32 ms·

Coinbase down for maintenance

200 points by winterismute 9y ago

dewiz 9y ago
how many things can go wrong when the service is overloaded... looks like Coinbase doesn't know what stress testing or monitoring is. * ID verification by either webcam or id pic upload fails, and eventually one reaches the daily quota, locking the feature for 24 hours (seems fair though) * removing and re-adding bank accounts fails, the site says the account is already linked and it shows some ghost duplicates (i.e. the same bank account multiple times with different statuses) * bank account verification fails, the site says the small amounts deposited don't match * some buying operations fails due to API timeouts when collecting money from linked bank accounts
benmarten 9y ago
it's back up; but not working
- bonestamp2 9y ago
  Strange, the price data from coinbase never stopped working on tradingview.com. I wonder what was affecting the price changes when the order book was down?
  - asciimo 9y ago
    The books are on https://www.gdax.com/ https://www.gdax.com/, Coinbase's exchange intended for big trades. Coinbase is more of a consumer retail site. I assume the latter is what is going down, but it's hard to tell as they both seem fine at the moment.
    - TFortunato 9y ago
      As of now it is back up. If you take a look at the GDAX or Coinbase charts over the past 1-2 hours on a short timescale though (i.e. 1 || 5 minute candles on GDAX, or Past hour on coinbase app), you'll notice after the big dump, there was a large flat period where no trades were occuring, even though the site and app appeared to be up for a lot of people.
ktta 9y ago
Bitcoin hit ATH on coinbase, then crashed. Something's not right. The exchange is still not really 'up'. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxcoinbase_just_crashed_right_before_20k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxc... Can we change the link to https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600 https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600
- sciurus 9y ago
  Also https://status.coinbase.com/ https://status.coinbase.com/
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    That's a nice, detailed status page. Although, some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed.
    - woolvalley 9y ago
      Apple: https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ Google: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status AWS: https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/
      - dwaltrip 9y ago
        Fair enough, I see what you mean. I take back my statement.
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      > some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed Not me. Detailed status pages are awesome. Visibility into the service is awesome.
rdp 9y ago
This is another one of those moments in cryptocurrency where time seems to freeze and everybody holds their breath.
- djhworld 9y ago
  In regards to the volatility? sure. But coinbase goes down for maintenance all the time
  - rdp 9y ago
    Generally speaking. For example, Nicehash, which had been chugging along for a long time, went belly up yesterday after what seemed like a regular maintenance period.
  - nemacol 9y ago
    When CB went down for a bit today I had the recent news of NiceHash in my mind. Sure was a breath holding moment.
sk2code 9y ago
I never want to reuse my comments from other thread but this time I just can't resist. No one really anticipated what we all are currently experiencing and Coinbase is not different. It seems Coinbase struggling to cope up: $0000 - $1000: 1789 days $1000- $2000: 1271 days $2000- $3000: 23 days $3000- $4000: 62 days $4000- $5000: 61 days $5000- $6000: 8 days $6000- $7000: 13 days $7000- $8000: 14 days $8000- $9000: 9 days $9000-$10000: 2 days $10000-$11000: 1 day $11000-$12000: 6 days $12000-$13000: 17 hours $13000-$14000: 4 hours $14000-$15000: 10 hours $15000-$16000: 5 hours $16000-$17000: 2 hours $17000-$18000: 10 minutes $18000-$19000: 3 minutes
- Snackchez 9y ago
  How much money needed to come into the bitcoin market for it bump from 15k to 19k? Where is this money coming from??
  - swarnie_ 9y ago
    New money is coming in that's for sure. But a limited resource and a lack of sellers will also push the price.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Technically, not much. Let's say people stopped trading except for two people that made a series of trades of .0000001 btc at $100k, then the price would be $100k.
  - dx034 9y ago
    Not much. 1% of asset allocation for an institutional investor is enough for that. EDIT: You currently need $70m to bump the market above 20k on GDAX. That's a lot for retail investors but not much if institutional investors get involved.
    - 0xCMP 9y ago
      In the grand scheme of things sure, but definitely a large influx as compared to the size of the market in Coinbase. We're talking probably low 2-digit millions to make big moves I think.
Snackchez 9y ago
All of this is anecdotal: These past couple of days, whenever a coin soars a ridiculous amount, on any given exchange, that exchange seems to mysteriously go down. For example: Binance and Bitfinex were down for "maintenance" (or just plain down), while IOTA was experiencing a surge in price (from ~1.10 to 6$). Similarly this happens with Bitcoin today (it seems Quadriga had some issues and Coinbase; not sure about others). Something is up, and it's weird. My conspiracy theory: big money institutions are testing pump and dumps for when short contracts come into play. On the one hand, the cryptocurrency world wants to remain as unregulated as possible; on the other, a lot of individuals are going to get reamed by big whales.
- crazypyro 9y ago
  Isn't it just the simple explanation that big swings in the market bring insane traffic spikes to market websites? Add to the fact that people are also DDOS websites (doesn't take a "big money institution" to do that) and it seems the explanation is clear...
  - odonnellryan 9y ago
    Honestly, I don't think these exchanges can handle a lot of traffic. By a lot, I mean a few hundred trades a second. It is odd to me.
    - mv4 9y ago
      They are very well funded, and they can afford scalability. It's not that hard, given the number of transactions even at peak so far. So yeah, I find these weird circuit breaker patterns suspicious. The worst part is "partial" degradation, when you can't execute trades, but someone else can. It's very easy to hide all sorts of irregularities behind these partial outages.
      - dwaltrip 9y ago
        > It's not that hard I'm sure they would pay you a lot of money to solve their scaling issues, if you were so inclined.
scarmig 9y ago
What's the likelihood here that someone is in the middle of running off into the sunset with a giant ɃɃɃ bag?
- hnarn 9y ago
  As always with Bitcoin, I'd say 50/50.
- webXL 9y ago
  Then the market loses faith in the currency and that bag is suddenly a lot smaller, perhaps gone.
- puranjay 9y ago
  Considering that it has appreciated by 15% in one hour, not really a good sign
- darawk 9y ago
  Pretty unlikely for coinbase. They always go down during high traffic periods. Plus their principal owners are well known US citizens/residents.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
SilasX 9y ago
You really shouldn't be surprised, at this point, by Coinbase going down during times of high activity. It happened on November 29th (when, in fairness, everyone was going down), and happened four times last June, which should have been their canary-in-a-coal mine.
tome 9y ago
Now what would happen if Coinbase went down at a time when Bitcoin was going through a short period of decreasing value?
- fullshark 9y ago
  This is exactly my question. What happens when these exchanges face the inevitable panic/bank run?
  - tome 9y ago
    I wonder how apt the comparison to a bank run is, given that AIUI Coinbase holds the Bitcoin of the exchange participants. Is there any legal form of sequestration of those assets?
  - rednerrus 9y ago
    We've been through this in the past. They just cancel your transactions without apology.
    - emerged 9y ago
      That's what they did to me. Incredible how much naivety surrounds and excuses their behavior. There is no recourse when they "accidentally" lose your purchase at $200 once it jumps to $450.
  - Beejeepa 9y ago
    Bank runs are bad when there isn't a full reserve. Coinbase should carry a full reserve. Fractional reserve banking is a prisoner's dilemma, we all marginally benefit from the status quo of credit/debit/interest, but in a crisis, the first people to pull out win, and everyone else loses.
    - heartbreak 9y ago
      Coinbase isn’t a bank it’s an exchange. Why would they carry a reserve of anything? It stores your shares for you, but it’s not loaning them out. The only way you get money out of Coinbase is if someone buys your shares.
Shoothe 9y ago
Bitstamp.net was also unavailable for a while. Weird coincidence.
- glorkk 9y ago
  Not really... websites regularly go down when they are under a load they cannot handle
makpy 9y ago
Ah oh! Time to add backdoors for NSA
syntaxing 9y ago
I'm curious what the implications are that all these exchanges go offline whenever there is a huge spike in bitcoin. That being said, anyone care to elaborate how the price of bitcoin is determined? I mean it's easy when there is a large central bank monitoring this figure. However, how exactly does it work for bitcoin? What makes it worth the $15K value when there is no "goods" to back it up. Are there anyone here buying bitcoin as an investment?
- wskinner 9y ago
  What makes it worth 15k is that people will pay that much for it. The price is determined by buyers and sellers, trading with each other on markets called exchanges.
  - bob_theslob646 9y ago
    This is true. It also helps that their is a finite supply, so if demand remains constant, the value theoretically should rise over time.
  - syntaxing 9y ago
    I get the "market" determines the price but I guess I'm confused with who is agreeing to the value? Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price? Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?
    - TFortunato 9y ago
      Hey, I hope you saw my above price about how the market works. So to give you a little more info: 1) Yes, there are big players (aka "whales"), and the rest of the "small fish", all playing in the same pond. The interesting thing about cryptos is that the are more "money-like" than "stock-like" when it comes to trading. Meaning just like money, where I can buy a fraction of a $, I can also buy a fraction of a bitcoin. So there are a lot of smaller players who will buy, say .01 BTC for $150 right now. But while there is a general consensus that bitcoin is $15k by virtue of people paying that much for it, the "whales" (people with a lot of money or coins), can cause issues because they can put a lot of volume on or take a lot of volume off the order book at once. This happened to Ether this year, dumping the price for a few minutes from >$300 down to about 10 cents for a few minutes! https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 In fact, there is some speculation that a lot of the rise right now is from Wall St. / big firms buying up a lot of coin, as futures trading on Bitcoin is coming in the coming weeks! (But I don't know enough to comment on that theory) As far as preventing exchanges themselves from colluding... it would be difficult but not impossible, because again the price on the exchanges comes from the traders, not the exchanges themselves. (Theoretically it is possible that an exchange could do a bunch of "wash trading" / make up a bunch of fake trade volume to make demand look higher than it was, but given that there are a number of exchanges in a number of different countries, coordination there might be difficult)
TFortunato 9y ago
I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently (https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1), if Coinbase / GDAX instituted some sort of "circuit breakers" on their exchange to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Bitcoin and the other cryptos, trades at a pretty low volume relative to their market cap, so if a lot of people we're trying to dump large orders this morning to take a profit at the new ATH, I could see that causing similar issues that they may have been trying to prevent.
- bhouston 9y ago
  Circuit breakers do not matter if other exchanges continue to trade the same currency. It would just cause the exchanges that do the circuit breaker to possibly hurt their customers. The only effective circuit breaker is some form of synchronized method, but will the different exchanges cooperate? They really should put in circuit breakers this week across all exchanges so that when really bad stuff the panic doesn't destroy tons of people. It will be bad, but at least if the trades can complete and things unwind in a moderately slow fashion, it won't just 100,000 attempted transactions per second with random successes.
  - TFortunato 9y ago
    Maybe not, I'm just speculating that GDAX or coinbase may have added this as some sort of "sanity-check" in their system (regardless of the insane volatility in crypto right now!) In the situation with ETH, a bunch of automated margin calls happened because of one large order on the books, dumping the price down to 10 cents! GDAX/Coinbase repaid a lot of people who lost money then, even though they didnt have to. They may now have some dumb heuristics that slow down trades / whatever if a bunch of large orders are going through, or price delta over a short time period goes too high. I remember looking at the charts today on GDAX and the 5 minute candle went from 20k open to 16k close before trading halted! I also heard from others that there were a lot of ~19k sells of 100 coins each on the books and executing. So yeah, just speculating that this may bave been the case of someones boss at GDAX/Coinbase telling engineering "please don't make us do that again", after they ate the cost last time! :-)
bob_theslob646 9y ago
Maintenance xor DDOS?
simonsarris 9y ago
It's a matter of time until Mt. Gox part 2 I think. It may not even take nefarious workings at the top, just sloppy work somewhere + one bad employee or outsider. Is this going to end in a re-discovery of exactly why we have FDIC? Or the SEC? How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked? Popular Google Searches by year, by my estimation. 2016: "what is bitcoin" 2017: "what is ethereum" 2018: "what is a wash trade" 2019: "can you eat squirrel"
- baoha 9y ago
  >> How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked? Define fake
  - Rmilb 9y ago
    Ignore exchanges where there is 0 trading fees like the big one in Korea.
    - runeks 9y ago
      Why? Volume isn’t important, it’s order book depth that matters.
  - gist 9y ago
    I do not think it would be difficult for someone to setup a website and scam newbies into buying 'bitcoin', handing over credit card info and taking wire transfers. Perhaps even act legit to start and then segue into only processing part of transactions as real. Quite a ponzi. I don't think is a stretch either. There isn't anything comparable that people would give you money for and the key really is the overwhelming interest and publicity combined with people who have no clue what they are buying. As long as (as with any ponzi) people don't withdraw more than they actually have this could go on for quite some time. Madoff had it much much harder.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      You can't easily pull a scam like that using credit cards. Wire transfers could be potentially easier as we know the union transfers are hard to revert (but there's work being done there as well). Essentially, if you interact with banks and have too many chargebacks or complaints, you'll be dropped. Or your fees will get massive. And that's if you find a payment processor who's happy with you taking money for cryptocurrencies in the first place.
siculars 9y ago
Coinbase being unavailable during times of extreme volatility is not a new thing. Today's swing was 14k up to 19k then down to 15k or so over a period of an hour of severely degraded access. I'll go out on a limb and say that much of the recent spike can probably be attributed to the 100k++ accounts open on Thanksgiving weekend getting funded today and everyone losing their shit mashing the Market Buy button which get instantly executed. The mechanics of vast market buy orders with no liquidity is well known.
- nlperguiy 9y ago
  On some exchanges it was an opposite direction. Down to 12k then up back to 15k.
Animats 9y ago
The big question now is, what happens when somebody sells big for dollars. This would be an excellent time for someone with 10,000 Bitcoins to sell, take their $160,000,000, and go home. Could the market handle that?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  There was a big multimillion dollar sale today, possibly the cause of the small dip. Looks like it handled it. e: actually, tbf, it was a buy and a sell: https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdcHS8fVA https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdc... But it does demonstrate the market can just about handle large transactions.
  - Animats 9y ago
    But did it result in an exchange actually transferring millions of dollars out of the exchange to a real bank? That's the question.
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      Compared to national currencies bitcoin is now top 20 in terms of market cap.
      - tomjakubowski 9y ago
        What kind of currency is measured in market cap? Isn't that a chicken-egg problem?
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
    How big is big?
    - 9y ago
shiado 9y ago
As somebody who doesn't have a background in finance, what are the legal obligations of an exchange to stay online? How can a user of the service be certain that an exchange is offline for technical or non-technical reasons? Let's imagine the likely scenario when the price suddenly drops like a rock and the exchange goes offline completely (for technical or non-technical reason). Could a user make a claim that Coinbase is liable for their losses because they were unable to access their coins?
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  In this case, it's completely up in the air - bitcoin isn't an official financial product, doesn't fall under any formal juristiction, etc. At best any gains get taxed now, but besides that, exchanges can't give any guarantees about uptime or e.g. getting your money back if they're not available.
- gamblor956 9y ago
  A financial institution has fiduciary obligations to its clients to maintain the assets (here, the Bitcoin, ether, etc.) entrusted to them. However, financial institutions are not currently obligated to maintain their clients' ability to transact those assets, let alone within a specific time-frame. Many people have sued their brokerages for not letting them sell stock in a timely fashion to take advantage of price changes; essentially all of them have lost or settled for pennies on the dollar.
- stef25 9y ago
  I'm expecting this all to go wrong, up to the point that I'll just let my coins ride it all out. The first gamble is bitcoin, the second gamble is the exchanges.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
How can anyone reliably trade Bitcoin? With Coinbase immensely unreliable, I can't see how anyone would tolerate running algos on their exchange, given they could be in a bad position unexpectedly. What are the other exchanges that you can trade BTC and are they more reliable than Coinbase?
- kruhft 9y ago
  yobit.net
wonderwonder 9y ago
Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle it, especially when their server status affects the bank accounts of real people. But I feel that it is understandable with out condoning it. The simplest explanation is likely correct in this case. I don't think many of us could have predicted the volume and interest in BTC a year ago and neither did Coinbase's purchasing and infrastructure teams.
- DougWebb 9y ago
  "We want to run an exchange that the entire world will use for this crypto-currency that's become very popular and has increased in price 1000% since it became widely known." I think I would have predicted that they'd need to run at a very large scale, and be able to handle massive spikes. Whether or not I could have convinced them to make the investment is another story.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    The problem is what happens if that growth stops? What happens if bitcoin tanks right after you hired 300 new customer service reps and tripled your server hardware? It's a gamble no matter what, but moving too quickly or moving too slowly results in the company going under. In that case, I think straddling the line of "overwhelmed when there is a big spike" is a good spot to be in all things consitered.
    - iopq 9y ago
      You have layoffs and turn servers off. This isn't rocket surgery. They're skimming a ton of money off these trades every day, down time is a loss.
      - wonderwonder 9y ago
krisives 9y ago
Coinbase doesn't support Tether so it should be okay.
themihai 9y ago
so it got hacked
pcf 9y ago
My friend thinks the exchanges also go down when assets "flash-crash", because it means normal users can get in to sell their assets. And when they can't get in, they also can't cancel their stop-loss orders, so it means a TON of assets are available to buy cheaply (by the exchange and/or certain VIP users/collaborators) as the value goes down. Then these are bought up, and the price quickly increases again, before the exchanges slowly come online again. Therefore he thinks the people exchanges are either part of the "flash-crashes" (and buy up assets themselves, because they know exactly where most of the stop-loss orders are placed), or they get kickbacks from the whales manipulating the market, by giving them access to the database with all the limit and stop-loss orders.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yueq 9y ago
  why would they cancel the stop orders when the sole purpose for stop order is to protect profit?
- twohearted 9y ago
  This has always been a worry in the traditional stock market. With a stop loss order you're basically creating a "secret" order to sell at below market value. Anyone who knows about it has a direct incentive to profit from it. Stop-losses are very important in investing but I'd recommend always executing them manually at market rate. Set a price alert to notify you. Of course if the exchanges are down you're sol, but if BTC is on a bullet train to $10 your exchange stop-loss probably won't fill at your price anyway.
  - rsync 9y ago
    "Stop-losses are very important in investing but I'd recommend always executing them manually at market rate." No, no, no, no ... You do not ever want to insert a market order[1] ... the market can be manipulated and high frequency traders can buy/sell your public market order at an artificially low/high price. The answer to getting "stopped out" is not to insert a market order - it is to create a fill-or-kill at a specific price or other more specific order type ... [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-why-you-never-use-a-market-order-during-a-selloff-2015-08-28 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-why-you-never-use-...
nodesocket 9y ago
Serious question, would it ever be possible to implement circuit breakers like the stock market does for Bitcoin? Without safeguards, and the nature of 24/7/365 trading of Bitcoin, this all feels like teetering on the brink of catastrophe.
- londons_explore 9y ago
  Not really. Unlike stocks and shares which are traded on regulated exchanges, bitcoins can be traded anywhere on any terms. If one exchange implemented circuit breakers, people would simply move their trading elsewhere.
ajcodez 9y ago
Build a financial exchange with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis. What could go wrong? https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-post-mortem-69a1810f9910 https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-...
- wilde 9y ago
  Stripe is on Ruby and Mongo and they seem to be doing OK.
  - ajcodez 9y ago
    Good point.
    - nikolay 9y ago
      Why do people still use a document database with no transactions for domains with a fairly slim and rarely changing schemas?
      - j4ship 9y ago
        the expertise of their engineers leans that way .... why do we have many techs that can do the same thing? ... engineering is a social science
thedragonslayer 9y ago
For how powerful we announce bitcoin/blockchain and its possibilities, the faultiness lies in the exchanges and that is my biggest con with Bitcoin
prawn 9y ago
If this phase of Bitcoin is likened to each goldrush around the world, isn't it fairly inevitable that there will be hiccups? Robberies, banged together shopfronts, people using any tools they can find, etc. And the internet has long been a bit of a Wild West already. Assuming they're adding thousands and thousands of customers quickly, I'm not surprised that their systems and support are lagging. Comes with the (Wild West) territory.
hoodoof 9y ago
I wouldn't want to be in a business in which the worlds absolute finest hackers and crackers - the elite of the best of the best - make it their full time job - forever without end - to get into your systems and steal everything of value.
- lunaru 9y ago
  That sounds like any bank. Computer systems as the source of truth for billions of dollars of assets is not new.
  - hoodoof 9y ago
    I think bitcoin attracts more hacker attention than banks.
  - will_hughes 9y ago
    Banks have the advantage that if they see a huge spike in their outbound inter-bank transfers they can suspend traffic while they investigate it, and then if necessary call up the recieving bank(s) and issue a freeze on those funds. There's already established relationships and agreements for these things. With a cryptocurrency there's nobody to call, you have to convince 50% + 1 of the mining pool to undo any major breach - which is almost certainly never going to happen.

200 points by winterismute 9y ago

how many things can go wrong when the service is overloaded... looks like Coinbase doesn't know what stress testing or monitoring is. * ID verification by either webcam or id pic upload fails, and eventually one reaches the daily quota, locking the feature for 24 hours (seems fair though) * removing and re-adding bank accounts fails, the site says the account is already linked and it shows some ghost duplicates (i.e. the same bank account multiple times with different statuses) * bank account verification fails, the site says the small amounts deposited don't match * some buying operations fails due to API timeouts when collecting money from linked bank accounts

benmarten 9y ago

it's back up; but not working

bonestamp2 9y ago
Strange, the price data from coinbase never stopped working on tradingview.com. I wonder what was affecting the price changes when the order book was down?
- asciimo 9y ago
  The books are on https://www.gdax.com/ https://www.gdax.com/, Coinbase's exchange intended for big trades. Coinbase is more of a consumer retail site. I assume the latter is what is going down, but it's hard to tell as they both seem fine at the moment.
  - TFortunato 9y ago
    As of now it is back up. If you take a look at the GDAX or Coinbase charts over the past 1-2 hours on a short timescale though (i.e. 1 || 5 minute candles on GDAX, or Past hour on coinbase app), you'll notice after the big dump, there was a large flat period where no trades were occuring, even though the site and app appeared to be up for a lot of people.

ktta 9y ago

Bitcoin hit ATH on coinbase, then crashed. Something's not right. The exchange is still not really 'up'. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxcoinbase_just_crashed_right_before_20k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7i7mix/great_gdaxc... Can we change the link to https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600 https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/938802155925913600

sciurus 9y ago
Also https://status.coinbase.com/ https://status.coinbase.com/
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  That's a nice, detailed status page. Although, some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed.
  - woolvalley 9y ago
    Apple: https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ Google: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status AWS: https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      Fair enough, I see what you mean. I take back my statement.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    > some would say that it's a bad sign such a page is needed Not me. Detailed status pages are awesome. Visibility into the service is awesome.

rdp 9y ago

This is another one of those moments in cryptocurrency where time seems to freeze and everybody holds their breath.

djhworld 9y ago
In regards to the volatility? sure. But coinbase goes down for maintenance all the time
- rdp 9y ago
  Generally speaking. For example, Nicehash, which had been chugging along for a long time, went belly up yesterday after what seemed like a regular maintenance period.
- nemacol 9y ago
  When CB went down for a bit today I had the recent news of NiceHash in my mind. Sure was a breath holding moment.

sk2code 9y ago

I never want to reuse my comments from other thread but this time I just can't resist. No one really anticipated what we all are currently experiencing and Coinbase is not different. It seems Coinbase struggling to cope up: $0000 - $1000: 1789 days $1000- $2000: 1271 days $2000- $3000: 23 days $3000- $4000: 62 days $4000- $5000: 61 days $5000- $6000: 8 days $6000- $7000: 13 days $7000- $8000: 14 days $8000- $9000: 9 days $9000-$10000: 2 days $10000-$11000: 1 day $11000-$12000: 6 days $12000-$13000: 17 hours $13000-$14000: 4 hours $14000-$15000: 10 hours $15000-$16000: 5 hours $16000-$17000: 2 hours $17000-$18000: 10 minutes $18000-$19000: 3 minutes

Snackchez 9y ago
How much money needed to come into the bitcoin market for it bump from 15k to 19k? Where is this money coming from??
- swarnie_ 9y ago
  New money is coming in that's for sure. But a limited resource and a lack of sellers will also push the price.
- dnautics 9y ago
  Technically, not much. Let's say people stopped trading except for two people that made a series of trades of .0000001 btc at $100k, then the price would be $100k.
- dx034 9y ago
  Not much. 1% of asset allocation for an institutional investor is enough for that. EDIT: You currently need $70m to bump the market above 20k on GDAX. That's a lot for retail investors but not much if institutional investors get involved.
  - 0xCMP 9y ago
    In the grand scheme of things sure, but definitely a large influx as compared to the size of the market in Coinbase. We're talking probably low 2-digit millions to make big moves I think.

Snackchez 9y ago

All of this is anecdotal: These past couple of days, whenever a coin soars a ridiculous amount, on any given exchange, that exchange seems to mysteriously go down. For example: Binance and Bitfinex were down for "maintenance" (or just plain down), while IOTA was experiencing a surge in price (from ~1.10 to 6$). Similarly this happens with Bitcoin today (it seems Quadriga had some issues and Coinbase; not sure about others). Something is up, and it's weird. My conspiracy theory: big money institutions are testing pump and dumps for when short contracts come into play. On the one hand, the cryptocurrency world wants to remain as unregulated as possible; on the other, a lot of individuals are going to get reamed by big whales.

crazypyro 9y ago
Isn't it just the simple explanation that big swings in the market bring insane traffic spikes to market websites? Add to the fact that people are also DDOS websites (doesn't take a "big money institution" to do that) and it seems the explanation is clear...
- odonnellryan 9y ago
  Honestly, I don't think these exchanges can handle a lot of traffic. By a lot, I mean a few hundred trades a second. It is odd to me.
  - mv4 9y ago
    They are very well funded, and they can afford scalability. It's not that hard, given the number of transactions even at peak so far. So yeah, I find these weird circuit breaker patterns suspicious. The worst part is "partial" degradation, when you can't execute trades, but someone else can. It's very easy to hide all sorts of irregularities behind these partial outages.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      > It's not that hard I'm sure they would pay you a lot of money to solve their scaling issues, if you were so inclined.

scarmig 9y ago

What's the likelihood here that someone is in the middle of running off into the sunset with a giant ɃɃɃ bag?

hnarn 9y ago
As always with Bitcoin, I'd say 50/50.
webXL 9y ago
Then the market loses faith in the currency and that bag is suddenly a lot smaller, perhaps gone.
puranjay 9y ago
Considering that it has appreciated by 15% in one hour, not really a good sign
darawk 9y ago
Pretty unlikely for coinbase. They always go down during high traffic periods. Plus their principal owners are well known US citizens/residents.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SilasX 9y ago

You really shouldn't be surprised, at this point, by Coinbase going down during times of high activity. It happened on November 29th (when, in fairness, everyone was going down), and happened four times last June, which should have been their canary-in-a-coal mine.

tome 9y ago

Now what would happen if Coinbase went down at a time when Bitcoin was going through a short period of decreasing value?

fullshark 9y ago
This is exactly my question. What happens when these exchanges face the inevitable panic/bank run?
- tome 9y ago
  I wonder how apt the comparison to a bank run is, given that AIUI Coinbase holds the Bitcoin of the exchange participants. Is there any legal form of sequestration of those assets?
- rednerrus 9y ago
  We've been through this in the past. They just cancel your transactions without apology.
  - emerged 9y ago
    That's what they did to me. Incredible how much naivety surrounds and excuses their behavior. There is no recourse when they "accidentally" lose your purchase at $200 once it jumps to $450.
- Beejeepa 9y ago
  Bank runs are bad when there isn't a full reserve. Coinbase should carry a full reserve. Fractional reserve banking is a prisoner's dilemma, we all marginally benefit from the status quo of credit/debit/interest, but in a crisis, the first people to pull out win, and everyone else loses.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    Coinbase isn’t a bank it’s an exchange. Why would they carry a reserve of anything? It stores your shares for you, but it’s not loaning them out. The only way you get money out of Coinbase is if someone buys your shares.

Shoothe 9y ago

Bitstamp.net was also unavailable for a while. Weird coincidence.

glorkk 9y ago
Not really... websites regularly go down when they are under a load they cannot handle

makpy 9y ago

Ah oh! Time to add backdoors for NSA

syntaxing 9y ago

I'm curious what the implications are that all these exchanges go offline whenever there is a huge spike in bitcoin. That being said, anyone care to elaborate how the price of bitcoin is determined? I mean it's easy when there is a large central bank monitoring this figure. However, how exactly does it work for bitcoin? What makes it worth the $15K value when there is no "goods" to back it up. Are there anyone here buying bitcoin as an investment?

wskinner 9y ago
What makes it worth 15k is that people will pay that much for it. The price is determined by buyers and sellers, trading with each other on markets called exchanges.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  This is true. It also helps that their is a finite supply, so if demand remains constant, the value theoretically should rise over time.
- syntaxing 9y ago
  I get the "market" determines the price but I guess I'm confused with who is agreeing to the value? Is there a small amount of big players that are playing with the price? Or is there a general consensus that the price is $15K. And wouldn't there have to be people that we willing to pay this price? What prevents the exchanges from colluding and raising the price artificially?
  - TFortunato 9y ago
    Hey, I hope you saw my above price about how the market works. So to give you a little more info: 1) Yes, there are big players (aka "whales"), and the rest of the "small fish", all playing in the same pond. The interesting thing about cryptos is that the are more "money-like" than "stock-like" when it comes to trading. Meaning just like money, where I can buy a fraction of a $, I can also buy a fraction of a bitcoin. So there are a lot of smaller players who will buy, say .01 BTC for $150 right now. But while there is a general consensus that bitcoin is $15k by virtue of people paying that much for it, the "whales" (people with a lot of money or coins), can cause issues because they can put a lot of volume on or take a lot of volume off the order book at once. This happened to Ether this year, dumping the price for a few minutes from >$300 down to about 10 cents for a few minutes! https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 In fact, there is some speculation that a lot of the rise right now is from Wall St. / big firms buying up a lot of coin, as futures trading on Bitcoin is coming in the coming weeks! (But I don't know enough to comment on that theory) As far as preventing exchanges themselves from colluding... it would be difficult but not impossible, because again the price on the exchanges comes from the traders, not the exchanges themselves. (Theoretically it is possible that an exchange could do a bunch of "wash trading" / make up a bunch of fake trade volume to make demand look higher than it was, but given that there are a number of exchanges in a number of different countries, coordination there might be difficult)

TFortunato 9y ago

I do wonder if after the Ether "flash crash" recently (https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1 https://blog.gdax.com/eth-usd-trading-update-5d8142b5bdc1), if Coinbase / GDAX instituted some sort of "circuit breakers" on their exchange to prevent this type of thing from happening again. Bitcoin and the other cryptos, trades at a pretty low volume relative to their market cap, so if a lot of people we're trying to dump large orders this morning to take a profit at the new ATH, I could see that causing similar issues that they may have been trying to prevent.

bhouston 9y ago
Circuit breakers do not matter if other exchanges continue to trade the same currency. It would just cause the exchanges that do the circuit breaker to possibly hurt their customers. The only effective circuit breaker is some form of synchronized method, but will the different exchanges cooperate? They really should put in circuit breakers this week across all exchanges so that when really bad stuff the panic doesn't destroy tons of people. It will be bad, but at least if the trades can complete and things unwind in a moderately slow fashion, it won't just 100,000 attempted transactions per second with random successes.
- TFortunato 9y ago
  Maybe not, I'm just speculating that GDAX or coinbase may have added this as some sort of "sanity-check" in their system (regardless of the insane volatility in crypto right now!) In the situation with ETH, a bunch of automated margin calls happened because of one large order on the books, dumping the price down to 10 cents! GDAX/Coinbase repaid a lot of people who lost money then, even though they didnt have to. They may now have some dumb heuristics that slow down trades / whatever if a bunch of large orders are going through, or price delta over a short time period goes too high. I remember looking at the charts today on GDAX and the 5 minute candle went from 20k open to 16k close before trading halted! I also heard from others that there were a lot of ~19k sells of 100 coins each on the books and executing. So yeah, just speculating that this may bave been the case of someones boss at GDAX/Coinbase telling engineering "please don't make us do that again", after they ate the cost last time! :-)

bob_theslob646 9y ago

Maintenance xor DDOS?

simonsarris 9y ago

It's a matter of time until Mt. Gox part 2 I think. It may not even take nefarious workings at the top, just sloppy work somewhere + one bad employee or outsider. Is this going to end in a re-discovery of exactly why we have FDIC? Or the SEC? How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked? Popular Google Searches by year, by my estimation. 2016: "what is bitcoin" 2017: "what is ethereum" 2018: "what is a wash trade" 2019: "can you eat squirrel"

baoha 9y ago
>> How do people even know how much bitcoin activity is real and not essentially faked? Define fake
- Rmilb 9y ago
  Ignore exchanges where there is 0 trading fees like the big one in Korea.
  - runeks 9y ago
    Why? Volume isn’t important, it’s order book depth that matters.
- gist 9y ago
  I do not think it would be difficult for someone to setup a website and scam newbies into buying 'bitcoin', handing over credit card info and taking wire transfers. Perhaps even act legit to start and then segue into only processing part of transactions as real. Quite a ponzi. I don't think is a stretch either. There isn't anything comparable that people would give you money for and the key really is the overwhelming interest and publicity combined with people who have no clue what they are buying. As long as (as with any ponzi) people don't withdraw more than they actually have this could go on for quite some time. Madoff had it much much harder.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    You can't easily pull a scam like that using credit cards. Wire transfers could be potentially easier as we know the union transfers are hard to revert (but there's work being done there as well). Essentially, if you interact with banks and have too many chargebacks or complaints, you'll be dropped. Or your fees will get massive. And that's if you find a payment processor who's happy with you taking money for cryptocurrencies in the first place.

siculars 9y ago

Coinbase being unavailable during times of extreme volatility is not a new thing. Today's swing was 14k up to 19k then down to 15k or so over a period of an hour of severely degraded access. I'll go out on a limb and say that much of the recent spike can probably be attributed to the 100k++ accounts open on Thanksgiving weekend getting funded today and everyone losing their shit mashing the Market Buy button which get instantly executed. The mechanics of vast market buy orders with no liquidity is well known.

nlperguiy 9y ago
On some exchanges it was an opposite direction. Down to 12k then up back to 15k.

Animats 9y ago

The big question now is, what happens when somebody sells big for dollars. This would be an excellent time for someone with 10,000 Bitcoins to sell, take their $160,000,000, and go home. Could the market handle that?

deleted 9y ago
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oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
There was a big multimillion dollar sale today, possibly the cause of the small dip. Looks like it handled it. e: actually, tbf, it was a buy and a sell: https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdcHS8fVA https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdc... But it does demonstrate the market can just about handle large transactions.
- Animats 9y ago
  But did it result in an exchange actually transferring millions of dollars out of the exchange to a real bank? That's the question.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    Compared to national currencies bitcoin is now top 20 in terms of market cap.
    - tomjakubowski 9y ago
      What kind of currency is measured in market cap? Isn't that a chicken-egg problem?
- bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
  How big is big?
  - 9y ago

shiado 9y ago

As somebody who doesn't have a background in finance, what are the legal obligations of an exchange to stay online? How can a user of the service be certain that an exchange is offline for technical or non-technical reasons? Let's imagine the likely scenario when the price suddenly drops like a rock and the exchange goes offline completely (for technical or non-technical reason). Could a user make a claim that Coinbase is liable for their losses because they were unable to access their coins?

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
In this case, it's completely up in the air - bitcoin isn't an official financial product, doesn't fall under any formal juristiction, etc. At best any gains get taxed now, but besides that, exchanges can't give any guarantees about uptime or e.g. getting your money back if they're not available.
gamblor956 9y ago
A financial institution has fiduciary obligations to its clients to maintain the assets (here, the Bitcoin, ether, etc.) entrusted to them. However, financial institutions are not currently obligated to maintain their clients' ability to transact those assets, let alone within a specific time-frame. Many people have sued their brokerages for not letting them sell stock in a timely fashion to take advantage of price changes; essentially all of them have lost or settled for pennies on the dollar.
stef25 9y ago
I'm expecting this all to go wrong, up to the point that I'll just let my coins ride it all out. The first gamble is bitcoin, the second gamble is the exchanges.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

How can anyone reliably trade Bitcoin? With Coinbase immensely unreliable, I can't see how anyone would tolerate running algos on their exchange, given they could be in a bad position unexpectedly. What are the other exchanges that you can trade BTC and are they more reliable than Coinbase?

kruhft 9y ago
yobit.net

wonderwonder 9y ago

Just my opinion but I think the conspiracy theories are not realistic. Coinbase is essentially a startup that is dealing with monstrous traffic. They are still scaling their infrastructure and when the price starts moving quickly everyone logs in to either get in on the action or take a look. This cranks the traffic up and the servers cant handle it. I am not excusing their behavior as they need to be able to handle it, especially when their server status affects the bank accounts of real people. But I feel that it is understandable with out condoning it. The simplest explanation is likely correct in this case. I don't think many of us could have predicted the volume and interest in BTC a year ago and neither did Coinbase's purchasing and infrastructure teams.

DougWebb 9y ago
"We want to run an exchange that the entire world will use for this crypto-currency that's become very popular and has increased in price 1000% since it became widely known." I think I would have predicted that they'd need to run at a very large scale, and be able to handle massive spikes. Whether or not I could have convinced them to make the investment is another story.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  The problem is what happens if that growth stops? What happens if bitcoin tanks right after you hired 300 new customer service reps and tripled your server hardware? It's a gamble no matter what, but moving too quickly or moving too slowly results in the company going under. In that case, I think straddling the line of "overwhelmed when there is a big spike" is a good spot to be in all things consitered.
  - iopq 9y ago
    You have layoffs and turn servers off. This isn't rocket surgery. They're skimming a ton of money off these trades every day, down time is a loss.
    - wonderwonder 9y ago

krisives 9y ago

Coinbase doesn't support Tether so it should be okay.

themihai 9y ago

so it got hacked

pcf 9y ago

My friend thinks the exchanges also go down when assets "flash-crash", because it means normal users can get in to sell their assets. And when they can't get in, they also can't cancel their stop-loss orders, so it means a TON of assets are available to buy cheaply (by the exchange and/or certain VIP users/collaborators) as the value goes down. Then these are bought up, and the price quickly increases again, before the exchanges slowly come online again. Therefore he thinks the people exchanges are either part of the "flash-crashes" (and buy up assets themselves, because they know exactly where most of the stop-loss orders are placed), or they get kickbacks from the whales manipulating the market, by giving them access to the database with all the limit and stop-loss orders.

deleted 9y ago
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yueq 9y ago
why would they cancel the stop orders when the sole purpose for stop order is to protect profit?
twohearted 9y ago
This has always been a worry in the traditional stock market. With a stop loss order you're basically creating a "secret" order to sell at below market value. Anyone who knows about it has a direct incentive to profit from it. Stop-losses are very important in investing but I'd recommend always executing them manually at market rate. Set a price alert to notify you. Of course if the exchanges are down you're sol, but if BTC is on a bullet train to $10 your exchange stop-loss probably won't fill at your price anyway.
- rsync 9y ago
  "Stop-losses are very important in investing but I'd recommend always executing them manually at market rate." No, no, no, no ... You do not ever want to insert a market order[1] ... the market can be manipulated and high frequency traders can buy/sell your public market order at an artificially low/high price. The answer to getting "stopped out" is not to insert a market order - it is to create a fill-or-kill at a specific price or other more specific order type ... [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-why-you-never-use-a-market-order-during-a-selloff-2015-08-28 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-why-you-never-use-...

nodesocket 9y ago

Serious question, would it ever be possible to implement circuit breakers like the stock market does for Bitcoin? Without safeguards, and the nature of 24/7/365 trading of Bitcoin, this all feels like teetering on the brink of catastrophe.

londons_explore 9y ago
Not really. Unlike stocks and shares which are traded on regulated exchanges, bitcoins can be traded anywhere on any terms. If one exchange implemented circuit breakers, people would simply move their trading elsewhere.

ajcodez 9y ago

Build a financial exchange with Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, and Redis. What could go wrong? https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-post-mortem-69a1810f9910 https://engineering.coinbase.com/november-29th-december-1st-...

wilde 9y ago
Stripe is on Ruby and Mongo and they seem to be doing OK.
- ajcodez 9y ago
  Good point.
  - nikolay 9y ago
    Why do people still use a document database with no transactions for domains with a fairly slim and rarely changing schemas?
    - j4ship 9y ago
      the expertise of their engineers leans that way .... why do we have many techs that can do the same thing? ... engineering is a social science

thedragonslayer 9y ago

For how powerful we announce bitcoin/blockchain and its possibilities, the faultiness lies in the exchanges and that is my biggest con with Bitcoin

prawn 9y ago

If this phase of Bitcoin is likened to each goldrush around the world, isn't it fairly inevitable that there will be hiccups? Robberies, banged together shopfronts, people using any tools they can find, etc. And the internet has long been a bit of a Wild West already. Assuming they're adding thousands and thousands of customers quickly, I'm not surprised that their systems and support are lagging. Comes with the (Wild West) territory.

hoodoof 9y ago

I wouldn't want to be in a business in which the worlds absolute finest hackers and crackers - the elite of the best of the best - make it their full time job - forever without end - to get into your systems and steal everything of value.

lunaru 9y ago
That sounds like any bank. Computer systems as the source of truth for billions of dollars of assets is not new.
- hoodoof 9y ago
  I think bitcoin attracts more hacker attention than banks.
- will_hughes 9y ago
  Banks have the advantage that if they see a huge spike in their outbound inter-bank transfers they can suspend traffic while they investigate it, and then if necessary call up the recieving bank(s) and issue a freeze on those funds. There's already established relationships and agreements for these things. With a cryptocurrency there's nobody to call, you have to convince 50% + 1 of the mining pool to undo any major breach - which is almost certainly never going to happen.