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Coinbase down for maintenance

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Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#141

Post by gamblor956 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #124

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. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Coinbase goes through this charade every time this happens with a major digital currency. It wasn't a legitimate excuse the first time, and it's not an excuse the 7th time.

Scaling is a solved problem. You have AWS, Google Cloud, and MS Azure to choose from with financial institution/HIPAA-level offerings.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#142

Post by TFortunato »

bhouston wrote: post #130
TFortunato wrote: post #64

I 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…

Maybe not, I'm just speculating that GDAX or coinbase may have added this as some sort of "sanity-check" in their system (regardless of the insane volatility in crypto right now!)

In the situation with ETH, a bunch of automated margin calls happened because of one large order on the books, dumping the price down to 10 cents! GDAX/Coinbase repaid a lot of people who lost money then, even though they didnt have to. They may now have some dumb heuristics that slow down trades / whatever if a bunch of large orders are going through, or price delta over a short time period goes too high. I remember looking at the charts today on GDAX and the 5 minute candle went from 20k open to 16k close before trading halted! I also heard from others that there were a lot of ~19k sells of 100 coins each on the books and executing.

So yeah, just speculating that this may bave been the case of someones boss at GDAX/Coinbase telling engineering "please don't make us do that again", after they ate the cost last time! :-)

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#143

Post by SippinLean »

simonsarris wrote: post #80

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. 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? Popular Google Searches by year, by my estimation. 2016: "what is bitcoin" 2017: "what is et…

"Why have I seen this comment before if it's only an hour old?"

Oh, you copied and pasted it from yesterday...

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#144

Post by ceejayoz »

igorgue wrote: post #121
tome wrote: post #27

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. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

A run on one bank frequently has knock-on effects on other banks.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#145

Post by nawitus »

wonderwonder wrote: post #124

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. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

> 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.

Are they not using cloud, which should enable easy scaling? Or is their architecture not designed for good scaling?

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#146

Post by simonsarris »

SippinLean wrote: post #143
simonsarris wrote: post #80

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. 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? Popular Google Searches by year, by my estimation. 2016: "what is bitcoin" 2017: "what is et…

"Why have I seen this comment before if it's only an hour old?" Oh, you copied and pasted it from yesterday...

Yeah, but that story got flag-killed quick and I still thought this was funny.

(I actually originally tweeted it, like two weeks ago, but no one reads my twitter, which is to their credit.)

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#147

Post by teraflop »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #136
mancerayder wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably. Could be an interesting data science project. One thing I'm not sure about is how easy it is to make new wallet addresses. Do you know?

A Bitcoin address is just the hash of a public key, so generating new addresses is extremely cheap (on the order of microseconds) and doesn't require interacting with the blockchain at all.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#148

Post by gamblor956 »

shiado wrote: post #97

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 Coinba…

A financial institution has fiduciary obligations to its clients to maintain the assets (here, the Bitcoin, ether, etc.) entrusted to them.

However, financial institutions are not currently obligated to maintain their clients' ability to transact those assets, let alone within a specific time-frame. Many people have sued their brokerages for not letting them sell stock in a timely fashion to take advantage of price changes; essentially all of them have lost or settled for pennies on the dollar.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#149

Post by spookthesunset »

paulhodge wrote: post #110
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?

On GDAX the trade volume for BTC/USD is now about $1.4 billion per day. And there are other exchanges too. So yes the market could fulfill that trade. Would probably bring the BTC price down but it wouldn't be catastrophic.

Given the completely unregulated nature of these exchanges, that 1.4 billion USD could be legit, it could be wash trades, it could be inhouse bots doing crazy things to rig the market. , or it could just be a complete fabrication.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#150

Post by [deleted] »

gamblor956 wrote: post #141
wonderwonder wrote: post #124

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. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle…

Coinbase goes through this charade every time this happens with a major digital currency. It wasn't a legitimate excuse the first time, and it's not an excuse the 7th time. Scaling is a solved problem. You have AWS, Google Cloud, and MS Azure to choose from with financial institution/HIPAA-level offerings.

[deleted]
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