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Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

status.coinbase.com

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Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#91

Post by EGreg »

I wonder, what are these exchanges like GDAX, BitMex etc. doing with their dollar/euro/etc. reserves?

They obviously need to keep dollars on hand in order to cash everyone out. But what if Bitcoin goes up in price? If there is a run on the exchange later they may have to sell their bitcoins on the spot market to cash people out.

Banks reinvest money held into loans and other speculative investments. But what do you do when as an excuange / market maker you stand ready to buy and sell at any time?

Here is my concern: while it was just two guys meeting up to exchange $ for bitcoin, the $ kept circulating. But these exchanges may be locking up more and more USD just so they have enough to cash people out on demand. As a result, there is a real transfer of wealth to bitcoin and USD is getting frozen in exchanges.

If this continues for 5-10 years more, wouldn't bitcoin become millions of dollars and bitcoin holders would be able to buy up anything vs dollar holders? One bitcoin holder could buy half of NYC already, and who can stop them?

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#92

Post by yoodenvranx »

wott wrote: post #75
phil248 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having purchased several cryptocurrencies recently, I can attest that I am certainly not acting rationally. But at least I'm having fun!

I should start a business selling thin air. Thin air from France, thin air from Japan, thin air from Mexico, and so on, you can collect them all, it is super fun. Then I could introduce cold captured thin air, warm captured thin air, etc. Wet thin air, dry thin air for year 3. More fun every year. Even better, I should sell just a paper (well, an electronic one) stating you own some thin air. Hey, geeks, how cool can…

> Thin air from France, thin air from Japan

That reminds me of "Perri-Air" from the movie Spaceballs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbIrb7LUJA

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#93

Post by s0rce »

scurvy wrote: post #70
astrowilliam wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what happens when a business is trying to scale to meet crazy demand.

Can't they just click the auto scale button in AWS? Isn't that the entire point of cloud services?

Probably not a infrastructure capacity issue but a limited amount of cryptocurrency in a hot wallet for transactions.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#94

Post by volgo »

_m8fo wrote: post #11

Can someone familiar explain why cryptocurrencies aren't a bubble? They both seem to exhibit similar characteristics. Clearly, are shown by the site here, these aren't nearly as liquid as fiat currencies, nor are they really used to purchase anything. So... What is it? EDIT: upon thinking about it, MLM wasn't the term I meant.

It is a bubble. In fact I'd venture so far as to say it's a Ponzi scheme. But in any successful Ponzi scheme, the early investors actually get a huge payout. I don't regret investing in it one bit.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#95

Post by xocyabencl »

arkades wrote: post #51
qeternity wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what makes MLM a "pyramid". Residuals are part of lots of legitimate business. What makes most MLM a pyramid scheme is the fact that growth is predicated on bringing new members into the scheme, rather than existing members growing their business.

Not growth, but revenues. All asset appreciation is predicated on increases in demand for an asset. Asset appreciation isn’t a pyramid. Pyramids have no source of value - even an ephemeral asset - just dues of new members being channeled into revenue for preceding members.

They key thing about pyramids/MLM is that the growth is based entirely on getting more investors i.e. people who are putting money in with the intention of getting money out later (this also included MLM sellers who have to buy product upfront). Whereas a non-pyramid grows because it has more non-investor users, or some other source of revenue from people who don't plan to take that money out later.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#97

Post by pm90 »

scurvy wrote: post #67
csbrooks wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the really difficult part might be figuring out when to take it off the table. For example, let's say bitcoin goes up 10x. Then do you decide to sell, because it might crash back down the next week? But what if you miss out on another huge increase by selling?

Sell half after it doubles, then hold the rest until you need the money. Selling half returns your initial investment; what remains is pure profit and you can't lose money.

> what remains is pure profit and you can't lose money.

Except to inflation ;). But adjust for inflation and selling enough to cover that gets you back the initial investment and also you don't lose money.

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#98

Post by kombucha2 »

sidlls wrote: post #44
make3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

christ you must have made ridiculous money with this

Well, ridiculous in the sense that the whole phenomenon is absurd or relatively to what some people earn in a year, sure. But I only made about 2.5x my wager, which wasn't much (less than $10000, more than $1000). Also, as noted, much of a LTC gains could easily be eaten up by ETH losses. BTC is too expensive for my gambling taste.

I locked in gains with LTC a few weeks ago like a rube thinking there was going to be a correction :( Locked in some good gains but missed on 70 thou plus USD....sigh...gotta keep trying though right?

Re: Litecoin and Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled

#99

Post by dragontamer »

scurvy wrote: post #70
astrowilliam wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what happens when a business is trying to scale to meet crazy demand.

Can't they just click the auto scale button in AWS? Isn't that the entire point of cloud services?

Cold wallets don't scale, and that's the entire point of them.

"Hot Wallets" can be hacked, because they're connected to the whole system. "Cold Wallets" are offline, and require human intervention to transfer money into and/or out of.

Figuring how much money to keep in the "Hot Wallet" is a tradeoff in services, convenience, and security.

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