Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

Post by stygiansonic » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:37 PM UTC

sowbug wrote: post #44

Good opportunity for the old-timers who were daytrading in the 1990s to tell their stories of Datek, E*Trade, Ameritrade, Schwab, etc., failing during peak NASDAQ/NYSE markets. You know who you are -- drinking coffee and staring at multiple monitors while in your boxer shorts at home. 6:29am Pacific, watching Ron Insana and Maria Bartiromo on CNBC... This has all happened before. It will all happen again.

Post by Blackthorn » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #60

thisisit wrote: post #27

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.

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #85

matt4077 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are several reputable apps for both iOS and Android that provide secure, easy to use wallets, which do not centralize the storage of a user's coins whatsoever. I've told friends for years about Bread[0], a wallet app for both smartphone platforms that I've used before with great success. [0] https://breadapp.com/

Post by burger_moon » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

dahdum wrote: post #77

SilasX wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

blhack wrote: 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…