Coinbase is cruising at escape velocity. I signed up for an account around the time they launched. I had some questions about button creation so I emailed them. In response, Brian (the founder) coded up a button API to make it possible to generate payment buttons on the fly. Needless to say, the show of dedication was impressive. Congratulations to the Coinbase team.
So they will burn endless amounts of fuel (venture capital), rise high but deliver exponentially little, and promptly fall back to burn up in the atmosphere?
I would avoid any company "cruising _at_ escape velocity". Approaching it, fine, but at that specific velocity it's downhill from here.
For definitions here let's have Wikipedia[0] and Oxford dictionary[1]
0. "escape velocity is the speed at which the kinetic energy plus the gravitational potential energy of an object is zero. It is the speed needed to "break free" from the gravitational attraction of a massive body, without further propulsion."
1. "a speed for a particular vehicle, ship, or aircraft, usually somewhat below maximum, that is comfortable and economical"
An object travelling at escape velocity without further propulsion will just (only just) escape the gravitational pull of the contextual body. That means by the time it's distant enough from the body for the gravitational forces to be trivially weak, it's going damn slowly.
This means the company is slowing down continually, relative to that body.
In terms of whether you can "cruise" at escape velocity, I don't think so. Going at escape velocity for as much of the journey as possible would require a huge propulsion at the start, with a very high initial speed and use of fuel. I suggest cruising would actually be when you spend most of the journey below escape velocity by applying propulsion more steadily. The maximum velocity experienced in the company would be lower (comfort) and less fuel would be used.
The other downside of always being at escape velocity, unless the destination lies at a distance from the body where there's still a relatively non-trivial gravitational pull left, there's a good chance you'll die before you get there.
Seriously. I see more and more posts like this on HN. Someone uses a word or phrase in a sentence that is a tiny fraction of the actual content of their post, and someone replies with paragraphs (with references!) about why that phrase or word is not something they would choose based on something completely unrelated. Instantly derailing and detracting from discussing the actual points made. We need to start downvoting these kinds of posts.
This would be a good time to spend some of that money on building up the customer support.
I gave them a try and for my first purchase I received BTC at a significantly higher rate than they quoted and confirmed. To make things worse, I still have no reply on the support ticket 10 days later. Not exactly what I'd expect from a company handling significant amounts of money in a market that's struggling to gain recognition and trust.
On rare occasions we are not able to provide bitcoin at a locked-in price. When we can't, we offer the ability to place an order in USD for an amount of BTC equal to the exchange rate at the time that we receive your USD from the bank, 4 business days later. When this is offered as an option, we display a note on the buy page that says: "Note! We've exceeded our normal buy limits for today. If you would still like to purchase you will receive the market price of bitcoin on [some date] after your funds have arrived." You are also required to agree to a term like this before placing an order: "I acknowledge that the amount of BTC I receive will vary based on future exchange rates." Some users check the box without reading it; maybe this happened to you.
We're trying very hard to scale our support team. We've gone from 1 to 12 support in a matter of months, and we are hiring more support staff, and it is still difficult to keep up. We are responding, but it is almost impossible to grow fast enough. That said, 10 days sounds way too long. If you send your coinbase email address to me at craig(at)coinbase, I'll get your ticket prioritized.
Thanks Craig, posting about my personal issue here feels a bit like cheating, but it was nice of you to jump in. I can imagine support is already a priority, but consider this my nudge about it.
Yes, but there are situations where you don't honor the confirmed price even for instant buy purchases or sales. You can read about my experience below in a separate thread!
...at the time that we receive your USD from the bank, 4 business days later.
Is there really no faster way for coinbase to receive a payment? This doesn't seem practical, or rather it seems a bit too practical for a company that wanted to set up a one-way "pump" to profit by alternatively: immediately completing, or stretching out, transactions based on which action pulls value directly out of the customer's pocket.
4 days is very reasonable. My broker settles most trades in 3 days. And, that's for public stocks which have been around for a couple hundred years and are well understood. 4 days is also in line with what credit card gateways will settle in for higher risk accounts. And, yes, bitcoin is high risk. Oldschool guys who still don't like email get to decide what's high risk so bitcoin will set off red flags for a while.
That being said, I personally think coinbase should burn some of that VC fuel to bring that 4 days down. They will lose money to do it but they'll gain customers like you who aren't used to a 4 day settlement period.
Sure, but why can't I transfer money to you, receive confirmation that the transfer has completed, wait some reasonable amount of time (no more than a month maybe?) and then convert to BTC at the exact moment I prefer? Then I would feel like an investor, rather than a chump.
EDIT: actually it would be nice if you responded to some of the many seemingly-reasonable customer complaints on this page.
They on purpose don't allow balances in USD as maybe then they will be considered a bank. Once you go thru their verification process, you get buy instantly up to 10 BTC/week without waiting (although sometimes they turn this feature off for whatever reason). Also, you don't need to wait a whole week - you get hourly increases of the 10 BTC quota, which is nice... when it works.
I'm not sure if that's better or worse than my experience, where my order was cancelled altogether, freezing ~$1800 in my bank account for six+ days only to return the money because it was "too risky." I'm not interested in doing business with Coinbase anymore.
that seems to only happen when they can keep your coins and profit due to rising prices.. basically giving themselves a free loan and free coins.. super scammy.. I had made 20 purchases with them, and then initiated a buy at $180.. by the time i became "high risk" it had rocketed to $400+.. i've heard they honor these prices but they have failed to respond to my emails for months.. They selectively scam their customers.. I quit giving them business too and wouldn't advise anyone to do business with conbase.
I believe they're just working on fraud prevention. No need to sound the alarm. I bought bitcoins and my transactions were deemed high risk and cancelled after they received the money and held onto it for some time. Price actually went down from when I bought.
However, their customer service could definitely be improved. It's been over 9 days since I sent a request with no response and my transactions keep getting denied.
I had a similar experience a while back where it seemed to be the case that I ordered 1 BTC, but then only received ~0.7 BTC because the exchange rate had changed. More recently, however, when I've ordered 1 BTC I received 1 BTC x days later even though the exchange rate had changed (and not in coinbase's favor). So it seems like they've changed how they deal with the large latency in transactions--for the better.
Also, they're doing something called instant pay, which could help normalize expectations of what happens when you buy BTC. I wonder how that works with credit card charge back problems?
I wholeheartedly agree with this - it's been 3 weeks since bitcoin "disappeared" from my account and still no response from Coinbase despite multiple requests from me.
That's not primarily a customer support issue. It's an issue with them deliberately concealing exactly what will happen when you choose to take an action on their website, and in some cases blatantly lying about what will happen.
I don't have any applicable skills for the team, but the company perks remind me of a fun start-up that wants its workers to work their asses off (free lunch and -dinner-? Better throw in the Dr. Pep). I like that. Hope you guys do well.
This is why the start-up environment sucks in Europe. It seems so (relatively) easy to get $20 million in US as a start-up, while it seems almost impossible to get that kind of money in Europe from an investor, which is why there are so many "winner takes all" companies from US and not from other places.
This happens at a time when Bitstamp is several times bigger than Coinbase, also growing fast, and is covering both EU and US. Yet, because of this sort of funding (and probably more later), there will probably be yet again a US company dominating the scene.
In a post-Snowden relevations time, I'm not very eager to continue using US services, but the environment seems to be so harsh for non-US companies that want to be global companies, and they basically have to grow themselves into global companies only through bootstrapping (the vast majority of them, I'm sure there are a few exceptions).
Yes, there is a massive bias against tech companies not in the Valley. My company, based in Canada, recently finished a $50M Series C road trip that included the Valley and New York, and the contrast between the two could not be any larger.
The Valley VCs and investors were dismissive and incredulous that a Canadian company could achieve the success we had, and that we could find people "good enough" to make systems able to handle the kind of traffic we were running. They genuinely couldn't believe we'd done it outside of California.
New York, however, was much more interested and receptive, and ended up being the best source for our future funding.
This whole business is less about numbers and reality and more about feelings and who you know than anyone wants to admit.
It depends on the VC and the size of the round, some VCs only invest in a very specific area while others are more flexible for larger investments.
Most of the major VCs do invest internationally in larger rounds. For example in the last year Greylock invested in Wrapp (SWE), Sequoia invested in 6Wunderkinder (DEU) and Skyscanner (GBR), BVP in NewVoiceMedia (GBR), USV in Hailo (GBR) and FundingCircle (GBR), IA & Valar in TransferWise (EST/GBR), etc.
Well, there's another vote of confidence in Bitcoin. It seems to be a battle of good and bad press. Ultimately, I don't think it matters. The votes are in and the people have said they want virtual currency. If it's not Bitcoin, next man up.
That's the brilliance of Coinbase .. it's not tied to BTC, in fact the creator of Litecoin is part of their team now. They are building an infrastructure layer for cryptocurrency, period, and they seem far ahead of any competitors atm.
do you really think that in the hypothetical situation of a major bitcoin crash litecoin will still stand?
i think this highly unlikely. imho all the altcoins derive their value from the faith of people in bitcoin and by association in crypto currencies. the big one fails, all of them fail.
No. The point of some of the alt currencies is to address perceived weaknesses in bitcoin, like deflation, or wasted energy in mining for example. Bitcoin created a market but that market will outlive bitcoin if it fails. Now litecoin is basically a clone so it'll fall with bitcoin, there's nothing interesting about it, but others like peercoin or primecoin are substantially different in ways that may matter greatly.
The VC's are looking to invest in people selling shovels, not panning for gold/speculating on price. They've built cryptocurrencies' naturally high volatility into their expectations, and are looking for ROI on service fees.
There are basically two hashing algorithms for cryptocurrencies: SHA-256 and scrypt. SHA-256 is the one used for Bitcoin and its derivatives. Litecoin uses the scrypt algorithm, as does its derivatives, like Worldcoin. There are a handful of other proof of work algorithms as well used by a few other currencies.
scrypt uses the SHA-256 algorithm for hashing the blocks, but the caveat is that it also uses a high number of read/writes to RAM. In fact, there is very nearly parity to the number of compute cycles to read/writes cycles. Here's the paper on it: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf.
In order to build an ASIC miner for Litecoin, one would have to build a circuit that had a massive number of CPUs encrusted with a fairly massive amount of fast RAM. As this more or less describes a video card, whoever designs an ASIC for Litecoin will have a nice challenge in front of them.
Digital currencies are a classical winner-takes-it-all market. There is not much room for alternatives besides Bitcoin. Also, Bitcoin has a huge lead - an altcoin would have to be fundamentally better than Bitcoin in order to take over. Similarily, TCP and SMTP have both never been replaced by newer protocols. I suspect the same to be the case for Bitcoin.
Also, revising the core of Bitcoin in any significant way will be prove at least as hard as replacing IPv4 with IPv6.
I've been considering buying a Litecoin or two just for the fun of it. I have greater faith in Bitcoin for sure, but unless a technical flaw destroys it, I don't see exactly why Litecoin should disappear.
The whole point of a currency is that it's a universal medium of exchange. On the other hand, most real world payment systems can handle FX between currencies already, so Bitcoin-to-Litecoin shouldn't be too hard.
The point of a currency is that it's an agreed upon medium of exchange, not necessarily a universal one. We're accustomed to dealing with multiple currencies, as you correctly note. None of our currencies have the trait of universal.
It sounds like a proud Bitcoin owner pitching his coin. I think that Litecoin and a few others are already in a good position: http://coinmarketcap.com/.
For one I would think the market cap has to be enormous, to avoid any large entity being able to move the market. Even now with bitcoin at, what, 15 billion dollars? Price can still be swayed 5-10% by a million dollar purchase. Which is what leads people to criticise it for price swings.
Not enough money in the world to support too many networks of the necessary size.
How does that same critique not apply to many of the worlds currencies?
You're talking as if multiple new currencies are not possible when it clear that they are. People who use currencies don't care about the market, they care that products are priced in that currency and are relatively stable.
The market will eventually level out as usage grows, anything new is going to be volatile but there's clearly room for more than one player as long as they're not identical and offer different value propositions then they'll be taken up if only to hedge against the weaknesses of their competitors.
Bitcoin has flaws, it's terrible wasteful of energy as if proof of work were the only possible solution to creating coins. Other coins offer different less wasteful ways of minting new coins, that's going to have a market regardless of bitcoin's success.
I completely disagree. A digital currency is a game design in the clothes of a communication protocol. That is to say, digital currencies are poised to enter an indefinite period of competition and specialization based on the economic properties(rules of the game) that they offer and society's preferences for them; bitcoin is a tiny suggestion of what is possible. We are about to customize capitalism.
Fantastic point, and it's a real shame that there don't appear to be any anthropologists, sociologists, game theorists, psychologists or political scientists advising in the models of any of these coins. The algorithms that underly these currencies are going to have massive impacts on the shape of our society going forward, without proportionate deliberation about their design.
Absolutely this. Gold bugs and Austrians like bitcoin. Keynesians call it deflationary they'll like peercoin better. The math community may prefer primecoin. Namecoin could be the base of the new DNS system as well as many others attracting the tech community. Each will attract people who prefer their rules. Customize capitalism, I like that; totally stealing that.
There will always be a market for altcoins alongside Bitcoin because (a) they can remain completely anonymous and (b) pure cryptocurrency exchanges that do not engage in trades for fiat currency provide an indirect avenue for trading in and out of official fiat currencies, via Bitcoin. With KYC and AML attaching themselves heavily to most Bitcoin exchange services, people will trade into or out of Bitcoin non-anonymously, and they'll trade their Bitcoins anonymously for another cryptocurrency. Those cryptocurrencies will then by used for illegal purposes and it'll be very difficult to prevent that value from being laundered back into legitimate currency because the exchange between different cryptocurrencies can't be effectively policed, especially once distributed exchanges get off the ground. In my mind, because of this, the whole field of KYC/AML restrictions being forced onto Bitcoin will ultimately fail or at least be extremely easy to circumvent, as long as altcoins exist.
Comparing a cryptocurrency to the network stack doesn't make any sense. You are cherry picking out of one layer of the network stack to make a weak ad hominem argument to support a bandwagon effect bias. Regardless, your argument is flawed by the fact TCP and UDP traffic are about equal on the Internet. That's two protocols at your chosen network layer, each doing what they are good at.
Note: SHA-256 and scrypt are the building blocks of most cryptocurrencies. SHA-256 is to UDP as scrypt is to TCP? Dunno.
Interesting. If it's true Bitcoin will be replaced by another algorithm, then Bitcoin does not make much sense to hold. It would then be true that Bitcoin is a tool to facilitate real currency transactions.
Since all of these are fluid and electronic, it wouldn't take very much for someone like bitpay to write a coin-agnostic API that interfaces with multiple cryptocurrencies.
That's not what he said. Fixed supply means deflation, regardless of how many units exist as long as population and economies grow. Economists generally consider deflation a very bad thing that kills economic growth and creates artificial recessions.
Most altcoins use scrypt instead of SHA256, so that it's harder to make FPGAs/ASICs, thus relatively easier for people with GPU/CPUs.
This is because if only people with specialized hardware could mine, the network could be more vulnerable to 51% attack from a well-funded team, versus when every person with a graphics card can mine.
I question how far the Bitcoin industry can develop without government regulatory agencies getting involved. Granted I don't have a deep background in financial systems, but this seems like more than a remote possibility.
I see a parallel with Bitcoin and the financial system to Uber & Lyft with traditional taxi/limo services. In Seattle, both Uber & Lyft are being hassled by the city since they don't fall under the regulations that apply to taxis and limousines. And truth be told, I think that Uber & Lyft are going to see the regulatory matters eventually impact their operation, rather than going away.
And that's just working at a local level. Payment systems on a worldwide scale? Seems commensurately high-risk, high-reward at present, where the "high" measurement is significant.
Sure, it is regulated by FinCEN but what does that do for me? It seems FinCEN is nothing more than a part of the national security theatre than actually regulations that help me.
Technically it's not. FinCEN regulates money services businesses and they have decided that people/companies who exchange virtual currencies for USD are in the money services business.
It might sound like nitpicking but it's an important distinction.
I both love and hate Coinbase! So far, they've cost me hundreds of dollars. Some may consider it stolen money. I understand the technical issue, but I'm sure when they get adopted by a wider and not-so-technical audience, they may become a target of a nasty class action lawsuit. For example, I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing. Again, I understand why this is happening, but they make enough (1%) to honor the price. As I suspect, sometimes they sell from their own inventory of Bitcoins, so, they don't depend on the market order.
> ..I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing.
That's shocking (if true).
Recording trades at a price that's different from what the user saw on their screen when they clicked to commit to the trade is pretty fundamental fuck-up. It's a "Drop EVERYTHING! We need to fix this NOW!" kind of problem. There's a good chance that someone's head would roll if it happened in an investment banking/capital markets-type environment.
I know for certain that if it was happening with a bank's online payments service (the sort of thing where you can send EUR from your USD bank account), the service would simply be switched off until the problem was fixed. You'd have to get the legal department involved to notify the regulator and assess the company's liability. You'd have to go through the logs to find every single instance of it ever happening and write to each and every customer who was disadvantaged to inform them, apologise and reimburse them. And there'd be a significant fall-out, with very senior people asking "How the fuck could this happen?!"
I get the impression that some Bitcoin startups have a lot of growing up to do.
Unfortunately, it's true. It hasn't happened just once or twice. They may have some excuse in the ToS, I can't read legalese, but, again, they will have huge issues when non-technical people who are used to the penny-level precision and honesty of banking and stock trading. Same with Bitcoin exchanges. I had Bitstamp incorrectly execute orders twice, which cost me even more than the few dollar rate difference with Coinbase. I won't mention the situation where you have an open position during big movements and their service gets offline and you cannot react. When it comes to money, regulation doesn't seem like a bad idea! All these things added to widespread Bitcoin theft and marketplaces created just to steal bitcoin en masse hurt pretty badly the reputation of Bitcoin!
The major news here is that Bitcoin is corrupting itself by affiliating with major corporate interest. Silicon Valley thinks they own Bitcoin - they will be proven wrong. a fork is becoming more and more likely. Gavin is not treating his responsibilities well and should find himself a well paid job if he wants to make money. there is something wrong with incentives here. Bitcoin is global, not a US owned network.
Bitcoin is not one entity. When someone effectively "creates money" then of course there's a strong incentive for people to build businesses around it.
Things can fork as much as it wants: Any alt-coin that becomes successful will attract people trying build businesses around it.
If you want to prevent people from making money on it, find a means for people to achieve their goals without exchanging anything that can be converted into money. Good luck trying to do that without also making it pointless and/or unusable.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was referring to the fact that the core Bitcoin dev, basically the guy in charge of the network, joined the board of one company in Silicon Valley. If I have a competing business, what do you think his preferences are going to be? So if this continues there will be a fork, so that devs of the protocol are prevented from selling out. I think the core bitcoin devs are really going in a very wrong direction with their affiliations.
You are right. Bitcoins and bitcoin businesses in general have taken a very American twist. The entire 'bitcoin foundation' had turned into nothing more than a lobby group which is what Gavin happens to belong to. Large bitcoin businesses are dominate by Americans so far: Coinbase and Bitpay.
Happy that Bitstamp isn't US owned but not sure for how long. It's basically a repeat of what happened with the Internet. No one is stopping other regions from taking their own slice of the pie. It just appears that Americans are quicker on the innovation front and seem to understand where future value may lie and thus take appropriate risks.
To me personally, Bitcoin is dead already. It's turned from a nice idea to a speculation tool. Get Wall Street involved and it will become worse than USD! I won't even mention the fact that China owns over 70% of the market! The whole thing starts to stink badly!
Bitcoin needs more effective mainstream marketing and with $25 million in depreciating dollars, I really hope that Coinbase is the entity that brings Bitcoin to the masses.
I would strongly suggest that Coinbase do an endorsement deal with William Devane and start buying ad spots on FOX News. The script is simple. William rides up on a horse and tells viewers:
I just feel so much more secure knowing that I own Bitcoin. And you can't print Bitcoin. Don't you just love the feel of Bitcoin?
I buy my Bitcoin from Coinbase, because I trust them. No gimmicks. Coinbase will beat any price of any Bitcoin and at any time. Just call em. And Coinbase transfers my Bitcoin in 10 days or less, faster than anyone else. So protect yourself from the problems of the world. Invest in volatility with Coinbase.
With such a compelling commercial[1], there's no reason we couldn't see BTC $1 million.
Would it be possible for CoinBase to have some kind of FDIC like insurance? It seems like that's the biggest problems with bitcoins these days is that there's no safe place to store them.
The purpose of deposit insurance is to prevent runs on banks that make loans and don't have as much money in their vaults as the total of their customers' balances. Coinbase does not make loans. As far as I can tell, it's a service that stores your actual bitcoins for you. FDIC-style insurance isn't applicable.
Very good point. But I still think the bitcoin ecosystem is missing a foolproof way to securely store bitcoins in the way that US dollars have a bank.
Paper wallets can get lost or stolen, A lot of online wallets get hacked, and DIY encryption doesn't seem like a great way to go either, especially for grandma.
I'd happily pay a fee to coinbase in exchange for some kind of insurance against them being hacked.
Agreed. The bitcoin ecosystem will need traditional banks, credit cards, and the rest of the financial services industry. Prices that involve transfers will just be lower, and interest rates on deposits will have to factor in expected deflation once that stabilizes.
I honestly doubt that much of this is going into buying and holding bitcoins. Institutional investors are already trading big numbers of bitcoins via Second Market. They don't use regular exchanges and certainly wouldn't need to go through the 'false investment' route.
I do however think a large part of this would go towards Coinbase improving its bitcoin stash. They've been running out of stock every single week.
I still wonder why I as a buyer would choose to buy through coinbase rather than PayPal or just credit card.
For sellers it is awesome and I know how bad PayPal is for sellers so I understand that.
But as a buyer if I don't care about being anonymous why would I spend a currency that is deflating and has no safeguards or way to charge back when I could just use fiat, have safety and feel better knowing the money I just spent won't be worth 10% more tomorrow.
All transactions have a ~3% credit card tax (even if you pay with cash). With Bitcoin, you can avoid this tax and get the discount.
Try sending money to a family member in Africa, then understand why PayPal and credit card are bad.
If you have qualms with bitcoins (the unit), then hold them for less than a minute and don't expose yourself to the exchange risk as you use the Bitcoin payment network to transfer value.
Finally, Bitcoin is FAR FAR from anonymous, it is as public as it could possibly be (everybody everywhere has an index of every transaction!!).
It doesn't matter that PayPal or credit cars are hypothetically more convenient for you as a consumer. The reason you don't buy with PayPal/CC is that nobody will sell to you.
PayPal has explicit policies against buying virtual currencies and they will cancel your payment if it's brought to their attention, screwing the seller out of their Bitcoin. Similarly, credit card transactions will be reversed if later found to be fraudulent, and there's no way for the seller to be completely sure your card isn't stolen. So the status quo is that nobody sell Bitcoin for credit, and if anyone were to start they would be a lightning rod for CC thieves, since Bitcoin is by far the best thing to buy with stolen credit if you have the option.
The parent wasn't asking why they can't buy bitcoins without paypal/CC, they were asking why they would use bitcoins to buy something instead of paypal/CC.
Eh, if you're trying to be anonymous your ISP is still tracking what you are watching. If you run a proxy on a server somewhere that provider is tracking it. If you're using anonymizing software your connection will be slow, but that might work.
Also the websites that provide the type of content you're referring to like to gauge people with expensive subscription costs and I'm not sure how you can set up a subscription service with bitcoin.
Particularly when they conveniently decide to suspend the ability to immediately xfer payment out of a verified bank account, leaving you with a 3-5 day electronic check or signing up for "bill me later" as your only options for making a payment when your balance is 0. I'm sure it's all about fraud detection, and nothing to do with selling more people on "bill me later".
"has no safeguards or way to charge back when I could just use fiat, have safety and feel better knowing the money I just spent won't be worth 10% more tomorrow."
Indeed. This is what keeps me out of cryptocurrency. In spite of how crappy paypal is (or can be) for buyers.
I wonder if the "12 Days of Bitcoin" on Bloomberg played a tiny part in this. I was watching a segment the other day which had one of the reporters talk about purchasing BTC and mention that Coinbase is very reputable.
Doubtful, I think. Raising venture rounds of any size (especially this one) takes a very long time! Bloomberg may have caught wind of the deal, however, and chose to release the story to capitalize on the press trend.
I gave up multiple times on purchasing Litecoins. All I want to do is securely use my american credit or debit card to purchase 200 litecoins at reasonable price and fee. In the world run by bitcoin, is that too much to ask?
It would probably be easiest to buy bitcoins with Coinbase and trade them for litecoins at an exchange. You are going to have a hard time buying any cryptocurrency with a card, because it is too easy for you to reverse the charge and take the irreversible cryptocurrency. The places that let you buy bitcoins with cards are a lot more expensive for this reason.
Click "request money", then leave all the fields blank and click the blue "request money" button in the popup modal again. It'll give you a deposit address.
It doesn't seem to be advertised well on the main page but you can go to account settings and then bitcoin addresses to see addresses associated with your account you can send your btc to.
