Of course, if all exchange had acted faster and initiated those measures in time the 14 customers wouldn't have succeeded in sending the bitcoins. Probably ten more customers would have been stopped from completing the transaction.
That's not something we want to be relying on, though. We tell people about the importance of holding their own keys and not relying on exchanges and web-wallets, but so many of them clearly can't be trusted with that responsibility. I don't see a way around it. Blacklisting is something that will *never* be implemented at protocol level, yet we're applauding a centralized service for effectively doing that to prevent their eejit customers from giving money to scammers.
Welcome to the Modern World where the Human part of the equation is being rubbed out from many facets of life. Apparently, Humans can no longer be relied upon to pay attention to what they are doing and when something happens they (or their survivors) then love to whine about it because "it's not
their fault!" so, systems are being built to think for them.
What Coinbase is doing is no different than what auto makers are doing with their "safety" features like lane warning/guidance, back up cameras, vehicle next to you sensors etc. Then there is this: Because many (idiots) are killed/injured each around the world because they are walking while texting, decide to cross the road without a care or thought about anything and get hit by a vehicle,
cities are installing crosswalk warning systems designed specifically get the twits attention.
Of course, that just furthers degrades incentives to pay attention in the 1st place...
Case in point, a quote from the linked article (emphasis mine)
We developed a cell phone app that warns pedestrians when they initiate unsafe crossings and tested the app in our stateof-the-art pedestrian simulator. The project expands on our first SAFER-SIM grant that investigated permissive alerts (ones that indicate when it is safe to cross). We found that texting pedestrians who were given permissive alerts took safer gaps than those without these alerts. However, they also paid much less attention to the traffic, relying on the alert system to identify when it was safe to cross.
Safe bet the same applies to exchanges trying to automajikly prevent folks from send coin to scammers. Alfred E. Newman comes to mind with his "What? Me worry?" quip.