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Coinbase outages

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Re: Coinbase outages

#251

Post by NicoJuicy »

throwkeep wrote: post #249
NicoJuicy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin and the Nakamoto Consensus is a breakthrough that provides a secure, global, uncensorable, decentralized store of value. Most people don't seem to realize that a store of value is stable. Today ( just as in 2017 till the pandemic) has proven that BTC/crypto is not stable. It has more similarities with a MLM scheme ( not really backed by anything ( eg. Stable coins - tether), unregulated, limited withdrawals…

It's a new technology. Volatility is to be expected. Zooming out, any purchase of Bitcoin prior to a few months ago is still in the green. Even if you bought the peak in 2017. If you zoom out on USD, it's not exactly stable either. It has greatly decreased in value due to inflation over the years. Or worse, if you zoom out on bolivars and other currencies. Anyone in country with hyperinflation, or at risk of it, very…

Inflation is a technique created for stable countries with stable markets. Fiat is based on market conditions, not on hypes and memes like BTC. BTC isn't really a hedge against inflation either, since the lack of underlying value.

Hyperinflation means that that market is in trouble, you can already hedge with USD/gold in most cases, which is actually backed by something. Losing a couple of % over years is a tested strategy and a requirement for healthy economies. Most people that talk about BTC and hyperinflation don't understand basic economy and are just looking for an excuse for BTC to rise because of... Greed.

Additionally, BTC was new in 2009 and I cashed out 2017 and never looked back. It's not new anymore and hasn't been for a long time, a lot of accountants even got courses about the blockchain in Belgium 5 years ago.

Everything of 2016-2017 repeats. Then it was adopted by steam, woocommerce, square, Amazon, ... and they all removed it again or never finalized the integration, because of not enough usage. That's 5 years ago and everyone was talking about it and it was in every possible media in every country. That is: Newspaper, tv, going out, Reddit, here, ads, ... I even had a site with some popular articles on it ( how to recover your bitcoin password was by far the most popular one fyi)

Today it's just Tesla and they also removed payment.

Ps. Countries going to do digital currencies are not going to base it on a existing one. So that's unrelated to the topic of currently tradeable crypto.

Ps2. A bit of regret not thinking about it in March last year. But that's just the greed talking.

Re: Coinbase outages

#252

Post by dumbfoundded »

dougmwne wrote: post #103

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm…

Just a tangent. Thomas Midgley invented both CFCs and leaded gasoline.

Re: Coinbase outages

#253

Post by grey-area »

hwillis wrote: post #186
grey-area wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the network can’t handle more transactions. Decentralised, fast, cheap: pick two.

Bitcoin picked centralized, slow, and expensive. Most mining is done in giant warehouses, and the whole point is that more computing power results in zero faster processing. It remains to be seen if there are good ways to do distributed currency, but there are certainly less bad ways.

Sure, they could have made better choices, but the decentralisation is really a fundamental problem that can't be designed away.

If you want it decentralised it's going to be significantly slower and more expensive than centralised networks.

Re: Coinbase outages

#254

Post by nostrademons »

grey-area wrote: post #126
idiotsecant wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing the same thing about tether for about half a decade now. We all know it's insolvent. Apparently it doesn't matter.

Until it does. If everyone tries to get out of tether at once there could be a run on the currency and a collapse. If tether has been manipulating prices (seems likely) that will also come out in the crash.

That happened in May-Jun 2019. Auditor's report came out that Tether was insolvent, there was a run on the bank, Bitfinex suspended redemptions of Tether, Binance suspended trading in Tether.

The price of Bitcoin went up, from about $5200 to $11,000. Why? Because with Tether out of the picture, Bitcoin is the next most stable cryptocurrency (at the time, there was not enough DAI or USDC in circulation to absorb all the Tether money, though those "stablecoins" traded at a premium of about $1.06/$0.92 against Tether). If you're in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it's usually because you don't want to keep any of your wealth in $USD, so when Tether was declared insolvent all of the money there rushed into BTC.

Re: Coinbase outages

#255

Post by amptorn »

_alex_ wrote: post #183
dougmwne wrote: post #103

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm…

The power per tx metric is a dumb metric. Power usage doesnt increase or decrease per tx

It's reasonable to evaluate the usefulness of a system by weighing the resources it consumes against the valuable output it produces. In Bitcoin's case the valuable output is around 10 financial transactions per second, and the resource it consumes is enough energy to power the Netherlands.

Re: Coinbase outages

#256

Post by mathiasrw »

dougmwne wrote: post #103

I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm…

The consumption is a result of the greed to get the reward (fee + per block coins) and is not related to how the blockchain is operating.

You can see the carbon footprint from different blockchains on https://coincarboncap.com

Re: Coinbase outages

#257

Post by loceng »

JackFr wrote: post #178
ojr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that Coinbase has a $50k a day withdrawal limit? A lot of doomsday scenarios leave out this important detail when talking about a hypothetical bank run.

> You do know that Coinbase has a $50k a day withdrawal limit? On the day you might think that limit matters, it's not really gonna matter.

It still would slow down a bank run, and Coinbase conveniently/suspiciously going down when bank runs seem to start would further cut off impulse selling - and arguably long enough for manipulation to happen elsewhere to turn price into upward trend again to quell impulse selling by potentially artificially making the price look like it's rebounding.

Re: Coinbase outages

#258

Post by giarc »

bidirectional wrote: post #113
jw1224 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those following the GME saga believe it’s Wall Street banks scrambling to find liquidity in response to emergency rule changes by the OCC. It’s fascinating stuff to follow — watch the VIX today, a measure of stock market volatility. It’s absolutely soaring already.

The GME saga is over outside of fervent believers who cannot accept that Wall Street did not tumble because one small hedge fund made a bad bet.

Following WSBs is like the new QAnon.... some 'event' is always a few days away.

Re: Coinbase outages

#259

Post by dragontamer »

beckler wrote: post #250
dragontamer wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an FDIC insured account says "$100,000" in it, and then Coinbase goes under... you get $100,000 from it. Maybe in a few months after bankruptcy court figures out the details. But... yeah, the FDIC insurance definitely covers the stated balance.

If you have $99,990 in BTC, and $10 in cash, only the $10 is covered. Coinbase could shut down converting crypto to cash at any time. There is no promise or guarantee that they have to allow cash exchanges or deposits, since they're basically buying and selling crypto on your behalf.

> If you have $99,990 in BTC, and $10 in cash, only the $10 is covered.

By the FDIC. Of course, FDIC only covers dollar-denominated balances (savings accounts, checking accounts, etc. etc.). Even money-market accounts (very cash-like) are NOT covered by FDIC, which is why money-markets get a wee bit of a bump in %yield.

Coinbase claims they have the BTC insured through some other means. I don't know how to look into those details or how trustworthy it'd be (ex: AIG "insured" a bunch of mortgages through Credit Default Swaps, which ended up being worthless).

But overall, the idea of losing a security through various means (ex: Credit Default Swap "insurance" turns out to be a sham and the mortgage debt is all worthless) is kind of "normal" in terms of financial markets.

Similarly, if all the BTC disappeared it'd be terrible for BTC-holders, but I think people generally understand that those risks exist.

----------

Look, I think Cryptocoins are stupid at this point (even proof of stake, but that's another thing). And Coinbase's service going in-and-out over the past day or so is clearly a threat (if BTC moves while Coinbase is down, you lose your opportunity to buy-and/or-sell at the prices you want).

But I don't think there's anything shady going on at Coinbase specifically.

------

Now if you want to talk about shady business, we can talk Binance, Bitfinex, and Tethers. Plenty of shady things going around in the cryptoworld.

Re: Coinbase outages

#260

Post by loceng »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #152
ojr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that Coinbase has a $50k a day withdrawal limit? A lot of doomsday scenarios leave out this important detail when talking about a hypothetical bank run.

>Coinbase has a $50k a day withdrawal limit Given the price volatility of crypto, that sounds absolutely insane to me. Also, I don't think this prevents a run, on the contrary, when everyone hits the sell button and cannot actually exit then panic will ensue.

True but it still makes a single day hit via Coinbase users predictable - which gives them data they'd need to pull different levers including when they use reserve funds they're controlling for buy orders from large institutions; likewise they'll know when the bank run is trending too fast and they'd need to hit the breaks by making Coinbase inaccessible.
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