Maybe some of you will remember back in the 80's or 90's there was a movie about a hacker that had been steeling small fractions of a cent from every bank transaction somewhere out west. Said hacker ended up making 100's of millions of dollars before getting caught or fleeing to some tropical paradise. Well it went something like that anyways can't quite remember the exact details.

Coinbase is doing the exact same thing! Over the last week I sent 2 small quantities of btc to coinbase as follows

BTC0.13182195

BTC0.05819864

Of the first deposit I sold 0.1318 after which coinbase cleared/stole the resulting balance of 2195 satoshi

The second was similar only this time 0.05819 was sold and they stole 864 satoshi.

Now consider this happening 100 thousand times! That's BTC2195 and BTC864 respectively.

For each individual it's like oh no big deal the "dust" is gone from my account. However collectively they are stealing thousands possibly 10's or 100's of thousands of btc on a weekly/monthly/annual basis!!!