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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

#171

Post by ineedasername »

ryanSrich wrote: post #121
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.

Adding regulation would just increase the complexity. Instead of one curtain, you now have two. For as much as people complain about the US government, they certainly aren't backing down when it comes to having them meddle in private affairs. Let the market work this out. Coinbase exists to legitimize the industry. If they turn, someone will step in to take their place. Blockchain and crypto aren't going anywhere.

Yeah, maybe the long term is all good either way, but look at it from the view of an individual, or institution, trying to decide an investment strategy. It's like any product or service. Let's finance is like restaurants, and look at the example of a local McDonald's: Food has been fine, and if the manager screws up, there'll be another to step in and fix things, eventually. But lets say the manager really screws up and a bunch of people get sick. That a new manager will fix things isn't much consolation. And after a few days in the toilet, and fines paid for poor sanitation standards, and news plastered around about the issue, it's going to be a while. Now imagine there wasn't even a local health & safety team certifying and inspecting these things to begin with, and a new place opens up: It's exciting, edgy cuisine, equal parts delicious and daring. But there's no health & safety inspection. Heck, that's part of the excitement, they don't have to play by any set rules! So you might get an awesome meal, but its a dice role on which day of the week all customers will spend their time crapping their pants.

Now, in the world of large-scale personal finance and institutional investment, not many are going to risk redecorating the insides of their pants every few days. They're sticking with McDonalds, which may still cause some level of bowel décollage now and again, but in much safer, more predictable ways. I'm not saying that makes crypto a "fail", only that the next few months will really determine if it's going to be a future behemoth or a niche asset class that risk-tolerant portfolios occasionally take a piece of.

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

#172

Post by ineedasername »

abakker wrote: post #41
conanbatt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not what bank regulations have achieved.

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…

Yes, it would be extremely useful if some of the ardent voices for unregulated crypto took a bit of time to acquaint themselves with the history of various banking collapses from 1850 to 1930, and subsequent rise of modern financial structures.

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

#173

Post by abakker »

demachina wrote: post #170
beavisthegenius wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 was about over leverage and speculation.

It was also about mortgage fraud ... bond rating fraud ... multinational banks selling fraudulent mortgage backed securities based on the previous two frauds. Almost no one went to jail for any of it, the few who did were little fish. The SEC, Fed, Treasury and DOJ were asleep at the wheel before and during the crash and did almost nothing after other than reward the perpetrators: A. threw $700 billion in tax payer f…

It is easy to claim that these things were fraud, but courts have not agreed that they were fraud. The dispersion of responsibility in the system made it difficult for any one person to be solely responsible for the actions of the firm. the "fraud" you perceive was an emergent phenomenon resulting from poor oversight. Few people actually committed fraud. The difference in personal responsibility is very important, especially for the people involved.

I agree, however, that our legal system lacks an adequate punishment for companies that allow such poor governance practices. I don't feel it is necessary to throw people in jail for it, though.

In my opinion, we ought to be able to convict a company of "governance failure" which would carry the concomitant punishment of mandatorily ejecting all officers and directors without severance and without the ability to exercise options.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #115
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#

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 reserve…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

ceejayoz wrote: post #134
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reserve…

> What are you talking about? This is not about the exchange being compromised at all. Yes, it is. The question is "which place to store your coins is riskier?" I'm of the opinion that a decently run exchange with a full security team in place is going to be better at managing security than virtually any individual attempting to do it at home. You, for example, suggested an Android app as a wallet, which seems to con…

> The question is "which place to store your coins is riskier?"

Where did you get that idea from? Not from my OP, that's for sure:

> 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.

Please, do not misrepresent my views. I do not have much of an opinion on the security of wallets, because I know that unless you go cold storage, any other wallet approach is about as safe as the one in your back pocket.

You can't seem to stop injecting your own totally unrelated arguments and also seem to refuse to actually comprehend the complaint I aired in my OP.

The concern I raised was one of centralization. The Bitcoin white paper is pretty explicit when it comes to explaining its rationale, and in fact mentions negating centralization in the very first sentence of the abstract[0]:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

[0]https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

So there's really no reason to continue to ignore what I am actually saying, because it's a valid concern that strikes at the core tenants of Bitcoin's intended use case. Your concern, on the other hand, is splitting hairs on a subject that does not at all address the actual, fundamental issue of using a Coinbase wallet. This has nothing to do with Coinbase the exchange, this is about the Coinbase service which offers wallets, to which they and only they control the private key.

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

#176

Post by defo_nonconvex »

akhatri_aus wrote: post #167
defo_nonconvex wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, a big chunk of their bottom-line comes from reinvesting the float, or just re-insuring and taking the spread.

To do this you can only make money if the insurance is priced at more than the chance of it happening. Or the reinsurer wouldn't be able to offer any insurance either, & the float wouldn't exist because it would be paid back in claims. Insurance runs on the same premise of making money a casino does. If there was no casino edge, there would be no cash for the casino 'float' back into bets.

Given a market in a steady state, as long as your (return+premium) rate is higher than your expected payout, you're still ok. So your premium-expected_payout could be negative and you could hopefully still keep the lights on, no?

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

#177

Post by adjkant »

earenndil wrote: post #165
mr_spothawk wrote: post #122

It's so mind-bogglingly fucked... they're freezing the market exactly when the clever investor would like to be buying.

Clever ?? Crypto is on its way down right now. You go right ahead and buy, but for everyone else I recommend you SELL.

Ethereum:

- June 13th: $380

- July 17th: $185

- August 31st: $389

- December 16th: $700+

50% or more swings are all too common. I doubt this is the end. While I would love to see the crash happen sooner than later, I think the percentage of traders that would sell at the signs of a 25% drop or more is still too low. You won't see the big crash until more of the general population is in. After this crash, that still could be a ways off sadly as they back out only to enter a few months later.

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

#178

Post by Fnoord »

ramphastidae wrote: post #36

I ignored all the warnings about Coinbase at my own peril. I tried to move my coins out of the exchange about 48 hours ago (shortly before the crash) but I made the mistake of purchasing a new phone about a week ago and not switching over my 2FA keys in Google Authenticator. They have an account recovery process in place but it takes "48-72 hours" to complete. I had to re-submit my ID, which was confirmed as verified…

Sounds like you got yourself an expensive phone. Hope it was worth it!

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

#179

Post by zeep »

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…

Since the beginning, Coinbase has been kind of fishy... Every time Bitcoin would drop sharply in a short period of time, it would shut down all transactions (not sure if it happened today, I haven't been following closely)... In 2012 or 2013, they canceled an order I placed because the price of Bitcoins was too low.

I use GDAX to buy coins but I transfer them out right away.

Now they stopped BCH/BTC trading and it appears that they also freeze the prices to control drops (https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7lch2d/coin...).

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

#180

Post by Fnoord »

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.

Ledger Nano S took ~4 days to arrive from France to The Netherlands. During Black Friday mania. It has its pros and cons compared to Trezor so YMMV.
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