Greetings Steemians,
Today I am going to talk about the Coinbase service and its greatest shortcomings.
Wait time and fees.
First, Youtube and the internet at large or rife with instructions on how to buy bitcoin or ethereum absent fees on Coinbase by bypassing the main site for GDAX and performing a limit buy which will load your account with your coin of choice for no additional fee.
The problem is it doesn't work that way unless you load large amounts of funds on way ahead of the time you plan to trade any coins. The reason for this is that if you wish to skip the $3 fee for using the instant method, there is a 3-5 business day waiting period before your funds hit the exchange.
This is a problem for multiple reasons.
- It goes against everything crypto is supposed to represent.
- That claim may sound like whining, but crypto is meant to bypass the huge waiting periods of fund transfer
between traditional financial institutions.
- Additionally, from my own experience, Coinbase has taken my funds from my account, they were processed and
accepted by Coinbase within a day and then over a week later I am still waiting for my funds to be available for
trading on GDAX. That's not acceptable. The trades I'd like to make are already pointless a week later. - You don't save anything.
- By the time your funds are available you've lost more profits than you saved by trying to skip the debit/credit card
fee. - Once you find out there is an option to skip the fees one begins to question the fees altogether.
- If I can skip the fee by waiting two weeks to trade, why is there a fee at all?
- This feels like deliberate scheme to make customers willing to pay the $3-5 (That may not be a huge number, but 3-
5 every time I buy from fiat adds up quickly) to begin trading. Thereby gouging them for their hard earned cash
which seems to be an annoying piece of the cryptospace culture.
These things are turning em off of Coinbase and cause a want in me for a competitor to come along and do it better for cheaper. If coinbase if the Bitcoin of fiat to crypto transactions, where is it's Litecoin competitor?
What do you think about Coinbase and they're unacceptable wait times or seemingly extortionist fees?