Bitcoin Forum

I am currently using Mycellium wallet and all the people around me use Coinbase and boast about how there are no fees,should i consider switching to Coinbase?
What is the difference between the both,which one would you recommend and which one do you use?

MyCelium is a wallet and coinbase is primarily an exchange. Coinbase can and will collect personal data about you, have certain level of control over your coins as well.

Coinbase also does not offer any sort of discounts for on chain transactions as well. MyCelium, though being less polished, still offers far more security as well as privacy.

Just to add

Even though you use Coinbase "wallet" it also occur a fee if you made a transaction, you didn't pay to them (coinbase) but you paid to miner to process your transaction on a network.

I don't know what do you mean about no fees, probably they use very cheap network (i.e. Tron).

I think what they are talking about no fee when they are sending from coinbase user to another coinbase user.
But if you would send from other platform then it would have a fee,
Just use what you are comfortable with but if you want a higher security on your crypto then buy a hardware wallet.

Maybe they're transferring from each other and that's the off-chain transactions that really have no fee at all. That's Coinbase wallet to Coinbase wallet.

@OP what's your plan with your crypto holdings. Are you planning to hold it long-term? Remember that if you don't own the keys, not your coins.

If that Coinbase wallet doesn't ask for any fees at certain transfers then those are off-chain, meaning that your friends don't actually own those coins (not your keys, not your coins), instead they have an account at a custodian wallet that holds the money for them, ask for KYC, record all they do and if Coinbase will get bankrupt or hacked your friends may lose their coins. Also if they want to send money to your Mycelium, on chain, most probably they'll have to pay the tx fees like everybody else.

Instead with Mycelium you have your own keys. Even better, Mycelium can work with Hardware Wallets, in case you'll have more coins there and you'll want to protect them better. Of course, you have to make sure you have a proper backup for your wallet/seed, since with your coins you have to be more responsible (no customer support will be able to recover them if you make mistakes).

I recommend Mycelium. But I reckon that there are many kinds of people in this world and both types of wallets have pluses and minuses, so please make your own choice.

Mycellium is your personal, private and somehow pseudo-anonymous while coinbase is an online centralized wallet. On some level, you can even trade on Coinbase for different coins or cash. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages but veteran bitcoin users prefer to use a decentralized wallet because they can become their own bank. Using online wallet has a big risk. They certainly have your data, collect your transaction and if they suddenly disappear, they will go along with your money. That is the most dangerous thing can happen.

To me, I like to use Coinbase. I do not have much money and the Coinbase fee is undoubtedly cheaper than the overall fee

Yes, but I think OP is referring to Coinbase <-> Coinbase off-chain transactions which are free.

But either way, while it sounds so attractive @OP (who doesn't like free transactions?), it's downsides heavily outweighs the upsides. Do you know? Coinbase can lock up your money if they want to? On the other hand, with non-custodial wallets such as Mycelium(though I'm personally more of a BlueWallet[1] guy), no one, I mean literally no one can revoke your access to your funds. That's one of the beauties of Bitcoin!

---

[1] https://bluewallet.io/

No No there is a very basic difference between both of them. Coinbase is a centralized wallet that does not give you private key of your bitcoins while Mycelium is just a wallet holder which gives you complete freedom and control over your wallet. You cannot buy or sell inside a private key wallet you have to move your money to an exchange to sell it and that would require transaction fees in Mycelium while Coinbase does not store your money in a specific private key they just do internal shuffling of your bitcoin whenever you put a buy or sell order which is why all of that is free. If you want to get the real feel of bitcoin and it's anonymity Mycelium is the thing for you but if you just want another go to exchange where you can buy/ sell as per your ease then go for Coinbase.

Simply making out some comparison between custodial and non-custodial wallets which you can eventually tell the difference without much of explanation.
If a certain user could really handle out the risk on using up Coinbase then its up to his choice.The good thing about internal transfers that it is really free of charge
which is already a standard with most platform when making internal transactions but for on outside then its understandable that you would need to pay
up some miners fee. Coinbase doesnt charge out any additional aside from that.

Mycellium gives you compelete control over your coins, as you keep the wallet and the private keys on your own machine. All you need to do is keep your wallet secure and that's it. Coinbase, on the other hand, is an exchange and a custodian over your funds. By utilizing their service and giving them your coins, you lose control over your coins until you take it out of their platform. Do note that there is a possibility for them to lock your account, and the possibility that they'll be hacked, too. For the free transfers, these are user-to-user transfer that happen within Coinbase's system and not necessarily bitcoin's network. Moving coins around the bitcoin network would always net you with fees.

All said above were right, remember that Coinbase wallets aren't the same as Coinbase.com which is an exchange platform.
I guess they are almost the same platform, you can able to buy and sell cryptocurrency using that wallet but the problem is they are different when it comes to centralized and decentralized matter. Coinbase wallet is purely centralized while Mycelium is fully decentralized.

Here is the article from Coinbase that stated the differences between their exchange and their wallet.
https://help.coinbase.com/en/more/coinbase-wallet/getting-started/what-is-coinbase-wallet.

I don't use any of the two wallets but I once use mycelium. However, it depends on what you actually want either the no fee for on-chain transactions (you free transaction to your friend or anyone that you coinbase) provided by coinbase or having total control over your coin with privacy.
Coinbase is a custodial wallet, none privacy and they only provide you recovery phrase.
Mycellium is a noncustodial wallet you have 100% control of your holding.

In terms of security, I will choose Mycellium over coinbase. Since the former is a wallet whilst coinbase is an exchange. Meaning coinbase will gather your info for KYC and will also have some sort of handling over your crypto, which is something that just doesn't sit well with me. So for security, I'd choose Mycellium. 

Since the fees point was already clarified, I want to add 1 thing: Do not put all your funds in Coinbase, ever. You can give it a try, put some bucks there if you wish but whatever amount you placed there consider it gone until you spend it. They can change terms, charge fees or do whatever they want, after all they control your money and info.

There are no fees for both Coinbase users and shouldn't exceed the limit which is I think 0.01 Bitcoin, IIRC.
And yes, that is off-chain for the microtransactions, but if you exclude on the limit, you might not able to transact any transfers you want.

If you're going to ask me, I'd prefer to choose Mycelium wallet compared to Coinbase wallet.  Because that Coinbase wallet is custodial wallet while Mycelium leaves you complete control of private keys.  Otherwise, you can choose both of them but not storing your coin for a long period of time in Coinbase but if you have microtransactions to your friends, using Coinbase is a good choice, it's upon you.

Main difference is that Coinbase can stop working at any time if one of their servers is down or overloaded like it happened before, and you don't have any control of your private keys.

You can still use Coinbase for trading and that is why exchanges exist, but for holding and spending your coins you should use some open source wallets like Electrum, Mycellium or Blue wallet.

Nobody can block or freeze your Mycellium wallet like it can happen for Coinbase and other centralized exchanges.

Oh sure, everyone's free to do whatever they like. I mean, isn't freedom one of the main advantages of Bitcoin? The problem is though, that the reason why a lot of people use custodial wallets is because they think that these custodial platforms are "very secure" or "unhackable" or something along those lines. Hence why everyone who knows enough about crypto security is frequently pushing people away from custodial platforms.

There are two different apps - Coinbase (exchange) and Coinbase Wallet. The last one is Coinbase Wallet is a non-custodial product. So it doesn't keep any users data.

Yeah I found it.

The privacy policy seems to indicate that they are able and will store certain personal identifiable information. While they *probably* won't have access to your private keys, you cannot assume that they are not actively tracking their users as well. Their privacy policy allows them to collect certain information and also share them to law enforcement if necessary.

Mycelium is certainly a good wallet for mobile, but I'd go with Electrum either for desktop/laptop or mobile over Coinbase or Mycelium in a heartbeat.  I would definitely not hold coins on Coinbase, as they're an exchange and you're giving up your privacy as well as taking the risk that there might be some hack, although I don't think Coinbase is nearly as dangerous as some of the other exchanges.

Last time I used Mycelium there were only three fee tiers, and I wasn't able to set the network fee to exactly what I wanted it to be.  I don't know if they've fixed that or not, but that's my only gripe with their wallet.  I stopped keeping crypto on my phone, though.  You never know what's going to happen if you lose it or break it or whatever.  If you've got the seed you can restore a wallet easily enough, but if someone steals your phone and you don't have your wallet password protected, you could be screwed.

For desktop I also recommend Electrum.
But, afaik, sadely Electrum for mobile still doesn't support hardware wallets. And, maybe I am paranoid, but I would not use a mobile wallet without being paired to a HW.

For my better understanding, electrum mobile wallet does not support hardware wallets? But it can also be imported into another wallet why didn't it support a hardware wallet?
I'm asking this question cause I have never used a hardware wallet and I don't know how it works but I understand electrum wallet.

You need an interface for communication between Electrum on Android and your hardware wallet it is not as straightforward as porting it from Windows to Android. Most of the hardware wallets uses USB and you'll have to use the phone's USB C port for communication which could be difficult.

I know that Ledger sells the required cables in their shop. They call it the Ledger OTG Kit. (https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-otg-kit) Wouldn't that be enough to pair Electrum mobile and a Ledger hardware wallet?

It's a set with three different cables:
USB-C to Micro-USB
USB-A to Micro-USB
USB-C to USB-C

The price is ridiculous - €15, but cheaper alternatives can be purchased in tech shops. 

Electrum currently does not communicate with any USB devices on their Android version. You need some sort of interface code to be able to communicate with it in the first place. Implementing that first would be the first step in supporting HW wallets, which AFAIK is in the pipeline.

OTG cable or adapter is the same - well, if depends on the phone's USB type, but that's all - and can be bought from anywhere. You have to be only careful that the cable is data cable.
I've bought mine for about 50 cents from AliExpress some years ago, it's a tiny adapter I have to insert into the USB cable, hence I use it together with Nano S factory cable.
But, while it works with Mycelium, it cannot work with Electrum, simply because that part is not implemented in Electrum for Android.

I would recommend coinbase, because it's better than the other. I've been using it those days that I am busy with my trading and I never encountered any problems with their wallet. Everything went out smooth and I certainly proved to everyone else that their security is safer than those I don't experienced. With regards to mycellium, I never used that one since I got into crypto that's why I can't provide any inputs about their services.