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Coinbase says buying and selling temporarily disabled amid price rout

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

#151

Post by slg »

munificent wrote: post #139
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.

The entire Bitcoin saga has been the most shining example of this classic narrative: 1. Technology people are presented with a social/cultural/government situation that seems inelegant, irrational and overly complex. 2. They decide to "solve" that problem using technology. 3. Even with the new technology, it somehow appears everything is not miraculously better. 4. Technology people propose layering a few small socia…

I like how you laid that out. We are seeing a very similar process happen with Uber and Airbnb at varying rates.

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

#152

Post by mancerayder »

ellius wrote: post #129
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.

Matt Levine has some amusing commentary about how crypto currency is going to rapidly reenact the entire history of the evolution of the modern financial system.

I can't find the quote now, but in that same line of thought he suggests that at some point in the near future, crypto currency enthusiasts will un-invent fire.

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

#153

Post by CamelCaseName »

stygiansonic wrote: post #91
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.

As I’ve said before, watching cryptocurrency markets evolve is like watching the entire history of financial markets being replayed as painful lessons are relearned.

Is there anywhere I can get a full rundown of the modern evolution of finance? I have a degree in it yet it all still send fragmented.

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

#154

Post by alextheparrot »

ceejayoz wrote: post #82
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What kind of non-technical person is trying to buy and manage a bitcoin wallet in the first place? I've had half a dozen non-technical friends ask me about getting into Bitcoin in the last month or so. Media attention, get-rich-quick, scams, etc. are all attracting hordes of people, to the point where the Coinbase app was #1 on the App Store for a while. Even the people running exchanges are getting hacked. What ch…

> Even the people running exchanges are getting hacked. What chance does a normal user have?

I agree that actually securing a wallet, independently, as a non-technical user, is difficult. It is further exacerbated by, as you mentioned, the general hype around crypto related apps that promise to do this in a trivial way, which can often be traps.

I also, however, think your final question presents a false dichotomy, as the two (Exchanges and users) have different threat models.

Exchanges present a larger, highly lucrative target, meaning they are ammenable to expensive, targeted attacks as they can still be possible.

The security model for an individual user can be to secure their coins in a way that is relatively secure (Maybe not as absolutely, as they are not experts), but more importantly to secure their coins in a way which a scalable attack against many users is not tenable.

In this way, just because exchanges get hacked doesn’t necessarily imply that normal users don’t have a chance, as they have different threat models with their own nuances.

Edit: Cleaned up some wording

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

#155

Post by jsmthrowaway »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #120
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Both work just fine, when compared to DIY. Playing favorites is not how to advocate to people not in the know; I happen to have a Ledger, so it's what I typed.

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

#156

Post by jsmthrowaway »

TheDong wrote: post #145
amenghra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Hardware wallets come with a passphrase mnemonic that completely restores them. Write it down, put it in a safe deposit box, you're done. You can then take an acetylene torch to your hardware wallet, buy a new one, restore from the passphrase, and have everything back. Hardware wallets are far easier to back up offsite than key management on a computer, though a SmartCard-HSM comes close. (Hardware wallets are the same principle as an HSM.)

Since you're probably wondering, the passphrase mnemonic on my Ledger is a group of 24 words that represent a translation of the primary secret key. All accounts on my Ledger are derived from it. I've tested wiping and restoring, and the passphrase now lives in my bank deposit box.

By the nature of cryptocurrency, if you had all the public keys from your hardware wallet you could use it as a bank by dropping the wallet itself in a safe deposit box. You don't need it in your physical possession to receive, only send. I'm considering buying a second for exactly this purpose, though at that point, a paper wallet would be just as functional.

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

#157

Post by oceanghost »

munificent wrote: post #139
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.

The entire Bitcoin saga has been the most shining example of this classic narrative: 1. Technology people are presented with a social/cultural/government situation that seems inelegant, irrational and overly complex. 2. They decide to "solve" that problem using technology. 3. Even with the new technology, it somehow appears everything is not miraculously better. 4. Technology people propose layering a few small socia…

There's a law of economics that, crashes occur when everyone who can remember the reason we have laws to prevent them is dead.

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

#160

Post by mancerayder »

mancerayder wrote: post #158

Dear Coinbase, Why in the world do you keep signing up new customers if you don't have the capacity to hold them? All aboard, yet the ship sinks due to the passenger load. That's both absurd and preventable.

AND cue the innumerable HN comments about how we need to feel sympathy for startup 'growing pains.' Coinbase has people's cash, hard cash, and stored value, it's not a software as a service startup that got wildly too popular.

It's not growing pains, it's greed and/or incompetence.

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