Bitcoin Forum

I sold some Bitcoins for fiat a couple hours ago. I sent the Bitcoins from my coinbase account, but the transaction never got pushed to the network. I waited at the guy's office for an hour and finally had to leave and give him my Government ID so he would know that I wasn't ripping him off. Despite that he's understandably upset because he still hasn't seen the transaction on the network and it's been over two hours.

I saw on reddit that someone said you could use the JSON text to push the transaction yourself manually using brainwallet. However his instructions weren't entirely clear and I can't get it to work. Could someone please help me ASAP if they know how to get this done? THANK YOU!!!

I have heard many stories like this with Coinbase.
Maybe you should use a real bitcoin wallet, where you are in control of your private keys, instead of a bitcoin bank. If you are not the sole owner of your private keys you don't have any coins.

What others said.  Personally I think Coinbase is great for buying Bitcoins, I'm an American living abroad and it can be hard for me to get proper verification to purchase/sell bitcoins at various sites (looking at you mt. gox) but Coinbase has always been very easy.

I do think though once you have the BTC you've purchased at coinbase you are better off transfering the BTC to your own wallet you are in full control over. If you ever need to sell/spend them, use it through your own wallet.

With that said, the transaction will go through. Coinbase is very trustworthy. You might want to try contacting their customer support about this to figure out why this happened and if it could happen again in the future.

UPDATE:

The transaction ended up going through 6.5 hours later. In the first two hours I sent two emails to coinbase support, but I didn't hear back from them. I know they have a huge backlog of emails, so I didn't really expect a response.

I do trust those guys and I like coinbase so I wasn't really worried that the coins would disappear or anything. My problem was that I had a customer (a stranger) who had given me fiat and now I had this pending transaction so he was out hundreds of dollars and no btc, and I had a transaction that was in indeterminate status.

A couple hours after I left his office (where I had left my government ID with him so he could somewhat trust I wasn't ripping him off), the transaction still hadn't confirmed and he was panicking because he had committed previously to send those BTC on to someone else. So finally I had no choice but to bite the bullet and trust him (and the fact that I knew where he worked, and that he seemed like a nice guy, etc.) and send him a new transaction. He received those BTC and then 3 or so hours later when the coinbase transaction finally went through he was true to his word and immediately sent the btc back to me. WHEW!

So I guess this is a "faith in humanity restored" kinda story, I suppose.

As for using a real wallet, I agree. I just didn't have any other option because the only working wallet on my phone is coinbase and I couldn't take my laptop. I believe in diversifying my risk, so I have many wallets, including paper wallets for cold storage, electrum, etc. etc. But your advice is correct. Obviously I won't be using coinbase for time-sensitive transfers anymore, but I will continue to buy/sell there.

Thanks for the responses.

I'm glad it worked out for you, GOB. I sent a transaction a little over 2 hours ago now myself and it hasn't been pushed through yet.