1. The vast majority of account terminations for individual (not public-facing) services by financial platforms is linked to KYC, AML, and other risks; banks don't wait for the government to tell them to shut down an account, they do so preemptively if they detect "suspicious behavior". There's plenty of stories of people with "unusual transactions" (e.g. freelancers who receive a few thousand £/$ in deposit) and get suspended by Revolut, with support that refuses to talk to them, because Revolut wants to cover their ass and ban people proactively even without hard evidence of fraud. You probably know someone who's been banned from a bank for "suspicious behavior" who don't even know why they were banned. Anyone who hung out around Bitcoin subreddits a few years ago has heard stories of this happening with Coinbase. The risk for Coinbase users isn't politically-motivated bans, it's bans for "no reason in particular".
2. They link to Cloudflare's famous "Why We Terminated Daily Stormer" article as further readings; but Coinbase terminated Daily Stormer months earlier than Cloudflare, for (presumably) an infrastructure, non-public-facing product. Presumably Daily Stormer didn't violate US laws. Here, they claim to only terminate private-facing infrastructure for illegal activity, so this marketing post about their "philosophy" doesn't seem to match their behavior.
I'm not puzzled. Coinbase is great as long as you stay in crypto it's the fiat to crypto that causes concern. I'm about/in the process of cancelling/closing all my accounts.
Why?
In the TOS they (Coinbase) state your crypto will always be your crypto. You are free to withdraw at any time. That's BS. Not only was I told to FO by coinbase support but they said any further contact would result in the exact same answer (FO).
That said, I had a large ( like 2k usd) deposit (in ETH so no fiat) so I wasn't giving up. Was about to post on Reddit, or elsewhere but they finally unfroze my account after a month.
Most people in crypto don't use Coinbase except maybe the whales because there are incentives for whales. Smaller players get screwed.
1. The vast majority of account terminations for individual (not public-facing) services by financial platforms is linked to KYC, AML, and other risks; banks don't wait for the government to tell them to shut down an account, they do so preemptively if they detect "suspicious behavior". There's plenty of stories of people with "unusual transactions" (e.g. freelancers who receive a few thousand £/$ in deposit) and get suspended by Revolut, with support that refuses to talk to them, because Revolut wants to cover their ass and ban people proactively even without hard evidence of fraud. You probably know someone who's been banned from a bank for "suspicious behavior" who don't even know why they were banned. Anyone who hung out around Bitcoin subreddits a few years ago has heard stories of this happening with Coinbase. The risk for Coinbase users isn't politically-motivated bans, it's bans for "no reason in particular".
2. They link to Cloudflare's famous "Why We Terminated Daily Stormer" article as further readings; but Coinbase terminated Daily Stormer months earlier than Cloudflare, for (presumably) an infrastructure, non-public-facing product. Presumably Daily Stormer didn't violate US laws. Here, they claim to only terminate private-facing infrastructure for illegal activity, so this marketing post about their "philosophy" doesn't seem to match their behavior.