Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 204 posts

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

#111

Post by brndnmtthws »

akhatri_aus wrote: post #103
brndnmtthws wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing your coins on coinbase (or any other exchange) is pretty much always a bad idea. If you don't own the private keys, you don't own the coins. Coinbase is not immune from failure, government intervention, or fraud. The insurance no doubt has limits, and if you've ever filed an insurance claim you'd know that if something goes wrong you'll probably be up a creek without a paddle. Insurance companies almost alway…

> Insurance companies almost always win, that's how they make money Not exactly. They make money off pricing their insurance higher than the chances of it happening.

Yes exactly. They make money by a) charging enough in fees to cover the risk and b) limiting the amount they have to pay out.

Just look at how health insurance works: without government regulation, most of the day to day healthcare you actually need isn't covered under the terms of the insurance. For example, contraceptives.

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

#112

Post by ceejayoz »

edejong wrote: post #110
ceejayoz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just changing the threat from "compromised exchange" to "compromised phone". I'd trust Coinbase to get it right before I'd trust the average Android phone not to be hacked. Only 0.5% of Android devices are running the latest OS. https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#

It’s all about opportunity, risk and reward. Hack a phone and you win some bitcoins. Quickly patched. Hack an exchange and you’re rich beyond belief.

You've left out "use an existing Android botnet to siphon off private keys in a way that's far less likely to attract law enforcement attention".

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

#113

Post by wsinks »

ceejayoz wrote: post #88
slg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. The last few years has basically been a real-time history lesson on how the modern financial and regulatory systems came to be. Must be fairly fascinating for economists and historians.

I can feel it! It's fascinating.

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

#114

Post by sean_anandale »

cma wrote: post #89
matwood wrote: post #84

Regular markets have circuit breakers [1] that stop trading for a period of time. Coinbase should just define and implement these to let their systems catch up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb

Coinbase is unintentionally the circuitbreaker. It crashes every time there is a lot of volatility.

That is insane. Traders make money during periods of high volatility and volume. Defined circuit breakers can be planned for, but unpredictable "lol unavailable gtfo" is unacceptable for serious usage.

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

#115

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

ceejayoz wrote: post #95
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That's just changing the threat from "compromised exchange" to "compromised phone". I'd trust Coinbase to get it right before I'd trust the average Android phone not to be hacked. Only 0.5% of Android devices are running the latest OS. https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#

What are you talking about? This is not about the exchange being compromised at all. In any event, I don't think it's much more difficult to get your phone getting hacked than it is to get your Coinbase account hacked. That's not what this is about.

This is about the cloud wallet service provider having the ability to basically do whatever it wants with your funds (including using them to pad their fractional reserves), charge you whatever fees it wants for whatever dumb reason they can think of, and do all the other things the banking system does today to peoples' wealth.

If this is what you want to do with your Bitcoin, then you're better off putting your money into fiat because that's a system that was actually designed to be used in our current currency/banking scheme.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #98
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"It's the financial system of the future!" "Only techies can use it!" Pick one.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by akhatri_aus »

ISL wrote: post #13
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they gone down when the price is surging upward? I only ever see them going offline when the price goes down but I may have missed something.

Volume is likely to be higher when the price is getting hammered. Panic, when it occurs, is more acute than ebullience.

Actually with volume its happened both ways. You can easily see from public data that volume doesn't only go mad when price is being hammered.

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

#118

Post by thisisit »

smaili wrote: post #100
thisisit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it implies any kind of manipulation? Check out these videos for what a market maker actually is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqK6H1JPjv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Guqs3eOgm6o

But what happens if the market moves rapidly in one direction? They end up selling low and buying high. So, they need to reset the market making algorithm. Or shutdown the exchange for a "fix", long enough that the volatility comes back in their range. Disabling a feature during live trading in order to ensure your company doesn't lose out on profitability, which in effect impacts market trend and activity implies ma…

I corrected my mistake of calling the whole thing an "exchange". Corrected it now.

As many have pointed it out on this thread, GDAX - the exchange works just fine. So people who are worried about selling/buying can find a willing participant on the exchange.

But, Coinbase's main site is just another willing participant just like you and me in a given trade. It can refuse to take the other side of the trade if it affects their profits.

If you still insist it is "manipulation" then I digress.

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

#119

Post by SilasX »

burger_moon wrote: post #97
dahdum wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even now Gemini's volume is pretty low. I just checked and BTC is 36k, last time I saw GDAX today (won't load for me now) was around 88k I think.

So a 2x volume justifies 10x outages?

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

#120

Post by mr_spothawk »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #33
blhack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few days ago it felt so much easier to answer this question, haha. Coinbase puts a lot of work and effort into their security models. Storing coins yourself means that you now have to: 1) Physically secure your private key 2) Secure the machine that you use to interact with that private key 3) Ensure that that private key was generated in a secure way 4) Ensure that the ways that you interact with that private key…

Or, just buy a Ledger Nano S, which handles all of that for you. For serious crypto one uses hardware keys, and cryptocurrency is no different.

s/Ledger Nano S/Trezor
Post reply on HN