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Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

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51–60 of 204 posts

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#51
post #30

I’m getting pretty tired of playing whack a mole with these wretched exchanges. I recently left the dumpster fire at Kraken, only to sign up at, yep, Coinbase. Oh well. On to Bitstamp or Gemini I suppose.

You might want to give Binance a try. No affiliation, it just came recommended to me from some successful traders I’ve met when the topic of reliable exchanges came up.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not what bank regulations have achieved.

They have achieved trust is system. If my bank stops existing right now, I still have any money. If gets hacked, tough luck.

It depends on the holdings, not everything you can have in a bank account is FDIC insured.

Update: By "everything" I mean not all kinds of financial instruments are insured by the FDIC. They do not cover mutual funds, annuities, bonds, etc. They cover pretty much just cash and cash equivalents.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#53
post #3

There is something that feels extremely fishy to me about what has happened at coinbase over the last few days. For years I've told people to just store their coins on coinbase. I've been a big fan of their "vaults", and I've been saying that they are the shining beacon of legitimacy in this whole thing. I honestly don't know that I still agree with that. This whole rollout of BCH has made me honestly start questioni…

But why were you ever telling people to store anything on coinbase? That is downright terrible advice to be giving anyone. One of Bitcoin's selling points is that it's decentralized. By keeping coins in a cloud operated wallet that you don't fully control, you're willfully giving up control over your own wealth, and needlessly putting your coins at risk.

You're comparing coinbase to an idealised version of a private wallet–which doesn't exist. In reality, a lot of money was probably lost to hard drive failures and other human errors. We just never read about it in the news, because each individual case is too small to warrant news coverage.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#55
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have achieved trust is system. If my bank stops existing right now, I still have any money. If gets hacked, tough luck.

It depends on the holdings, not everything you can have in a bank account is FDIC insured. Update: By "everything" I mean not all kinds of financial instruments are insured by the FDIC. They do not cover mutual funds, annuities, bonds, etc. They cover pretty much just cash and cash equivalents.

It's fairly trivial to make sure everything's FDIC insured, and being wealthy enough to care about the per-account caps should mean you've got someone to advise you on doing so.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#56
post #3

There is something that feels extremely fishy to me about what has happened at coinbase over the last few days. For years I've told people to just store their coins on coinbase. I've been a big fan of their "vaults", and I've been saying that they are the shining beacon of legitimacy in this whole thing. I honestly don't know that I still agree with that. This whole rollout of BCH has made me honestly start questioni…

You think it's fishy and you have no way to know if something is going on behind the curtain at coinbase but you don't want regulation? Regulation is what lets you peek behind the curtain and know that Coinbase is or isn't doing something fishy.

I can't help find it funny as the libertarian cryptocurrency fans slowly realize why we have all these dang laws. There are plenty of financial regulations that could use updates or tweaks, but an overwhelming majority are put in place to protect people and try to ensure transactions are as fair as possible. Cryptocurrencies too often throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#58
post #3

There is something that feels extremely fishy to me about what has happened at coinbase over the last few days. For years I've told people to just store their coins on coinbase. I've been a big fan of their "vaults", and I've been saying that they are the shining beacon of legitimacy in this whole thing. I honestly don't know that I still agree with that. This whole rollout of BCH has made me honestly start questioni…

But why were you ever telling people to store anything on coinbase? That is downright terrible advice to be giving anyone. One of Bitcoin's selling points is that it's decentralized. By keeping coins in a cloud operated wallet that you don't fully control, you're willfully giving up control over your own wealth, and needlessly putting your coins at risk.

It's pretty terrible advice to tell non-technical users to manage their own wallet. Keeping it secure is a non-trivial (understatement!) task.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#59
post #30

I’m getting pretty tired of playing whack a mole with these wretched exchanges. I recently left the dumpster fire at Kraken, only to sign up at, yep, Coinbase. Oh well. On to Bitstamp or Gemini I suppose.

A friend just bought Ripple on Bitstamp and it's taking upwards of two weeks to verify an account? I can physically walk to a bank and get foreign currency in person 1000x faster than this. I think all of this is speculation and hype, and only a small percent of people now have a use case met by these products.

Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

#60

It seems Coinbase's go to strategy every time markets are volatile. In case people are wondering why is this a recurring problem - this simply perils of Market Making in a volatile market. As a market maker for customer orders Coinbase needs to fulfill both sides. So to make money they buy from customers at low price and sell back at a high price. So they are collecting spread between bid and ask to make money. But w…

I've wondered about this. Specifically, how can you make a market in a product that has high violatility and fairly low trading frequency?

Seems like anyone doing so would inevitably get fleeced.

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