Bitcoin Forum

Crypto exchange Coinbase has said that it prevented little over 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to Twitter hackers who hijacked high-profile accounts to advertise a bitcoin scam last week.

If Coinbase didn't take the step, these customers would have collectively sent 30.4 bitcoin (currently worth about $278,000) to hackers, the exchange's chief information security officer, Philip Martin, told Forbes. Notably, this amount is more than twice the actual amount ($121,000) that hackers collected via victims.

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/72200/coinbase-says-it-prevented-over-1000-customers-from-sending-280000-worth-of-bitcoin-to-twitter-hackers

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Excellent operational work. If all exchanges had taken such measures in time, the hackers would probably have received significantly less.
What do you think?

Big exchanges are freezing accounts if they saw a suspicious transactions, its good that coinbase already learned the lesson to tighten their security. 1,000 account is a huge number even though the value is not that big at least coinbase prevented it. I’m also hoping for more exchanges to improve their security system and to monitor all the withdrawals of the users.

Do we need to give Coinbase a pat in the back here? They take measures to prevent "1,100" customers, supposedly,however, where are Coinbase support when you needed them? Specially the downtime pattern we've seen in the past from them, when the price of bitcoin suddenly spike?  :).

Nicely done by Coinbase this time and it is somewhat lucky for them to know the news and do make immediate action before the damage had been done.Centralized exchangers can do stuffs like
these since they are the ones who do had access to those buttons and operations of their platform.If they do alter out and disable something then theres nothing you can do but this time
its for users own good and not for other purposes.I appreciate that much that they do care out into their users and able to stop on the possible sent out of funds on that scam address that
do popout in that Twitter scamming scheme.

Big exchange wallets will be highly secure, as we see in Hollywood movies it can't be easily breached with a computer and the Hero continuously typing something on the keyboard. I don't say hackers doesn't have the ability, but the exchanges will always have its level of security. This is what we've encountered with coinbase securing the funds of its users. At times the exchanges itself tries to manipulate with some news rolling out making some large volume fund move terming it as hack.

Sometimes having your own keys can be a risk: when you don't have a clear mind (drunk/high/enthusiastic) and/or are about to make a big mistake like that.

Generally having your own keys is better, but storing some coins on centralized exchanges isn't a terrible idea if you enable 2FA and whitelisting and such.

If we do go back and try to check out, Coinbase didnt really experience any breaches or hack which do really indicates that they do really had that strong security but

the fact that nothing in this world is unhackable this is why we cant still fully rely on it and to think that when in talks of exchange wallets then you dont possess the keys and we know that

No keys = Not your coins and this had been said for countless times.Basing of the on the situation that they'd stop on possible transfer of funds then its a good move from them.

Why not? They deserve a little praise for quick reaction. But people should clearly understand that using exchanges as your wallet is a net negative, because you take risks of getting your account hacked or frozen, the exchange itself can get hacked, there's KYC and so on. And there's too little positive sides, in this case they only prevented people from sending coins because it was very well known scam. They can't do anything against smaller or smarter scams, so it might create a false sense of security.

I wonder what other places did, Gemini, Kraken, etc.
It's nice that Coinbase did that, but you are correct in that it's somewhat false security.
If it was my exchange I would have deducted the amount from their account but not actually send the funds, then add them back with a "don't do this again" note.

But that's just me.

-Dave

Let's forget the past were Coinbase acted less in response. Now they show they advanced and had tightened their security and proves they can handle more of such situations. Our earnest prayer and hope they don't go back same old lane in the long run

It baffles me to know many people are fell for this obvious scam, imagine the amount saved by Coinbase. Its high time everyone wise up

Until they decide to block your account or avoid you from cashing out, that's when you realized that having someone take control of your private keys is the shittiest idea ever in crypto.

How does one even think of sending out their Bitcoins to a random address just because they promised to double the coins in 30 minutes. People should simply stop being dumb and greedy, and they won't lose even a sign coin to such scams even if they personally control their private keys.

This is good action by them and by taking care of this issue for sure many will see them reliable. Those hacking issue is seriously needed to take care of and if the exchangers will do the same for sure there's no place for hacker to do this attempt since their money stolen will be hold for this bad activities.

Constant reminder to all never trust anyone especially offers you a good profit for less efforts.

One of the benefit of using centralized exchange. I'm just imagining how high the amount the hacker would have successfully gotten if they had not done this. I believe other centralized exchange can also do this to protect their traders just the way binance have implemented functions that prevent traders from making trading mistakes. E.g when you are trying to buy coin at the price above the market price

Yes, at least this time Coinbase didn't f**k up and on the contrary responded very quick to save their customers from depositing their hard earn bitcoin to the scammers. So I would say give them what they deserve.

On the other issues, they have taken the heat from the community with their downtimes and for sure if that happens again then it warrant another backlash from us.

Just this time, coinbase had performed its duty to safeguard the funds of its client.  Honestly it is a good job for them in preventing their 1000 clients from losing money on that recent scam attempt.  Just for this moment, even though we experienced bad Customer Service from them, we should at least be appreciative to the fast action of blacklisting the scammer address to prevent further damage to their customers.

I think that you found out a nice piece of info worth reading.

In this case Coinbase was able to help people not be scammed.
But the ability to freeze funds means Coinbase may freeze a transaction you need to go through with.

So Your info points out that a BTC holder needs multiple wallets and that  while big companies can correctly hold their coins it means they can incorrectly hold the coins.

Thanks for the thread.

I guess we do need regulations, because if we let things happen. Everything will fall apart for bitcoin and adoption would not be possible.
Regulations and restrictions for criminals are needed to not do things freely and to avoid millions of valuable Crypto being loss.

At least we are hearing good news coming from Coinbase, not all negative feedback.
If they did prevent that situation from happening, these customers will be grateful to Coinbase.
There will be more hacking events in the future, but hopefully users should know what to do the next time they encounter it.

Good thing that they already focus about this thing like on their security because from the previous weeks there are a lot of unexpected and suspicious transactions and also they make sure this to avoid getting trouble in their accounts and system too and also there are a lot of people saved their money and funds because of this, now the coinbase will surely be gained a lot of good reputation came from their users. But still, they need to find out what will happen on this is there is any problem with their system too to make sure the integrity and avoid getting data breaches of course we need to find out this immediately so the users must be aware of that thing.

That was a great decision on the part of Coinbase in the end, but only insofar as this particular case is concerned. This is a good work but I have reservations telling them to keep it up.

If we take a step back and look at the larger picture with Coinbase halting thousands of customers from sending BTC to an address or addresses they deem shady, that might pose a larger problem.

The result was good in this case but, in the first place, it wasn't the responsibility of Coinbase. The customers themselves should be the ones to be mindful of their funds and not Coinbase, or else they better let Coinbase take over. 

Very good move by the coinbase team, but i wonder how they managed to figure this out that the receiver's address is for hackers or they where just being suspicious?
If other exchange were more observant as coinbase was, they would have been able to prevent those who fall victim from sending their funds across,  am still finding it hard to believe people can just send over their money so easily to any information they come across online without any proper verification.

This is what we should look for in an exchange, protecting us from those hackers by cancelling transactions if they are suspicious. Coinbase will surely increase and improve its reputation towards other people who are looking for a good crypto exchange. We need more of this and I hope that Coinbase should be a role model for other exchange to have a high security and safety in its customer's transactions. Imagine, 30.4 bitcoin that is equivalent to $278,000, and that's a huge amount of asset. If Coinbase didn't prevent that sending of money, probably those hackers will celebrate, but we are glad that Coinbase did its responsibility as an exchange.

It's good that Coinbase has done something good in this case and it is something to applaud for. However, it's still a fact that Coinbase has the control and can dictate who has access to your coins and your Coinbase account. This is something that demonstrates their power albeit in something that portray them in a good light.

It's definitely not a point for people to encourage users to start using shared online wallets which gives the third party the rights to stop or freeze your coins.

That was a quick action and good feedback from Coinbase. They've managed to prevent their users to send funds to the scam address which we have to appreciate what they've done to counter those scammers at least. I think this will also wake up the other exchanges to have that certain staff or department to monitor about sudden scams and to block those addresses that's being shown with those websites or link shared to their users. That will prevent and if not, it will lessen the number of potential victims.

It's disturbing to know that so many bitcoins are in the hands of centralized custodians. Since Coinbase owns the keys those are their bitcoin, not their customers. All they did was protecting their own funds which is the reasonable thing to do.

Coinbase and some other exchanges did a great work in preventing their customers from transacting where they wanted to. What if I want to send my money to scammers, I understand risks and this is my conscious decision? I can't really, because this money is not mine, this money belongs to exchange. They decide for me what I can spend "my" bitcoin on. Actually, this situation is very dangerous for bitcoin adoption, people become used to some third party organizations holding and controlling customer's bitcoin. At some point, bitcoin can repeat the history of gold, that part when gold became centralized and forcibly exchanged for paper money.

Great move by coinbase to help their customers on securing their funds I hope more online wallet would take action like this to prevent their customer from getting scammed in the future.
And to stop or lessen the scam on the internet lets just hope that more people would also help prevent some scam like this by reporting it to the developers of online wallets and even in exchange.

This because bitcoin has shown great potential when it comes to business. Owning itself is already considered as investment. While it is in the hands of these centralized groups or organizations there will be a good reason from them to keep it. This is why I just thought that these bitcoins at their hands might potentially will be involve to business. Well, only them can tell on these holdings and I have a good perception that it could be good for the cryptocurrency system itself.

This is an example of how ethical address tracing can prevent loss of funds.
However, all thanks to Coinbase bragging about it, next time the scammers will know to create a new address each time.
This one simple trick that bitcoin wallets teach you about as soon as you download them... This time Coinbase was one step ahead. Probably not the next one though.  ::)

I have to tell you, I am not a big fan of centralized services, because I think they are destroying Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for Bitcoin... but when I see things like this happening, I think Satoshi would agree that it is a necessary evil for services like this to exist.  ::)

As always, we have two side to a coin.. and the other bad side is that decisions might be made to not allow Bitcoin donations to controversial organizations.. like WikiLeaks by these centralized organizations. (Like what was done by centralized Banks in recent history)

Bitcoin is a payment options, so there will always be criminals that would exploit or scam people and it is no different with any other kind of payment option. (How many people have been scammed with cash payments, compared to Bitcoin?... answer... Millions)  ;)

Give and take, pros and cons, they have done something good and has stop deposits from scammers but at the same time, you can just imagine the control they have in our wallets.

And I agree that it shows that we shouldn't trust any services specially shared online wallet that we don't have total control of because there are instances that they can freeze our coins anytime that want.

Focusing on the action Coinbase did with the recent issue, they really did a good job preventing 1000 customers from sending funds to the hacker. Without taking immediate action, the hacker could have got such a huge amount of money from the customers that could lead to a much bigger problem.


With the recent incident, I think exchanges will also learn from it to prevent the same scenarios from happening again. But it's not just about them since customers are also responsible for sending funds.

Not using Coinbase here but on this part, they deserve a bit of a recognition in what they did. They saved the investors from getting scammed. They reacted fast with this so thanks to the team.

Well this incident too of hacking is just a proof that the security system of different social media platforms must be upgraded. Still kudos to Coinbase for reacting fast with this incident. I also believe that this thing will happen in the future though.

I wonder how the company did this. I am usually cautious before approving or disapproving this kind of approach. It could be abused in the future(not necessarily by the company), even though it may have been used well today. You could aswell be prevented from sending money to innocent people/addresses.

I believe it should be possible to blacklist or tag addresses used by proven criminals to commit crime. But it should be done decentrally, with checks and balances.
Imagine creating a seperate decentralized application/community to report or mark proven scams addresses to enable validators reject all transactions entering into the addresses.
Such community has to be guided by clear rules, be transparent, immutable, permissionless/trustless, anonymous/private, consensus-driven, etc

Everything is correct. Basically, we don't have much choice. Centralized services occupy most of the crypto market, which means that we cannot just get rid of them, and most likely in the near future they will continue to increase their influence. All we can and should do is to provide such services with an appropriate level of security. In this case, Coinbase intervened in the personal affairs of users, but thereby saved them from mistake.


Bitcoin, like many cryptocurrencies, expands opportunities for everyone, both for ordinary people and for criminal elements. This is a side effect in our culture.
We do not know how high the turnover of these elements is, but we can assume that the turnover of drug money laundering in our usual offline casinos can easily exceed these amounts.

Indeed it is a good thing, but these measures are a band-aid solution to a growing problem. This will only make these scums make a counter measure. This is a step though which is nice.

There's something good about this, someone prevented someone from doing something stupid - but what message is it sending to us? The first is that custodial service isn't a bad thing because it can prevent users from falling in to scams, but what actually comes out of the whole story is that some users are pretty naive and fall for the cheapest tricks.

What a paradox, users of decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin saved from scam by the world's most famous crypto bank. If it weren’t tragic it would be ridiculous what perception some have today about what they’ve really invested in, but given that their ignorance obviously has a very high level, Coinbase is the ideal place for their coins.

Because those tweets followed the same painfully obvious way of operating as all the other trillions of giveaway scams. This is makes it doubly flabbergasting that anyone would fall for it.

If I were running Coinbase I'd tell those fucking morons they weren't able to withdraw their coins until they'd passed an IQ test.

Banks are good!
They've prevented bad actions for their customers and safeguarded their funds.
We should all put our money in Coinbase's wallets since they acted so responsible.

/s

What lesson we've learned here? (assuming the statement from coinbase is true and is not publicity lie)
That some people simply need a service like that, they need a bank that prevents them from sending money to a Nigerian prince, they need a credit card company that can make chargebacks on buying fake covid medicine, they need a teller asking them twice if they really want to empty their account and send the money to this individual across the globe.

Pretty obvious, bitcoin is not for everyone and not everyone can be their own bank


If they would do that will all their clients they would probably have more coins than Satoshi.

This is quite interesting that Coinbase actually does some good that is not based on something that benefits themselves.  That said, I would still not ever use Coinbase again.  They are a scummy/untrustworthy company that is all about what's best for themselves not the community.

So they prevented the transfer of Bitcoins to a certain scammy address, but should we feel good that there is some kind of prevention around here or should we rage over Coinbase for literally blocking an address from their platform?

The motive is great, but this reminds me of that time CZ wanted to do a block rewind after the Binance hack.

Besides what you mentioned, this should be a lesson for some newcomers out there: custodial wallet means your address could be censored at Brian's tip of the finger. :P

I'm quite sure they did have some people registering on their platform specifically because they blocked addresses found to be owned by the scammers.

Irrespective of the independence that they have taken away from their customers, I think there is still some good in this for them to protect their customers but at the same time they should not just assume that is the way to do things in the crypto world because it means that they can then just go an blacklists some wallet address even though it might be legitimate transactions that is going on between parties. But this really is a good one and should be commendable and also they should do well to enlighten their customers not to be too greedy.

To be honest, I had noticed from coinbase warning about the Twitter hack. When saw the warning notice on coinbase then I enter the forum to read more and realized there are going something suspicious. I have been using coinbase to sell my bitcoin locally since there are no fees. But handle only a small amount for a small-time. So I could say that was a great decision by the coinbase team to prevent their users from scammers. Warning popups & block transactions were real-time actions. Hope other exchange will follow the same thing in the near future if anything happens like this. Whoever controlling their fund via non-custodial wallet, usually they are enough clever and should be able to detect generic scams. Otherwise, no one could save them.

This was quite a nice move from coinbase, atleast this prevented +1000 misinformed crypto users who thought doubling there assets would be that easy from falling victim of the twitter hack. I would have said freezing the transfer of users is against everything cryptocurrency and blockchain stands for but then again, they are centralized exchange with full access and jurisdictions not to talk of the fact that it was done for a common good! Kudos to coinbase team!

Kudos to Coinbase for the proactive/preventative measures but it really makes you wonder, doesn’t it. Supposedly 1,100 were willing to be fooled by such a dumb scam attempt. Us bitcoin'ers are supposed to be intelligent people.

Wow, I saw that news this morning and I have to say that they did a really good job in protecting the funds of their customers who are of course dumb lol. I don’t know why people would think that such a thing is real. Who on earth will tell you to send money to them so that they can double it when you’re not in gambling for sure?

Imagine how much these hackers would have gotten if Coinbase didn’t take this timely action. They would have gotten three times of the amount they got :o . It’s high time people get wise and stop rushing into just anything they see. I am just wondering if any of coinbase user cum this forum Bremen will share their experience to confirm this news? Because, I am really concerning about about coinbase's this timely action.

lesson 1: "send me btc, I will send you back the double amount" works every time
lesson 2: Idiots never die out
lesson 3: A lot of people out there better not be "their own bank"

Ok, I'll give credit where credit is due, they did their part to prevent more people to send bitcoin to the scammers, so that's a good thing., protecting their customers. But it is a scary thought that this exchanges had obviously total control of your bitcoins and this should be a very big lesson for everyone not to put your confidence to these centralised exchanges.

I can't agree more, the amount the hackers parted with would have been much lesser if at all mega exchanges like binance, bittrex, okex and kucoin blacklisted the hackers bitcoim wallet and prevented users from sending funds to such wallet just like coinbase did. Coinbase deserves appreciation for such a wonderful move and people need to stop being greedy and naive to avoid futher scam schemes such as this henceforth

This is the question i have in mind and i am not using them for a very long time but are they monitoring all the transaction that are made or is it just a publicity stunt because i have not seen anyone complaining that their transactions are not going through anywhere and if there were over thousand customers who were not able to send the transaction you will end up seeing complaints publicly.

That is supposedly a thing to do in order to protect their reputation and found not accountable for being affiliated with the scammers. Crypto holders will find themselves comfortable with when the saw how the site protecting their clients.

Good job Coinbase, you prove to be worthy of our trust and that you should have to sustain. It is worth admirable for the other sites to monitor every transaction that it looks suspicious and investigate, in this way we can prevent this kind of event.

this sounds impossible  . with the number of accounts hacked , how will they collect all those address and how can they be able to block sending those funds to that address  . never experienced it to any wallet that i use but they only say that transaction are ireversible and they dont have any control to the funds once you sent it   .  maybe coinbase only give a warning on their page or on thier wallet upon you open it  . thats still fine atleast they are concern compare to other wallet providers out there  .

This is one of the characteristics that an exchange should have, they are fully aware of their service and transactions happening through their platform is completely monitored. Many people say that regulations aren't really needed for bitcoin, maybe this kind of scenario explains it all, that it wasn't bad for us if we provide our real identity to trusted exchanges, the process may take longer but the fact that they are securing our funds and transaction should be more prioritized than us having complete anonymity. Great action to Coinbase, indeed.

Well, Coinbase finally did something in exchange for how bad their site is. Now, only if coinbase were to run their exchange properly, with this move of theirs, I'd properly address them as one of the best even at the current moment.  I suppose all major exchanges should have some sort of central news system that lets them update about news regarding such issues so they can freeze the said accounts on their exchanges to prevent more hacks like this. Coinbase did pretty well imo, and even if it wasn't actually a hack, at the very least, they avoided the worst possible situation and could just provide explanation to their custoimers. I for one would agree to them suddenly freezing my account, as long as the reason is understandable like this one that is, compared to me losing my funds due to a scam.
Well, you can't 100% blame them for this one. It was official accounts of famous people, ones that have the capital to actually do the double amount scam that's been a trend since 2017. Still, they can take part of the blame, but not fully imo. After all, it's not like they can immediately tell that something was wrong, especially if they're only following one official account that got hacked. If they saw that multiple famous persons were doing the same thing, they'd probably find something suspicious after all.

Like stompix above says, and what I have also told people in the past before, very clearly, Bitcoin is not for everyone. If you would rather trust someone else to take care of your money, and to help you prevent your idiot self from falling for scams, then Coinbase is good for you. I would even just hire my mother to take care of my Coinbase and advice me on every financial decision if I were you, guys who trust Coinbase and would send bitcoin to scammers.

If this wasn't a lie or for the sake of publicity then yes a big Kudos for Coinbase.


Not sure since base from OP its a collective transaction and the system manage to
detect that funds will be transfer to one
Address and they prevent it to happen, a good thing since the recipients is the
address of the hackers.


Again, if this is not jus for publicities they really deserve that, such actions to
help their customers to prevent being scammed.

Anybody who falls for that kind of scam is gonna have themselves to blame. period.
Anyone with a spark of common sense should realize that no one simply returns twice the amount of anything.

In German we have a proverb for this behaviour: "Greed eats brains"  ;)

Yeah, but we have known this for a long time, probably since the Mt Gox or even earlier. The whole point of Bitcoin was to not trust someone else with storing your money.

Theoretically, something similar to what Coinbase did could be achieved in a more decentralized manner - it might be possible to make a scraper and database for this type of scams and make a public API, so that wallets could warn the users about potentially fraudulent addresses, but it also comes with risks to privacy and it requires a bit of trust in central authority. Still, it's better because it's just a suggestion, the user still controls their key.

I remember when I first got into bitcoin, Coinbase used to be my main wallet. They never prevented me from getting scammed by fake cloud mining services.

Coinbase action now I must give appreciation to prevent and freeze suspicious transactions, especially related to sending funds
to the twitter hackers that recently occurred. The actions taken by Coinbase could save 1000 customers, this is something that
must be copied by other exchanges.

It's much harder to prove a service is a scam than proving a "giveaway" is. Besides that, cloud mining websites do not have a single address they use so it's way harder to detect whether it's an address owned by them unless they've reused it. Blocking a service from Coinbase would've possibly sparked outrage, especially if it proved to be legit (very few cloud mining sites are legit) after a while.

Pro tip: stay way from too-good-to-be-true offers/services.

Will it hopes that could be serves as a mirror to the others and actually fairly do an immediate action to any suspicious looking transaction. Yeah, Coinbase save hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin transaction but the most important is they save ther reputation and trust from the community.

Traders and investors will look the capability of every exchanges and this happenings to Coinbase will likely to raise its level. Now, I understand why they become one of the best exchanges in crypto market and that surely because they ought to do something helpfull in all parties. I'm gald hearing this one.

The only aspect that baffles me is that the scam is nothing new and still people fall for these kind of stupidity says a lot about the market, mostly everyone is here to make a quick buck and if they see some sort of doubling schemes they will not think twice because they have no idea about the market as they think it is possible to somehow multiply the coins and we have heard these kind of scams every year and still people will not learn.
If coinbase really prevented people from sending the coins to scammers it is great.

It just shows how cryptocurrency industry learned from the past hacking events. They already have an idea to trap users who have suspicious moved in their exchange. I am not a coinbase user but this is a good thing because they have excellent work in regards to the security. What matters most for me is that who are the people behind the twitter account hacking? I hope they will be found so that hacking will become more difficult and eradicated in crypto space.

Well, sometimes you can be deserving of some criticism while still receiving a pat on the back.  Coinbase is far from an ideal exchange, but at least they did something right here.  I'm not sure a lot of other crypto exchanges would have prevented any of their customers from getting scammed.

As long as greed exists, people are going to be falling for these scams.  Not everyone in the crypto space is out for a quick buck, but many will try to take advantage of an offer if they think it offers high rewards and low risk--it's just too bad the folks who got scammed weren't fully aware of what the risks actually were, but that's typical of any scam situation.

This is not entirely true. The funds that the exchange did not allow to transfer at the wrong time belonged to the exchange technically.
So, in fact, CoinBase saved itself from additional losses, including from leaving customers in connection with this incident. Good job anyway.

It is rare to read something positive about Coinbase these days but it seems that they did a good and fast work over there to prevent that mess. As mentioned already by other, this can be used too to prevent any transactions and will cause false negative issues to flagged addresses?!

They have just done on what things should be done for their own good and of course people who do tend to make deposit will surely leave out coinbase platform but it cant be assured that they wont use it up after then get scammed but at least they are presuming things up that it might happen and thats actually a good move.

Reputation and User count is on the line and they do know that this is why making such decision like this will really preserve out the two and still able to stand strong into its spot as one of the most
famous platform as of these days.

Exchangers should really think up these kind of acts in times of potential scams.

I'm finding this topic quite depressing.  It's making me wonder whether human beings are, generally, ever going to be smart enough for any decentralised system to truly function as envisioned.  The very thought of "mass adoption" seems somewhat ludicrous now.  Given that, even at the decidedly niche present day adoption adoption levels, 1000 dipshits needed a third party service to babysit them.  And countless more actually managed to send money to the scammers in such an obvious ruse.  How many millions of people would it have been if in some alternate bizzarro-timeline we had already achieved mass adoption?  We could spend the next 50 years improving and refining code and it wouldn't change a thing, since the user is always going to be the weak link.

I get the sense it's always going to be a two-tier system.  Only intelligent and careful people will be capable of having the benefits of decentralisation.  Everyone else either gets a padded play area or robbed blind.  I don't see a great deal of hope for humanity, even in the long run.  People are actually getting dumber, somehow.  Like, a genuine evolution-in-reverse kinda deal.  Devolving back into pond scum or something.  It's nuts.

That's not something we want to be relying on, though.  We tell people about the importance of holding their own keys and not relying on exchanges and web-wallets, but so many of them clearly can't be trusted with that responsibility.  I don't see a way around it.  Blacklisting is something that will *never* be implemented at protocol level, yet we're applauding a centralised service for effectively doing that to prevent their eejit customers from giving money to scammers.

Welcome to the Modern World where the Human part of the equation is being rubbed out from many facets of life. Apparently, Humans can no longer be relied upon to pay attention to what they are doing and when something happens they (or their survivors) then love to whine about it because "it's not their fault!" so, systems are being built to think for them. ;)

What Coinbase is doing is no different than what auto makers are doing with their "safety" features like lane warning/guidance, back up cameras, vehicle next to you sensors etc. Then there is this: Because many (idiots) are killed/injured each around the world because they are walking while texting, decide to cross the road without a care or thought about anything and get hit by a vehicle, cities are installing crosswalk warning systems designed specifically get the twits attention (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwib1ZuuvuzrAhUEU80KHRJgASkQFjAAegQIAhAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsafersim.nads-sc.uiowa.edu%2Ffinal_reports%2FUI-4-Y3_ReportFinal.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0eKvz78w5jTWZQhY8kmGCu).

Of course, that just furthers degrades incentives to pay attention in the 1st place... ::)
Case in point, a quote from the linked article (emphasis mine)
Safe bet the same applies to exchanges trying to automajikly prevent folks from send coin to scammers. Alfred E. Newman comes to mind with his "What? Me worry?" quip.

Coinbase shares are great, but it's best to leave traders accountable for their actions. They should only advise the customer, they do not have the right to prohibit their customers from transferring money anywhere if their customers have made no mistake.

It's a good precaution that they act too fast regarding the issue of hacking. Though it is the responsibility of the exchange to protect their users, we can see that their team is active and concern. If ever coinbase didn't do the same thing, we can still not blame coinbase because it is also a responsibility of the users to prevent themselves being a victim.

These hackers are so prevalent these days but the security of the exchanges is also increasing that is why they are trying to socially engineer people in order to hack and steal money.

Coinbase clearly manipulate their trader by doing that although they did it for good sake. They are like saying ' don't do shit coz we can see everything up here and we can block you from doing that', and it made me think that they can label any address as a fraud and if you transfer funds to it they can easily refrain you doing it which might be a conflict for some in the future. I can agree that they should leave enough accountability for their users.

Indeed, the action just happened to benefit the rest of the customers not that that was a priority. In any case, the fact that thousands of people got saved by this is amazing but this should also be taken as a lesson that it doesn't matter where your money is - just assume there's always that slim chance of losing them. That's the risk everyone is taking when leaving their money exchanges and not cold wallets.

A really nice work from Coinbase. It is very important for exchanges to give the most importance to security of their customers. This can attract many people's attention to Coinbase for doing such a nice job.

security is important and major customers will feel comfortable with tight security,
customer interest is likely to increase with security guarantees.

Impressive prevention tactics by Brian Armstrong & co at Coinbase there. It was kinda simple to just block outgoing transactions to the addresses tweeted by the hacker but other exchanges didn’t do it. Kudos to Coinbase, say what you want about them but this shows how impressive & trustworthy they are.

I really appreciate Coinbase performance as no other exchange prohibits transactions to the hacker's Twitter account tweet address, I suggest all exchanges should follow Coinbase excellent footsteps to protect their customer funds.

That’s one of the advantages of having a centralized exchange, if these people that were stopped by Coinbase from sending money to the hackers were making use of wallets like Mycelium or Exodus where the creators of the wallet has no control over your wallet, they all would have sent this huge amount of money from their wallets to these hackers. Coinbase did a really good job in protecting their customers and that shows how much they can be trusted.

Moreover apart from that I think it’s really time that people wise up and stop acting, these things sounds too good to be true. People should try to understand the tactics that are being used by these scammers and start avoiding them.