There have been lots of reports over the past few months of all kinds of scandalous transactions on Overstock.com and also rampant ignorance from customer support. It seems that when you’re trying to make a purchase on the website, the checkout accepts altcoins for a while. On the other hand, customers’ altcoins are converted to Bitcoin, and this means that basically, the platform doesn’t, in fact, accept altcoins, but it rather acts as an automatic exchanger. It’s also important to note that by converting people’s altcoins to Bitcoin, you will pay for the Bitcoin transaction fees. Besides this, more issues are being reported regarding the website.
Overstock is extorting people
Tiffany Hayden who has a blog reported that she placed an order and sent $667 in Bitcoin to the website. Rather than filling her order, Hayden was immediately contacted by Coinbase, and they told her that her funds won’t be returned unless she created an account to verify her identity with Coinbase. She tweeted the whole story, and it seems that people have different opinions on what’s going on. Some of them feel that such complaints only give Overstock more reasons not to bother with cryptos anymore.
“You’re expecting a retailer to be expert in a niche payment method. It’s not realistic. Just validate your identity and be done with it. If you love crypto as much as you want people to believe, you’d be applauding Overstock for being willing to accept it at all,” someone else told Hayden.
“Validate my identity? Because I have nothing to hide, right? You don’t understand the point of crypto. Visa works just fine for you,” she responded. Indeed, the use of crypto does involve high security and privacy for the holders.
Overstock is extorting me.
I placed an order, sent them $667 in #Bitcoin, and rather than FILL MY ORDER, I was immediately contacted by Coinbase saying the funds won’t be returned unless I created an account and verify my identity with Coinbase. #M2020EU #Money2020 #money2020eu https://t.co/MulhKG1bxk— Tiffany Hayden (@haydentiff) June 5, 2018
Overstock is reportedly using Bitcoin to kill freedom of choice
Hayden also reported that rather than use Bitcoin to eliminate third-parties and financial intermediaries, Overstock is utilizing the crypto to remove freedom of choice.
Rather than use Bitcoin to eliminate financial intermediaries, Overstock is using it to eliminate freedom of choice. Forcing verified Coinbase accounts on users is more Orwell than Satoshi.
(Theft and extortion are still a violation of the non-aggression principal, Patrick.) https://t.co/xY3Eygh0R4
— Tiffany Hayden (@haydentiff) June 7, 2018
She says that forcing verified Coinbase accounts like this on users has nothing to do with Satoshi and it’s more on an Orwellian approach. You can follow her Twitter account to see what happens.
Overstock has issues before as we already mentioned and you can see another example.