110 sats \ 6 replies \ @kepford 20 Apr \ parent \ on: Coinbase Sends a Message to Bitcoin Miners bitcoin
Partnering with helping feds surveil bitcoiners and promoting scams. That's my issue with them.
If a company does these things I will never use them, trust them, or recommend them ever again. More generically if a person makes a change I will give them a chance to restore themselves but it is hard to regain trust that is broken.
Would you agree that Twitter “partnered with feds” and “promoted scams” too? If I recall they had NFT profile pics for a while and then got rid of them. Do you still use their service?
Would you agree that Stripe has partnered with feds and promoted scams too? Do you still shop online using their service?
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not to say we should be ok with people doing these things, it just seems weird to me that Bitcoiners have made Coinbase into public enemy #1, and refuse to acknowledge improvements they make while simultaneously giving passes to other companies doing similar things outside of Bitcoin
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I think this comes from them being early and the leading company in bitcoin as far as exchanges. I think many feel betrayed.
The other side of this is that Coinbase has done things they are not required by law to do, IE the surveillance stuff. The other companies you list are fiat companies and while bitcoiners don't talk about them in such negative terms they also aren't claiming to be good actors in bitcoin like Coinbase does.
That's at least how I believe I am thinking about these companies in different ways. I'm not a fan of Twitter pre / post Elon. Stripe is a necessary evil if you need to do fiat payments just as Paypal is.
With Coinbase there are other options if you just want to exchange fiat for bitcoin. Strike and Cashapp in the US and the others like Swan, and River. These options are bitcoin only and haven't promoted crypto or pushed forward surveillance.
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if we zoom way out of the tech ecosystem and look at businesses like grocery stores, don’t they fall into the same category as Coinbase, Twitter, and Stripe too?
i could argue they promote scams in the form of fake meat, seed oil sludge, and all the other junk they sell, and if the recent trend towards “cashless” continues, it won’t be long before all your grocery store transactions are being surveiled (not sure if feds have access, but banks and credit card companies definitely do)
there are options to use cash at farmers markets, although admittedly they are often not a large enough selection of items for most people to rely on as their only food provider.
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Yeah really - farmers markets that I've been to in the past year have freeze-dried candies, all kinds of baked goods, some pickles/relishes, and maybe one place with some very expensive veggies. All at extremely high prices. Very different from farmers markets I've known in the past.
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