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Coinbase down for maintenance

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Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#81

Post by heynk »

hervature wrote: post #45
AndrewBissell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make more sense to put this on a logarithmic scale. The move from $18000-$19000 is nowhere near as meaningful as the move from $0 to $1000. Also, the move to $19,000 seems to have been some kind of liquidity issue on GDAX, the price did not get that high on other exchanges.

I agree, so putting this together from the parent's info: $0000 - $1000: 1789 days $1000- $2000: 1271 days $2000- $4000: 85 days $4000- $8000: 96 days $8000- $19000: 20 days Edit: Even on a logarithmic scale, bitcoin is experiencing exponential growth.

Thanks, this is a really interesting way of looking at it. The change from $0-1000 is still not comparable to the other 2x gains. I looked up $500-$1000 and it looks like it took about 1000 days.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#82

Post by QML »

sk2code wrote: post #7

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. It seems Coinbase struggling to cope up: $0000 - $1000: 1789 days $1000- $2000: 1271 days $2000- $3000: 23 days $3000- $4000: 62 days $4000- $5000: 61 days $5000- $6000: 8 days $6000- $7000: 13 days $7000- $8000: 14 days $8000- $9000: 9…

How many 9s do you think Coinbase has?

2 9s, or 99% uptime? Or is it worse than that?

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#83

Post by TFortunato »

syntaxing wrote: post #75
wskinner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it worth 15k is that people will pay that much for it. The price is determined by buyers and sellers, trading with each other on markets called exchanges.

I get the "market" determines the price but I guess I'm confused with who is agreeing to the value? Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price? Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?

Hey, I hope you saw my above price about how the market works.

So to give you a little more info: 1) Yes, there are big players (aka "whales"), and the rest of the "small fish", all playing in the same pond. The interesting thing about cryptos is that the are more "money-like" than "stock-like" when it comes to trading. Meaning just like money, where I can buy a fraction of a $, I can also buy a fraction of a bitcoin. So there are a lot of smaller players who will buy, say .01 BTC for $150 right now.

But while there is a general consensus that bitcoin is $15k by virtue of people paying that much for it, the "whales" (people with a lot of money or coins), can cause issues because they can put a lot of volume on or take a lot of volume off the order book at once. This happened to Ether this year, dumping the price for a few minutes from >$300 down to about 10 cents for a few minutes! https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1

In fact, there is some speculation that a lot of the rise right now is from Wall St. / big firms buying up a lot of coin, as futures trading on Bitcoin is coming in the coming weeks! (But I don't know enough to comment on that theory)

As far as preventing exchanges themselves from colluding... it would be difficult but not impossible, because again the price on the exchanges comes from the traders, not the exchanges themselves. (Theoretically it is possible that an exchange could do a bunch of "wash trading" / make up a bunch of fake trade volume to make demand look higher than it was, but given that there are a number of exchanges in a number of different countries, coordination there might be difficult)

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#84

Post by siculars »

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.

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.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#85

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

syntaxing wrote: post #75
wskinner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it worth 15k is that people will pay that much for it. The price is determined by buyers and sellers, trading with each other on markets called exchanges.

I get the "market" determines the price but I guess I'm confused with who is agreeing to the value? Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price? Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?

>Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price?

We don't really know.

>Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?

Well the exchanges could be running buy-bots but I think the more likely collusion is going to be big-players selling to themselves, if a big player is filling up both sides of the order book they can make it look like there is a lot of activity and drive the price up that way. Now is this that or is it organic? I'm not sure we have a good way to tell.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#86

Post by darawk »

scarmig wrote: post #12

What's the likelihood here that someone is in the middle of running off into the sunset with a giant ɃɃɃ bag?

Pretty unlikely for coinbase. They always go down during high traffic periods. Plus their principal owners are well known US citizens/residents.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#87

Post by wonderwonder »

syntaxing wrote: post #75
wskinner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it worth 15k is that people will pay that much for it. The price is determined by buyers and sellers, trading with each other on markets called exchanges.

I get the "market" determines the price but I guess I'm confused with who is agreeing to the value? Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price? Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?

Overly simplified explanation: You have to have a buyer willing to purchase at that price. Lets say the exchanges set the price at 100k when 3 minutes ago it was 15k. No one would buy.

A lot of the market movement is caused by people setting fixed prices on their transactions. Eg: Sell 5 BTC at X Or buy 5 BTC at Y. If X or Y is never reached the transaction never takes place.

Generally the exchanges just connect a buyer to a seller. You are not buying the exchanges coins but rather the coins of another individual/trader. The exchanges are just middle men facilitating the sale.

The exchanges make money on a per transaction basis on fees. If the market grinds to a halt because there are no transactions the exchanges make no money.

Now there are many possible reasons for the recent spike, some malignant such as potential pump n dump scheme or artificial inflation due to the upcoming futures exchanges and the desire to profit from shorting and some benign such as all the media attention and fear of missing out or just genuine belief in the potential of BTC as a currency or asset.

No idea which reason is accurate, could be all of them or none.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#88

Post by Animats »

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?

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#89

Post by nemacol »

djhworld wrote: post #5
rdp wrote: post #4

This is another one of those moments in cryptocurrency where time seems to freeze and everybody holds their breath.

In regards to the volatility? sure. But coinbase goes down for maintenance all the time

When CB went down for a bit today I had the recent news of NiceHash in my mind. Sure was a breath holding moment.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#90

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

Animats wrote: post #88

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?

There was a big multimillion dollar sale today, possibly the cause of the small dip. Looks like it handled it.

e: actually, tbf, it was a buy and a sell:

https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdc...

But it does demonstrate the market can just about handle large transactions.

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