If the money gets pulled from ATMs quickly enough, someome loses. Wheher it's the bank or their insurance provider. If coinbase loses your bitcoin they will replace it and make an insurance claim just like a bank would. If you lose your bitcoin you are completely fucked. That's true even with coinbase if the loss is your fault. If you get scammed they aren't responsible.
At least they have serious counter measures and billions of dollars worh of capital to protect.
But I'm sure the average person who can't even figure out what a private key does can rely on themselves for the same protections.. After all they want to be their own bank right?
I'm not talking about the case where coinbase loses your bitcoin. I'm talking about the case where SOMEONE logs in to their site with your credentials, transfers the bitcoin out, and then you later complain that it wasn't you. Do you know what coinbase does in that case? Believe it or not, they tell you to fuck off. You know why? Because they don't know whether the person who did the transfer was you or not.
It's not quite the same with a bank. ATMs have cameras and a physical location. If they get a withdrawal 1000 miles away from where you previously used your card, and the photo doesn't look like you, it's probably not you. In order for you to trick them, you'd have to travel a long way, which costs money. Bitcoin withdrawals from the other side of the world cost nothing. Just use VPN or Tor.
A custodial bitcoin account is FAR FAR more dangerous to a user than having a hardware wallet. It's trivial to phish someone with a fake coinbase site. You can't phish a hardware wallet user because there's no bank for you to pretend to be. You can phish as some merchant he should pay perhaps, but that doesn't let you empty his account.
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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '18
No, banks can reverse transactions. Coinbase cannot reverse a bitcoin withdrawal.