Right, I just want to warn people away from putting significant Bitcoin holdings directly into Coinbase to use this card without being educated on the risks.

Banks, credit unions, and money transferring institutions are heavy regulated businesses that have to follow rules. Money you have in bank and credit union accounts are also insured.

Coinbase is a private company that is barely regulated. Any money put into Bitcoins should be money you are willing to lose.

Edit: meant to reply to your parent.

Sorry dude but I can't down vote this hard enough. Please read about the history of Bitcoin exchanges, and for that matter the history of banks. They arent trustworthy, and become insolvent all the time. The FDIC exists for a reason.

My bank deposits are FDIC insured

Worth mentioning, Coinbase has some kind of insurance: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...

That's Coinbase's insurance. That's not coinbase customers' indurance. FDIC is _my_ insurance coverage.

> Coinbase is insured against employee theft and hacking in an amount that exceeds the average value of online bitcoin it holds at any given time.

If someone steals 90% of Coinbase's transiently held coins, no insurance coverage.

This is only insurance for their hot wallet (Quite literally, the cash that a bank would keep in their teller registers.) The overwhelming majority of their deposits are not insured.

How many traditional financial institutions have done an exit scam on their users, though? Exit scams happen all the time with Bitcoin exchanges and dark net markets.

Your issuer could talk directly to your private wallet (e.g. on your phone or on server). You could preapprove requests coming from your issuer to be automatically executed so that there is no payment delay. This scenario would be somewhat similar to Direct Debit transaction and would require wallet software supporting automated requests.

Implementing interactive approval would be more difficult to integrate. Authorization systems typically respond pretty fast, so there might be automatic timeout in the payment chain (terminal, acquirer, schema network, issuer) if the transaction was waiting for your interactive confirmation. Maybe some magic with initial pre-auth and subsequent post-auth attempts at regular intervals could work but would be no fun to implement either.

The idea is to use it like a charge card and not like a depository for your bitcoins (since any bitcoins you put towards the system isn't yours anymore).