Ask Coinbase Anything...

You've probably heard of Coinbase, but have you met Brian and Fred (the founders)? Now is your chance to ask us whatever is on your mind. We haven't always been the most public figures (turns out running a company is a lot of work!) but we'd like to get to know you a bit better and do a live Q&A video to answer your questions.

When is litecoin support coming? How did we convince Dell, Expedia, and Wikipedia to accept bitcoin? When will Coinbase support storing your own private keys? And why did we cancel your bitcoin order? (sorry about that!) Any question is fair game (and if there is something legally we can't say, we will tell you that too).

This will be an informal chat where we speak off the cuff.

How do I ask a question?

You can post it to this reddit thread and we will try to answer it during the live video AMA
Even better: Tweet @coinbase during the live AMA with your questions and we will read them live on the air
When will the AMA be held?

Thursday Oct 16th, 2014 at 7pm Pacific time
View in my time zone: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Coinbase+AMA+with+Founders+Brian+and+Fred&iso=20141016T19&p1=224&ah=1
Add it to your calendar!

How do I watch the video?

We will tweet out a link 1 hour before the AMA from http://twitter.com/coinbase

Come Meet Us In Europe!

We will also be visiting Europe next week where we recently launched!

If you live in London, Paris, Madrid, or Helsinki, we will be hosting user meetups and giving talks. You should come say hello in person and have a drink on us.

Coinbase CEO here.

Just updated with a blog post: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/47198421272/data-on-public-merchant-pages

These are merchant checkout pages.  Your information is not going to be shown on one of these pages unless you created a "buy now" button, donate button, or checkout page and posted a public link to it somewhere as a merchant. Order pages are designed to be public so customers can reach them, but we messed up by making them publicly indexable and including merchant contact info there without being more explicit.  The email in particular should not have been included.  More details in the blog post.  Very sorry for the trouble on this!

Hello and thanks for the heads up on this.  Growing pains is correct.  We are almost done going through and cleaning these up.  Please check your balance and see if it now back to normal.

This was a view bug (the coins were never moved) that resulted from the unconfirmed transactions earlier this week.  Basically a bunch of pending transactions got added which were not processed yet but they were still affecting the balance calculation.

Did a major rewrite of it saturday and pushed it out, so this *should* be a thing of the past.  Definitely made us look bad though as the balance is one thing that should never get messed up.

We are still going through support requests but if you see anything else definitely let us know.  Thank you for bearing with us!

Hello and thanks for the heads up on this.  We are almost done going through and cleaning these up.  Please check your balance and see if it now back to normal.

This was a view bug (the coins were never moved) that resulted from the unconfirmed transactions earlier this week.  Basically a bunch of pending transactions got added which were not processed yet but they were still affecting the balance calculation.

Did a major rewrite of it saturday and pushed it out, so this *should* be a thing of the past.  Definitely made us look bad though as the balance is one thing that should never get messed up.

We are still going through support requests but if you see anything else definitely let us know.  Thank you for bearing with us!

Hello and thanks for the heads up on this.  Growing pains is correct.  We are almost done going through and cleaning these up.  Please check your balance and see if it now back to normal.

This was a view bug (the coins were never moved) that resulted from the unconfirmed transactions earlier this week.  Basically a bunch of pending transactions got added which were not processed yet but they were still affecting the balance calculation.

Did a major rewrite of it saturday and pushed it out, so this *should* be a thing of the past.  Definitely made us look bad though as the balance is one thing that should never get messed up.

We are still going through support requests but if you see anything else definitely let us know.  Thank you for bearing with us!

Yep, Luke Jr got it mined - and the bounty has been paid out.

We are now showing confirmations on it:
https://coinbase.com/network/transactions/88eb395b48a6d3875d8d55a6efd34afd2e1d4e397b43f9f790479914fba0c74b

Thanks for all the help in this thread.  In the future obviously this should not happen, so apologies for the bug on our end.  We would definitely love to see an option down the road where miners could opt in to mining some particular tx.  Would be interesting to see a market develop for that.

Anyway, big thanks!

https://coinbase.com/network/transactions/ccb75ea48acc40f249f445ab7b6913e6a805938c022fbc6c9dcbdc67e4cb8847
https://coinbase.com/network/transactions/88eb395b48a6d3875d8d55a6efd34afd2e1d4e397b43f9f790479914fba0c74b

These two transactions accidentally got into our hot wallet and are holding up some transactions in an unconfirmed chain.  They don't have sufficient fees to be included in the normal mining, but we'll pay 5 BTC to someone who can get these mined in a block (along with any other transactions you are already hashing).

Luke-Jr is already working on mining them, but we would like to add some more CPU power to it.  The bug which caused them to enter the hot wallet in the first place has now been fixed.

Thank you for the help!
Brian Armstrong
Coinbase

Hi everyone.  Sorry for the trouble on that.

This tx did cause us some issues.  https://coinbase.com/network/transactions/88eb395b48a6d3875d8d55a6efd34afd2e1d4e397b43f9f790479914fba0c74b  and should not have been used as an input - that was our error.

We are pushing out a fix for this now so transactions like this should not be used in the future.  Luke-Jr was kind enough to starting mining it for us (we sent him a bounty).  Hopefully it should be cleared up soon.  Apologies again for the trouble and thank you for bearing with us.

This group in San Francisco is quite active and meets monthly: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/

A bit of a drive from Sunnyvale, but a good option.

This is a good point.  We run about 100 tests on testnet before each deploy.  Unfortunately we didn't have a test case for the last problem that happened   Race conditions in coin selection.

Thanks for the support though!  Really appreciate it.

Hello all,

First just let me say I'm sorry for the trouble in the past few weeks.  We indeed had a bunch of transactions go unconfirmed on the blockchain.  This was due to a feature we attempted to roll out that paid transaction fees on the user's behalf (which created some unconfirmed transaction chains).

We did some testing, and thought we had it down.  Obviously we were wrong.  That was my fault.

We've rolled it back for now so things appear to be back to normal.  I'm the first to admit we're still getting things "production ready" on Coinbase, so we won't come out of beta until we can safely say it's production ready.  We don't expect to earn your business unless we can execute on this and much more.  Thanks for bearing with us - we're in this thing for the long haul.

When I say mainstream I mean non-technical users.  (Bitcoin still feels too nerdy to me.  And by the way, I consider myself a nerd!)

Messaged!  Would love to get his experience/advice.

You could say that, but I don't think users will think of it as an exchange.  The focus will be on easy payments, and one side benefit of the site will be easy adding/withdrawing of bitcoins to their bank account.  At least that is how I imagine it

Would love to chat with him, how can I get in touch with Vladamir?  Anyone have a link to his profile? 

Sure, good questions:

1. I definitely wouldn't ask anyone to trust me with their funds at the moment.  Especially if you are tech savvy and confortable with the existing tools out there.  As a technical user myself, I find them to be quite good and trustworthy.  Coinbase is built more for the mass market (think your mother), and non technical people.  We're making a long term bet that for bitcoin to go mainstream, regular consumers will need an easy cloud solution like this, and we'd like to be that trusted offering.  But while we're still in beta I wouldn't recommend anyone keep larges balances there.  By all means feel free to try it out with a few cents if you want to though, we could use the feedback.

2. 0.5% to exchange into/out of bitcoin (once we launch bank integration) is the current plan.  Once you have bitcoins transactions are free.

3. No, you can still send to BTC addresses on coinbase (everything is using bitcoin underneath).  We just don't default to using addresses in most of the UI since I think non technical users find them confusing/intimidating, so we usually show emails instead as what you're sending to.

Hello everyone, I'm working on Coinbase (and created Bitcoin Android last year).

You're right Paul Graham is a good person to have backing Bitcoin, and I'm hoping to bring in some more support from other Silicon Valley VCs.  0.5% isn't too bad (Paypal's fraud rate is less than this) but it's still super early stage so I don't want to make any assumptions too early.

Anyway, there are still lots of unanswered questions on the site about security etc (I am taking lots of notes and have chatted with about 100 users today during the launch).  I hope to provide more info soon.  If you have any feedback/questions feel free to email me (brian at coinbase) and I'll do my best to answer promptly.

Will be there, thanks Andrew!

Yep this was it!!!  bitcoin.org/feb20

Adding the checksum fixed it.  Thank you so much!

Hi,

I've run into a strange problem when I try to connect to the official client on testnet (I'm doing some testing locally).

My code sends the version packet, the client updates to show one connection has been made, but it doesn't seem to send any version packet (or anything else) in response.  So the handshake just ends there.

This was all working normally yesterday and I can't think of anything I've changed since then.

Has anyone ever encountered this?  I don't have any port conflicts I can see.  I thought maybe the connection was banned (for misbehaving peer) so I set bantime=0 but this didn't change anything.  It hasn't reached the max number of connections.  Under what other conditions would the official client not send a version packet in response on testnet?

Really stuck here, thanks!!