Buying, Part 1

And why I'm buying a Coinbase subscription. Plus old school e-commerce headaches.

I finally bellied up to the bar and bought my crypto today. Before I actually bought I started investigating additional security precautions I could take and discovered their Coinbase One product ($30/mo after one month free). This is such a good product!!! It solves a lot of problems/concerns I have about buying crypto and storing it in a custodial wallet. It’s kind of weird/annoying that during my journey no one was like “oh there’s a product for all of your elder millennial baggage and this is what it is.”

I promise I’m not a Coinbase shill. If I were I’d brag about being a legit crypto influencer and I am definitely not that. Here’s the product (fine print here):

Shut up and take my money

If you sign up for Coinbase One make sure you do the following, otherwise your insurance is invalid:

1. Verify you identity

2. Enable an authenticator app

In case there are disagreements later about whether or not your identity was “verified,” take a screenshot.

Having zero transaction fees and protection up to $1MM changes how much I’m willing to invest. I’ll have to recalibrate my number in a future post. For now, I’m still going to start with $2500.

Purchases and preview of transaction fees

See my previous post to understand what I’m buying and why.

Ethereum

I had planned to buy ETH2 but they actually don’t sell ETH2 (I’m surprised?) so I bought ETH, which is just as good as ETH2 due to their migration bridge.

Their transaction fee without a subscription would have been $15.35, which is roughly 3x transaction fees for buying stocks.

Polygon

Same $15.35 transaction fee but ran into a hiccup completing the transaction. I was under my daily limit of $1000, this being my second purchase, so I don’t know what’s up. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Solana

Moving on to, Solana had the same $15.35 transaction fee.

Also had the same issue with Polygon where Coinbase cancelled my transaction before it was completed:

This is not the future I was promised! I am paying for the privilege to speak to a person about this but I’d really like to not have to do that.

Calling customer service

I called customer service to investigate the decline transactions. There were phone trees (ugh) but no holding time and the customer service rep seemed smart and willing to help me figure it out. They told me that they think there’s an issue with PayPal declining the transaction and that I should call PayPal to investigate. I’m not getting any sort of security notifications from my bank or PayPal so I’m skeptical that this is a fraud prevention mechanism on their end.

The call lasted 21 minutes but we didn’t actually resolve anything, we just explored the problem space together (for 21 minutes). Current status is that a PayPal specialist rep will research the issue and get back to me via email. I’ll try to buy again tomorrow!

Open Questions