A Broken Link in the Chain, Cashing out- My experience
I have been on steemit for 29 days. I have done much better than I expected. This being my first dance with cryptocurrency, I decided to test the waters and cash a portion out. After all, if steem didn't translate to real dollars, then it was little more than Monopoly money to me.
The process as I understand it:
The steem dollars needed to be converted to bitcoin.
The Bitcoin is sent to a second site to exchange it for dollars and then deposit to a bank account or use it on a debit card.
Step one- I sent the steem to OpenLedger. The process took a few minutes and was pretty straight forward.
Step two- I sent the Bitcoin from OpenLedger to the garbage can.
Garbage Can?
Yes, Coinbase. Nine days ago I sent roughly $200 in Bitcoin to Coinbase. That is where my $200 became worthless and where I realized that the bitcoin industry is still run by people that give no shits. I contacted OpenLedger to try and cancel the transaction. Pretty naive, but I am new to the process. I recieved a message from OpenLedger stating that the money had been sent to Coinbase and that it was out of their hands.
Coinbase has a customer service email. Coinbase answered my first inquiry by pointing me to their FAQ page related to delays. Nowhere on the page did it indicate that the transfer should last more than a few hours. I sent coinbase the memo/address I used and asked them to confirm that the process was correct but just a delay in the system. 10 days later I still have no response.
Any other industry, including traditional banking, one instance of this type of customer service would have customers running. Not so with the cryptocurrency. Disappointing. One way to ensure that I stay powered up is to have no reliable way to cash out. That is also one way to kill a currency altogether.
Ideas on how to fix the situation? Is this standard?
When I use coinbase, I only send them bitcoin cash. Takes about 2 hours to process before the money shows up in the wallet.
I used to use bitpay but the fee's were just getting stupid.
There is a learning curve with the crypto. Learning the little inefficiencies along with the process is going to be a long up hill battle. If I use Coinbase again, I will definitely take this advice. Thanks!
This scenario has me worried too. I get hard assets and I understand fiat money, but Crypto still confuses me. It seems like it's the wild west around here sometimes.
I realized that my complaints would fall mostly upon deaf ears when I Googled Coinbase delays and read about someone that had thousands in transfer and was getting zero response. It appears that Coinbase is short staffed given all the positions they are hiring for. I plan on sitting on my steem for a few years since it came so easily. As for the $200, I chalk that up to a learning experience. I don't expect to see that again.
This is a good anecdotal story; please follow up with whether you ever get your hands back onto your $200 from Coinbase-- interested.
Coinbase may not even be the source of your problem, the problem is mostly related to bitcoin itself. You see, bitcoin now has VERY high "mining fees" for transactions, on the order of anywhere from $10 to $50 lately-- PER TRANSACTION. Not sure how it works, but if you didn't put up a big mining fee to attract miners, your transaction sits in a que which can last weeks (or longer?). It's actually kinda out of Coinbase's hands if it's a mining-fee problem. The mining fee is also why "wix" recommended you use Bitcoin Cash instead of Bitcoin, less mining fees, less time for transactions to post in the blockchain. We also rec you use BCH or LTC or ETH-- almost anything other than BTC unless you're moving a much much larger amount, like at LEAST a full bitcoin (~$15,000).
Hope that helps.
Great answer....one that should be part of the coinbase response. There are some pitfalls to overcome in an industry that is straining for resources.