I had around $151k at the day's value wiped out as one data point (my fiat cost basis on entry was lower, not my life savings but not a trivial amount for me). Had a very busy week and didn't grok it was gone until Thursday afternoon. It actually felt cathartic to feel the feeling of losing $150k in the sense I was thinking "ok if I can accept dealing with that failure I can deal with any business fiasco when I start one".. and now somewhat surreal to get it back.
Wait I'm confused... The market moved dramatically and quickly, which can happen dealing with something as speculative as cryptocurrency, and yet they are refunding people? Did I miss something? Isn't this part of the risk investing?
This is interesting because it gives them a huge incentive to prevent this from happening again, if it costs them millions of dollars each time. I wonder what changes they will institute?
It seems that the price plummet only occurred on the GDAX ETH-USD market. Even the GDAX BTC-ETH market hasn't the spike. Normally there are many bots ferrying liquidity between these markets so this suggests that the ETH-USD market was not giving willing traders a chance to place orders. Their first blog post indicated it was working perfectly, in which case a design rethink is in order.<p>Coinbase regularly goes down when there is heavy trading. Very decent of them to publicly refund people for this incident, but given they have regular Ethereum trading issues, they should be quicker to suspend their market and more humble about the technical issues they're facing
This is really a curious instance. Those people whose savings have been wiped out have been hit so hard because they had stop orders, not limit orders. The main difference is that once the stop point has been reached, a stop order becomes a market order and then is filled at market rate. So yes, a stop order at, e.g., 300$ turns into a market order for 300$ and it may be that you are filled at 1$ if there is huge market movement downwards.<p>Moral of the story: even if you do not grasp basic financial instruments, in cryptocurrency you can still be saved because of reputation.
This business of correcting errors to keep incautious crypto-speculators whole is going to kill ETH. Let the people who trade on margin fall. At the end of the day, the critical stability of the currency depends on people like me, who speculate with disposable income, and not on suckers with margin accounts. I have a lot invested in this currency, but it's still less than a quarter of my YTD gain on actively managed mutual funds. If ETH drops to USD0.01, my account sits still until we hit sell pressure again.
I think we are in for a huge pump on GDAX, because they now have to buy a shitton of ETH to make their customers whole(or if they give them cash, the customers will be buying a ton of ETH to get their holdings back)...and they will be buying it from GDAX exchange, add that buying pressure to the EEA announcement later this month that will give it an extra boost, and we'll pass the ATH and then its up to the next level up