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Coinbase down for maintenance

coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#161

Earlier 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.

If they're just doing so by essentially flipping between bid and ask prices they may also be called scalpers.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scalpers.asp

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#162

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.

Bitcoin doesn't scale with "The Cloud". If anyone can get the private key, they have the money... sending it off to any other provider is going to end badly. Sure any other company doesn't care if "The Cloud" leaks.. it's just the customers problem, cause it's their data... However Bitcoin leaks, it's the companies money, so it's now again their problem.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#163
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.

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.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#164
post #27

Now what would happen if Coinbase went down at a time when Bitcoin was going through a short period of decreasing value?

If there's a very large value swing, either up or down or both, services such as this are guaranteed to have to drink from the godzilla-scale firehose and learn to like it.

If there's a run on the bank, the little people are gonna get screwed, no doubt about it, no matter what store of value we're talking about (seashells, gold, paper currency, cryptocurrency, gold-pressed latinum, etc).

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple: https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

Google: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

AWS: https://status.aws.amazon.com/

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed

Not me. Detailed status pages are awesome. Visibility into the service is awesome.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#167
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and I would do it.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#168
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.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#169

I'm curious what the implications are that all these exchanges go offline whenever there is a huge spike in bitcoin. 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 b…

Look at it this way: these services are like banks, but their traffic is more like a news site. It's literally the most challenging aspects of both worlds.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#170

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…

https://www.nicehash.com/
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