Black Swan Author and Bitcoin Supporter Nassim Nicholas Taleb Closes his Coinbase Account

In 2020, so far, Coinbase has gone offline several times, the most recent one was the first day of June.

“It's 2020 and coinbase still goes offline with a 5% Bitcoin move. Meanwhile, they're the ones holding almost 1 million BTC,” said WhalePanda.

Besides these network issues, Coinbase isn’t helping out its customers either.

Coinbase users calling out the company's lack of support isn’t anything new but this time, it ended up costing them big.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of 2007’s “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and “Fooled By Randomness” took to Twitter on June 5 to share his displeasure with the exchange.

“@Coinbase What is going on with you? Why don't you respond to errors?,” called out Taleb adding “Even their account closing page is messed up. Does not respond.”

This initiated a response from the exchange that apologized for the delay and said they’ll be following up “shortly” to his support case.

Coinbase was quick to respond but it was already too late for Talib who replied with, “Too late. Closing account.”

In a separate tweet, Taleb shared that he has been a Coinbase customer for a few months now.

I closed the @coinbase account (opened a few months ago). Like Must, they answered me (blue check) when I complained but ignore the regular person. https://t.co/YqWWUQHwtc

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 4, 2020

With Coinbase out, other cryptocurrency exchanges took this opportunity to shill their exchanges with Kraken co-founder and CEO Jesse Powell asking Taleb to check out Kraken and “contact me directly if you have any problems.”

Taleb might have quit Coinbase but he isn’t quitting crypto and has been a staunch supporter of them for some time now.

Recently, he advised to “use cryptocurrencies,” after a user posted that the central bank of Lebanon is confiscating all the foreign currency remittances and forcing the money counters to pay their value in their local currency Lira.

Back in 2018, he had said “bitcoin is an excellent idea,” because “it fulfills the needs of the complex system,” and has no owner and no authority and even has a huge advantage over gold in transactions.