Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it.<p>I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle it, especially when their server status affects the bank accounts of real people. But I feel that it is understandable with out condoning it. The simplest explanation is likely correct in this case.<p>I don't think many of us could have predicted the volume and interest in BTC a year ago and neither did Coinbase's purchasing and infrastructure teams.
My friend thinks the exchanges also go down when assets "flash-crash", because it means normal users can get in to sell their assets. And when they can't get in, they also can't cancel their stop-loss orders, so it means a TON of assets are available to buy cheaply (by the exchange and/or certain VIP users/collaborators) as the value goes down. Then these are bought up, and the price quickly increases again, before the exchanges slowly come online again.<p>Therefore he thinks the people exchanges are either part of the "flash-crashes" (and buy up assets themselves, because they know exactly where most of the stop-loss orders are placed), or they get kickbacks from the whales manipulating the market, by giving them access to the database with all the limit and stop-loss orders.
Coinbase being unavailable during times of extreme volatility is not a new thing. Today's swing was 14k up to 19k then down to 15k or so over a period of an hour of severely degraded access.<p>I'll go out on a limb and say that much of the recent spike can probably be attributed to the 100k++ accounts open on Thanksgiving weekend getting funded today and everyone losing their shit mashing the Market Buy button which get instantly executed. The mechanics of vast market buy orders with no liquidity is well known.
Build a financial exchange with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis. What could go wrong?<p><a href="https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-post-mortem-69a1810f9910" rel="nofollow">https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-...</a>
The big question now is, what happens when somebody sells big for dollars. This would be an excellent time for someone with 10,000 Bitcoins to sell, take their $160,000,000, and go home. Could the market handle that?
Bitcoin hit ATH on coinbase, then crashed. Something's not right. The exchange is still not really 'up'.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxcoinbase_just_crashed_right_before_20k/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxc...</a><p>Can we change the link to <a href="https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600</a>
As somebody who doesn't have a background in finance, what are the legal obligations of an exchange to stay online? How can a user of the service be certain that an exchange is offline for technical or non-technical reasons? Let's imagine the likely scenario when the price suddenly drops like a rock and the exchange goes offline completely (for technical or non-technical reason). Could a user make a claim that Coinbase is liable for their losses because they were unable to access their coins?
It's a matter of time until Mt. Gox part 2 I think. It may not even take nefarious workings at the top, just sloppy work somewhere + one bad employee or outsider.<p>Is this going to end in a re-discovery of exactly why we have FDIC? Or the SEC? How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked?<p>Popular Google Searches by year, by my estimation.<p>2016: "what is bitcoin"<p>2017: "what is ethereum"<p>2018: "what is a wash trade"<p>2019: "can you eat squirrel"
You really shouldn't be surprised, at this point, by Coinbase going down during times of high activity. It happened on November 29th (when, in fairness, everyone was going down), and happened four times last June, which should have been their canary-in-a-coal mine.
I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently (<a href="https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1" rel="nofollow">https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1</a>), if Coinbase / GDAX instituted some sort of "circuit breakers" on their exchange to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Bitcoin and the other cryptos, trades at a pretty low volume relative to their market cap, so if a lot of people we're trying to dump large orders this morning to take a profit at the new ATH, I could see that causing similar issues that they may have been trying to prevent.
If this phase of Bitcoin is likened to each goldrush around the world, isn't it fairly inevitable that there will be hiccups? Robberies, banged together shopfronts, people using any tools they can find, etc. And the internet has long been a bit of a Wild West already.<p>Assuming they're adding thousands and thousands of customers quickly, I'm not surprised that their systems and support are lagging. Comes with the (Wild West) territory.
I wouldn't want to be in a business in which the worlds absolute finest hackers and crackers - the elite of the best of the best - make it their full time job - forever without end - to get into your systems and steal everything of value.
I'm curious what the implications are that all these exchanges go offline whenever there is a huge spike in bitcoin.<p>That being said, anyone care to elaborate how the price of bitcoin is determined? I mean it's easy when there is a large central bank monitoring this figure. However, how exactly does it work for bitcoin? What makes it worth the $15K value when there is no "goods" to back it up. Are there anyone here buying bitcoin as an investment?
how many things can go wrong when the service is overloaded... looks like Coinbase doesn't know what stress testing or monitoring is.<p>* ID verification by either webcam or id pic upload fails, and eventually one reaches the daily quota, locking the feature for 24 hours (seems fair though)<p>* removing and re-adding bank accounts fails, the site says the account is already linked and it shows some ghost duplicates (i.e. the same bank account multiple times with different statuses)<p>* bank account verification fails, the site says the small amounts deposited don't match<p>* some buying operations fails due to API timeouts when collecting money from linked bank accounts
How can anyone reliably trade Bitcoin? With Coinbase immensely unreliable, I can't see how anyone would tolerate running algos on their exchange, given they could be in a bad position unexpectedly.<p>What are the other exchanges that you can trade BTC and are they more reliable than Coinbase?
Serious question, would it ever be possible to implement circuit breakers like the stock market does for Bitcoin? Without safeguards, and the nature of 24/7/365 trading of Bitcoin, this all feels like teetering on the brink of catastrophe.
I never want to reuse my comments from other thread but this time I just can't resist. No one really anticipated what we all are currently experiencing and Coinbase is not different.<p>It seems Coinbase struggling to cope up:<p>$0000 - $1000: 1789 days<p>$1000- $2000: 1271 days<p>$2000- $3000: 23 days<p>$3000- $4000: 62 days<p>$4000- $5000: 61 days<p>$5000- $6000: 8 days<p>$6000- $7000: 13 days<p>$7000- $8000: 14 days<p>$8000- $9000: 9 days<p>$9000-$10000: 2 days<p>$10000-$11000: 1 day<p>$11000-$12000: 6 days<p>$12000-$13000: 17 hours<p>$13000-$14000: 4 hours<p>$14000-$15000: 10 hours<p>$15000-$16000: 5 hours<p>$16000-$17000: 2 hours<p>$17000-$18000: 10 minutes<p>$18000-$19000: 3 minutes
For how powerful we announce bitcoin/blockchain and its possibilities, the faultiness lies in the exchanges and that is my biggest con with Bitcoin
All of this is anecdotal:<p>These past couple of days, whenever a coin soars a ridiculous amount, on any given exchange, that exchange seems to mysteriously go down. For example: Binance and Bitfinex were down for "maintenance" (or just plain down), while IOTA was experiencing a surge in price (from ~1.10 to 6$). Similarly this happens with Bitcoin today (it seems Quadriga had some issues and Coinbase; not sure about others).<p>Something is up, and it's weird.<p>My conspiracy theory: big money institutions are testing pump and dumps for when short contracts come into play. On the one hand, the cryptocurrency world wants to remain as unregulated as possible; on the other, a lot of individuals are going to get reamed by big whales.