a couple links on how to find a wallet deposit address on coinbase, and a transaction index number. It was instructed to read these articles, double check my information, and talk to crypto.com support about it. I proceed to copy the Kronos page showing transaction which now has 4,000 some confirms and paste it into the chat box for him to read. A few minutes passing he says it’ll be a few more minutes.
The final answer he comes back with for me is that CRO is not supported on coinbase but when it does become supported my funds will be in my nearly supported cro wallet. I asked if he had a specific date that would happen. He sends me a link to a page of theirs that lists their supported coins.
The way I found this information out in the past was to look under the trade tab, home tab, or balances tab, find the coin I was interested in, and seeing if it said right next to it “not tradable” . If it did I move on. Cro did not. In fact it had a tab that said cro wallet balance zero when you open it just like every other wallet I had. In the upper right hand corner there was the symbol for a QR code just like every other wallet I had. I clicked on that and got the address from there. I explained this to my support man. He stated he understood my frustration (a fact I clearly was not convinced of),
Give me the line about when it became supported currency I should be able to get it. Then told me and due to the irreversible nature of crypto transactions they were unable to do anything else at this time.
I responded to that with a few options, but I’ll narrow the list in case the kids are reading or anyone still reading at this point in my post (thanks for sticking with me those that are).
He gave me one option. I gave him several. The solutions I suggested that would work for me I’ll paraphrase as follows:
) Go into my wallet, which you control access to, and send the cro back. I believe that would reverse the transaction in essence and to my satisfaction.
That triggered the reply of ’ due to the irreversible nature of blah blah blah whatever smoke up my ass’
) Give my wallet dogecoin in the amount equivalent to what the 4.20 in cro is currently trading at. An amount much smaller then the 132 or whatever I have gotten on coinbase earn over the past couple years, and infinitely smaller than the tally on the balance sheet of transaction fees I have paid in buying selling and moving crypto around on the coinbase exchange which I have used since its debut.
That triggered the reply of I understand your frustration but truly we don’t give one single f*** about our users.
) So I went to my last solution which was escalate the problem to a supervisor of his if you can’t break me off 30 or DOGE or better to cover the money you are robbing me of.
And then I proceeded to vent my spleen about what I was seeing happen on a highly trusted exchange that can afford to float a QR on the super bowl for 30 seconds, based on mine and my fellow crypto users believers and adopters use of these services which were awesome when they first started to both users and uninitiated seekers to help spread crypto grow the wealth and build the community etc all that happy hippie crap that I absolutely believe has improved and will continue to improve quality of life worldwide.
I continued on littany of spleen venting to the support agent more to put on the record with this company why this failure of me to be an informed consumer was so upsetting and getting worse every minute that support cold shoulders me.
I continue on discussing are they just flipped me from talking people out of joining the class action lawsuit to trying to get as many people as possible to, the ignition of a desire to write to my State attorney general local congressman national congressman senators and other appropriate financial regulatory agencies with an outline of my desires as a crypto user to see regulation and exchanges that will prevent them from bilking people in these kind of manners but. Include the desire as a consumer to also not be regulated legislated and text to the point of unusability as a constituent of your district and voting citizen in this democracy. Or whatever way I find to word that but rest assured whatever way I do find to word that will suggest to them that this constituent suggests that coinbase be the face of legislation and the pariah that Facebook has been for social media that coinbase should be for the crypto exchanges behaving badly.
I think this support agent was still understanding of my frustration at this point. Clearly figuring the idiot he’s supporting right now is blowing smoke out of his blowhole over a freaking $2 transaction in our competitors token… whatever.
So I hit with my final threat and the last and ideally most poisonous dart in the arsenal,… I inform coinbase that I will also use everything I can to put you on blast to the crypto community for these infractions against crypto as a whole and this behavior where I as a consumer want me and my fellow consumers to be able to hold you to being a good steward of cryptocurrency to all of us who are using the technology whatever our level of knowledge need companies like you to operate with integrity so that at this pivotal time we can all grow together without alienating the person who decided to start using it today and driving them to the side of the skeptics naysayers over regulators, absolutely petrified business executives and other non-crypto adopting forces in this world. It’s on us to be the check on you forcing you to behave so the SEC, Treasury department and legislators don’t come and s*** in all of our Cheerios because the gatekeeper companies greed closed the gate on themselves and all the assets they own because no one is now using them. (I’m paraphrasing and maybe another cup of coffee in on my day writing this here)
And the coup de gras of course, I inform them that I have been a subscribing member and patron of VoskCoin ever since the YouTube channel was in its infancy. Is platform has a bit louder voice than just me tweeting and redditing under my bridge with my nine followers or whatever here, so I think I’ll suggest to my good buddy Vosk, that he touch on sharing the story and encourage his users to share with each other who they think are excellent , good, and bad exchange companies. Or are there better ways to use and encourage your friends and new adopters to acquire and manage their crypto assets in these traditional exchange type of places.
So with all of that I’d like to escalate this support ticket to your supervisor. or the first couple options remain where you reimburse me with the funds I have lost via the support live chat and show me that you understand my frustration and that fortunately there is a way for you to change this what would be irreversible situation and make it right to this customer and then I can just shut up and go walk my dog, and get on with my day. It’d be easier I wouldn’t have to join the class action lawsuit I wouldn’t have to write to Vosk I wouldn’t have to wait on an email from your supervisor I wouldn’t have to write to all those politicians I wouldn’t have to piss my family off yet again at Easter talking about crypto and I would be able to just tell people when they ask me about coinbase that in my experience they’ve done pretty good and made right anything that I’ve had go awry. One of my favorite exchanges and the customer support is phenomenal. Sounds like a much better ending to this fairy tale.
I think I did get an email from support while I was writing this mini novel right here on voskcointalk.com(the only blog you will ever need!)(not true by the way inform yourself with everything you can in this world people. Never rely on one source for anything whether it be information wealth Management marijuana or scallops)
Thanks for staying with me and people if you read this far if you just skim to the end that was probably a good move as well because it brings me to the few questionS for everyone reading that my little tiny experience has me thirsting to see the crypto community here discussing?
WHAT ARE YOUR EXPERIENCES WITH DIFFERENT EXCHANGES OR ANYTHING THAT FILLS AN EXCHANGE-LIKE ROLE?
HAVE YOU HAD ANY AWESOME OR TERRIBLE WITH ANY ONE TYPE OF EXCHANGE SYSTEM OR COMPANY?
HAVE YOU HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE MADE UP FOR BY A GOOD CUSTOMER SUPPORT?
WHAT LEVEL OF RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD USERS EXPECT OUT OF EXCHANGES?
SHOULD WE EXPECT ZERO ETHICS FULL-ON PROFITEERING BUYER BEWARE SHOULD HAVE READ THE FULL TERMS AND CONDITIONS TYPE OF BEHAVIOR?
Or CAN USERS DEMAND A HIGHER STANDARD OF FAIRNESS?
HOW WOULD THAT DEMAND BE MADE MOST APPROPRIATELY? REGULATION FROM POLITICAL ENTITIES? OR CAN THE SYSTEM BUILD IN A STICK AND CARROT SET OF PROJECTS THAT WILL NATURALLY WEED OUT COMPANIES THAT ARE BAD ACTORS OR LESS THAN ETHICAL?
Hopefully this post breeds some discussion as I’m incredibly interested to see what are you smart people think banking, trading, and regulation should look like in crypto in the years to come.
Regards,
BTCMacGyver
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”
–MT