It's telling to me about the hype bubble that this article is coming from CNBC.
Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
71–80 of 204 posts
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#72How is bitcoin supply finite, if it can hard fork?
Like saying how is gold supply finite if you can break a piece of gold in half. When Bitcoin forks the value is split between the two forks. If the market cap of Bitcoin before the fork is $10 Billion, the combined market cap of both sides of the fork afterwards will still be $10 Billion. There are double the number of coins because of the fork but now each person who had one coin has two and each coin is worth a fra…
The split value is in theory but didn't seem to follow in practice. Anyone can create a fork, and the market will not be that efficient, even in the long run. I don't think the metaphor works for that reason.
Simply, forking makes a coin that is not Bitcoin, and people can value it however they like. The only question is why they would value it at all. There are usually technical differences in forks that people believe are better.
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What kind of non-technical person is trying to buy and manage a bitcoin wallet in the first place?
If the user is only willing to learn enough to keep the coins in Coinbase, then this person has no business dealing with Bitcoin at all.
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#74So if we shouldn't be leaving our coins on coinbase, where do we leave them? A full wallet is not an option for many of us. I don't want to have to download 100's of gigs of data just to store my coins... I even tried to move from bitcoin to etherum since I thought that wallet might be smaller. And it was, but after leaving it running for 2 days it still had a ways to go and all the IO it was doing was really trashing my SSD.
At that point I looked into hot wallets like jaxx. But then on /r/jaxx, there were many people complaining about using jaxx only to have had their private keys stolen. So at that point I just left everything on coinbase :/ Is there any decent hot wallet out there or anything else?
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed. the operational risk is huge. even for tech savvy participants
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#76Earlier 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.
True. But for average people at popular banks, it's very sufficient.
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#77There 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…
Coinbase had four outages in June that corresponded to unusually high volume. That didn't scare you away? That was when I was initially setting up accounts, and it was enough to scare me away. I use Gemini. They've had unplanned outages too, but they're much rarer -- only one that I recall over the same timespan (against 10+ for Coinbase).
Every exchange has gone down, Kraken is far worse than Coinbase. Poloniex used to go down constantly, but they are holding up remarkably well lately.
Gemini's spread used to be pretty bad and they didn't do much volume outside their daily auction. They really aren't focused on retail investors so they don't see the same scaling issues as Coinbase.
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#78So if we shouldn't be leaving our coins on coinbase, where do we leave them? A full wallet is not an option for many of us. I don't want to have to download 100's of gigs of data just to store my coins... I even tried to move from bitcoin to etherum since I thought that wallet might be smaller. And it was, but after leaving it running for 2 days it still had a ways to go and all the IO it was doing was really trashin…
Why don't you use a paper wallet or just keep your private key on a hard drive? Are you exchanging your bitcoins often?
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#79So if we shouldn't be leaving our coins on coinbase, where do we leave them? A full wallet is not an option for many of us. I don't want to have to download 100's of gigs of data just to store my coins... I even tried to move from bitcoin to etherum since I thought that wallet might be smaller. And it was, but after leaving it running for 2 days it still had a ways to go and all the IO it was doing was really trashin…
Electrum, Mycelium
Re: Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I posted my comment before I read this. So repeating from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988939 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 l…
So this essentially implies Coinbase needs to manipulate the market in order to ensure their profitability?
How does it implies any kind of manipulation?
Check out these videos for what a market maker actually is: