Now what would happen if Coinbase went down at a time when Bitcoin was going through a short period of decreasing value?
Hope you know Coinbase is only 8% of the total Bitcoin volume each day.
Coinbase down for maintenance
121–130 of 252 posts
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it just the simple explanation that big swings in the market bring insane traffic spikes to market websites? Add to the fact that people are also DDOS websites (doesn't take a "big money institution" to do that) and it seems the explanation is clear...
Yea. I work as a software engineer at a company that sees huge swings in traffic on our product (by nature of the product). It's not uncommon for us to see 20x swings in traffic day-to-day. It's taken us a long time to be able to handle that and even then shit still goes wrong. I'm much more inclined to believe the downtime is caused by scaling issues rather than some big conspiracy, EDIT: Just to give some insight,…
> but it's really hard to replicate production traffic
This times 1,000.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#123Bitcoin hit ATH on coinbase, then crashed. Something's not right. The exchange is still not really 'up'. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxc... Can we change the link to https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600
Also https://status.coinbase.com/
That's a nice, detailed status page. Although, some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#124Just 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.
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.
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.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't think these exchanges can handle a lot of traffic. By a lot, I mean a few hundred trades a second. It is odd to me.
They are very well funded, and they can afford scalability. It's not that hard, given the number of transactions even at peak so far. So yeah, I find these weird circuit breaker patterns suspicious. The worst part is "partial" degradation, when you can't execute trades, but someone else can. It's very easy to hide all sorts of irregularities behind these partial outages.
> It's not that hard
I'm sure they would pay you a lot of money to solve their scaling issues, if you were so inclined.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not much. 1% of asset allocation for an institutional investor is enough for that. EDIT: You currently need $70m to bump the market above 20k on GDAX. That's a lot for retail investors but not much if institutional investors get involved.
How do you determine the $70m?
You look at the "Depth Chart" -- it shows you how much people are selling (or buying if you go to the right) in a way that escalates as you get further away from the mid-market price that is currently executing.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others said, its determined by what people will pay for it. If you go to an exchange like GDAX (or any stock exchange), you can look at what is called the "order book". If you are a trader, you can act as either a: - "Market Maker" - By placing an entry in the order book, which says something like: "I have up to 100 Bitcoin I'm willing to sell at $15,000.01 a piece", or "I'm willing to buy up to 100 bitcoin at 14,…
Is there a term for those who take advantage of the spread to make their money, essentially placing buy orders and then turning around and placing sell orders? Seems like there must be people making money off those who only "Take" deals and never "Make" them.
Those are just called "market makers". As a market maker you might be exposed to the risk of always ending up on the wrong side of the market over a longer time. For example if BTC is generally moving up, market makers might eventually have sold all their BTC and end up with USD. Sophisticated market makers will thus try to maintain a neutral position to avoid that risk. Some exchanges will even offer market makers a fee rebate to encourage parties to become market makers.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the chart, you could liquidate $130 million and it would move the price down to $5200.
Is that based on the live buy orders? If the price dropped below 10k then I think you would see a ton of new buyers (including me)
You'd also see a lot of new sellers when peoples stop-losses trigger.
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Naïve question here: since wallet addresses are fixed, couldn't you detect transaction activity unusually repetitive between a few wallets? Couldn't some clever learning algo detect anomalies such as what you hypothesized could be going on?
Re: Coinbase down for maintenance
#130I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently ( https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 ), 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 p…
Circuit breakers do not matter if other exchanges continue to trade the same currency. It would just cause the exchanges that do the circuit breaker to possibly hurt their customers.
The only effective circuit breaker is some form of synchronized method, but will the different exchanges cooperate? They really should put in circuit breakers this week across all exchanges so that when really bad stuff the panic doesn't destroy tons of people. It will be bad, but at least if the trades can complete and things unwind in a moderately slow fashion, it won't just 100,000 attempted transactions per second with random successes.