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Coinbase down for maintenance

coinbase.com

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Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#181

Post by iopq »

Klathmon wrote: post #177
DougWebb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We want to run an exchange that the entire world will use for this crypto-currency that's become very popular and has increased in price 1000% since it became widely known." I think I would have predicted that they'd need to run at a very large scale, and be able to handle massive spikes. Whether or not I could have convinced them to make the investment is another story.

The problem is what happens if that growth stops? What happens if bitcoin tanks right after you hired 300 new customer service reps and tripled your server hardware? It's a gamble no matter what, but moving too quickly or moving too slowly results in the company going under. In that case, I think straddling the line of "overwhelmed when there is a big spike" is a good spot to be in all things consitered.

You have layoffs and turn servers off. This isn't rocket surgery. They're skimming a ton of money off these trades every day, down time is a loss.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#182

Post by igorgue »

tome wrote: post #160
ceejayoz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, "only 8%" is rather a lot.

You guys really don't have experience in the space huh?

Bunch of douchebags in this forums that like to talk like they know what they're saying :D

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#183

Post by wonderwonder »

chickenfries wrote: post #152
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…

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

I think its also a matter of funding and company financials as well. You have to make money to justify spending money and each company has a different idea on what an acceptable infrastructure spend is. While it might be great to spend a ton of money and build a bullet proof infrastructure, if traffic slows down or revenue dips they are in the very negative position of having a lot of hardware and not a lot of money in the bank.

They have to scale at the rate their revenue or financial backers will be able to sustain. Based on the number of new users signing up to the service the down time is not yet a significant deterrent. If use drops because of downtime they will likely need to reevaluate a large capital spend to solve the issue.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#184

Post by woah »

simonsarris wrote: post #179
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…

Slapdash startup-ism in an exchange for a Brave New Currency is just as scary as a conspiracy. It may be more scary. At least with the Cabal theories you know someone knows what's going on. You might even have someone to blame/jail at the end of the tunnel!

You really seem to be wringing your hands pretty hard about an overloaded NGINX instance. Wouldn't a conspiracy that was stealing everyone's money be a lot worse?

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#185

Post by vintageseltzer »

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.

Spoken like someone who truly knows nothing about scaling.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#186

Post by chickenfries »

Klathmon wrote: post #174
chickenfries wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

I don't know about Stripe or Whatsapp, but I know coinbase has had an average of 30,000 new users a day for a while, with spikes of over 100,000 new signups in a single day around thanksgiving. It's absolutely bonkers amounts of growth! Edit: more concrete numbers: In January of 2016 they had around 2.6 million users. On November 29th they announced they had over 13 million users.

Whatsapp famously had ~450 million users when they were acquired by Facebook. I assume that the average user sent quite a few texts, some pictures, occasional video... they also supported voice calls...

I don't know how much computing power is actually needed when you're just buying BTC. When I used Coinbase recently to take a small BTC position, I only made maybe 4 transactions in total. Is this really a lot to handle?

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#187

Post by chickenfries »

pishpash wrote: post #173
chickenfries wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

Coinbase probably deals with lots of bot trading. Most consumer-facing startups deal with human-scale behavior, not bot-scale.

Ah that's good point, they probably generate a lot of traffic and could increase rapidly while the number of users remains somewhat small.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#188

Post by runeks »

Rmilb wrote: post #119
baoha wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked? Define fake

Ignore exchanges where there is 0 trading fees like the big one in Korea.

Why? Volume isn’t important, it’s order book depth that matters.

Re: Coinbase down for maintenance

#189

Post by londons_explore »

nodesocket wrote: post #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.

Not really. Unlike stocks and shares which are traded on regulated exchanges, bitcoins can be traded anywhere on any terms.

If one exchange implemented circuit breakers, people would simply move their trading elsewhere.

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