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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

#41

Post by abakker »

conanbatt wrote: post #15
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.

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 thing lost in the system is volatility more than anything else).

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

#42

Post by ethbro »

davidw wrote: post #21
conanbatt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not what bank regulations have achieved.

Compare and contrast to hypothetical banks with no regulations at all? Maybe they're not perfect right now, but it could be a lot worse, too.

I'd certainly agree that at least in the US, regulation has greatly increased banking transparency.

There are still edge cases, but capital ratio requirements and accounting standards, compared to none? Huge difference.

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

#44

Post by sowbug »

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.

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

#45

Post by NelsonMinar »

Coinbase is the one exchange that's looked like a legitimate business. Between insider trading and execution problems, it's pretty alarming. (Who am I kidding? Clearly this is actually good for Bitcoin somehow.)

Worth noting Coinbase has two kinds of systems risk. There's the technical risk of writing and running code correctly. And there's also the financial risk of them making the market in Bitcoin. Both of those tasks have gotten a whole lot harder recently as Bitcoin transactions have gotten slower and more expensive. Turns out building a global currency with a global 7 transaction / second limit may not be a good idea.

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

#47

Post by brndnmtthws »

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 always win, that's how they make money.

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

#48

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

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…

But why were you ever telling people to store anything on coinbase? That is downright terrible advice to be giving anyone.

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.

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

#49

Post by gnicholas »

smaili wrote: post #20

Why is it they always seem to go down during times of sudden surges and dips? It almost feels like they’re trying to control the market of their platform rather than let it play out. It may indeed just be infrastructure but given the company’s age and decent amount of funding they have now, can scaling really be at play here?

I have wondered this also. Coinbase clearly benefits from BTC and other cryptocurrency being "a thing", and rising prices help that happen. If the price of BTC that market watchers and news orgs quote is impacted heavily by the price on Coinbase, then their actions could have an outsize impact on the overall trend.

I would be curious to hear from folks savvier than me about suspicions like this.

EDIT: wondering why this is downvoted — I make a conjecture and then openly ask for perspectives of those who are more educated on these matters. If you disagree, responding would be helpful. We downvote things not because we disagree but because we think it doesn't add to the discourse.

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

#50

Post by makomk »

chollida1 wrote: post #25
ISL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent thread, stop-loss limit orders were mentioned, which would appear to address the bad-fill concern, to an extent.

as far as I'm away they don't have them yet.

They're hidden under the "advanced" button when placing a stop-loss order. GDAX (the exchange side of Coinbase) actually have quite a plethora of order types... though they don't seem to let you change the time in force for the resulting limit order when the stop-loss triggers, for whatever reason.
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