Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ineedasername » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

mr_spothawk wrote: post #108

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.

Meanwhile, the libertarians in the crowd are nodding, having expected this... and protected themselves from the fallout ahead of time.

Could be most did in terms of not having their coins in an exchange, but their coins, wherever they are, just lost value for everyone looking to spend a bit of their money today. Off-exchange storage prevents against exchange-based theft, but not overall loss of value. If that loss of value stems from fraud on a single exchange it still impacts the libertarian crowd.

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

#142

Post by mv4 » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

Secret of success: buy low, sell high.

Unless you are a Coinbase customer (because they will selective disable your ability to act when prices move quickly). I've witnessed it at least a dozen time personally, and stopped trading altogether.

Seriously though, the way Coinbase/GDAX has been acting recently can't be attributed to scalability issues. These patterns seem to have a good dose of human decision making in them.

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

#143

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:21 PM UTC

theseatoms wrote: post #138

ceejayoz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By 1950s standards, most Americans are "techies". We learn what we have to in order to survive in a given environment.

We use more technology, but we understand less about what makes it tick. Most of today's Americans can't change a flat tire, let alone the oil. 1950s America would laugh at us for that.

Someone's ability to use a smartphone doesn't mean they're capable of patching the thing to keep it secure.

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

#144

Post by ineedasername » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

whytaka wrote: post #135

mr_spothawk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, the libertarians in the crowd are nodding, having expected this... and protected themselves from the fallout ahead of time.

No true Scotsmen.

The only true Scotsmen are the ones who agree with me :)

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

#145

Post by TheDong » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

amenghra wrote: post #83

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…

If you have small amounts of crypto currency and want a secure machine and don’t want to buy a hardware wallet: You can take your old phone or tablet, apply any available upgrades, factory reset it, use it only for crypto currency stuff. Our mobile operating sysmtems are pretty secure (in the grand scheme of things)

Until you lose it or drop it in a lake or it doesn't boot one day or the flash memory corrupts.

All these people recommending phones or hardware wallets as being easy, and not mentioning the complexity and opsec of offsite backup....

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

#146

Post by mikestew » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #109

abakker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure of that? In many ways bank regulation has achieved exactly that. We have an SEC, we have mandatory filings, we have disclosure requirements, conflict of interest requirements, bank capital requirements, stress tests, and many rules about types of financial products which cannot be sold. Those create much more uniformity and trust in the system. (of course this comes with some cost, but, arguably the thin…

... and then we had 2008, where you can violate all of that with reckless abandon and still get bailed out.

Had bankers broken regulations with “reckless abandon”, a few more of them might be in jail. And there’s the problem: a lot of the shenanigans might not have been on the up-and-up, but they were not illegal. For example, Moodys rating junk derivatives as AAA isn’t illegal, AFAIK, it’s a trust issue that should have put Moody’s out of business but didn’t.

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

#147

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

mr_spothawk wrote: post #124

esaym wrote: post #74

So 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…

order a Trezor and wait for it to arrive in February... until then, breath deeply.

If you pay $20 extra, they will deliver Trezor's now in 3 days.

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

#148

Post by ineedasername » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #22

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>don't want regulation No, there are many reasons why I do want regulation. I just try not to get too religious about any of my opinions, and that lets me still see some reasons why regulation can be a bad thing.

I figure regulation should protect against deliberate malice and foreseeable stupidity. Unfortunately that can be very broad, the line isn't always clear, and it can change. I figure good regulation needs to be very agile, and above all skeptical of its own use of power. But again, reasonable people can easily disagree on all of the specifics.

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

#149

Post by teekert » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

shepardrtc wrote: post #131

ceejayoz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It certainly was, until the advent of hardware wallets. I wouldn't quite say its easy enough for Grandma to do it, but it makes things much more secure and its no more complicated than setting up a wallet on your machine (give or take a couple of steps).

I just went through the situation where a family member all of sudden panicked (1 week after I reiterated all disclaimers multiple times, I said BTC is stretched and he already missed all forks that may solve it, etc, etc) and wanted his BTC paper wallet transferred to anything else. 33 hours later and 2 times > 40 euros (> 600 Satoshi/Byte) of transfer cost later the BTC are now USD in Bittrex.

Never advice your family anything. If they don't get it, they shouldn't be playing with it. This was certainly my last time, I even think I'm flat out going to refuse to talk about anymore. This week I even received texts that I should act "before Amerika wakes up". It's stopping right now, he either learns the Gdax or I will transfer what's left of his money to his normal bank account (he should be happy it's still almost everything.)

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

#150

Post by mv4 » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

brndnmtthws wrote: post #47

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…

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…

The really scary (or even shady) part to me isn't a complete outage, but a controlled selective one - where some functions become unavailable to some people. That creates massive opportunities for abuse.