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Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people th

Is it really that much traffic compared to your typical consumer-facing start up? There can't be that many people buying BTC compared to the number of people that say, Stripe or Whatsapp handled in their early days...

pishpash 9y ago
Coinbase probably deals with lots of bot trading. Most consumer-facing startups deal with human-scale behavior, not bot-scale.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Ah that's good point, they probably generate a lot of traffic and could increase rapidly while the number of users remains somewhat small.
Klathmon 9y ago
I don't know about Stripe or Whatsapp, but I know coinbase has had an average of 30,000 new users a day for a while, with spikes of over 100,000 new signups in a single day around thanksgiving. It's absolutely bonkers amounts of growth! Edit: more concrete numbers: In January of 2016 they had around 2.6 million users. On November 29th they announced they had over 13 million users.
- njarboe 9y ago
  Jan 2016 to now is 23 months. Still big but half as much.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Whatsapp famously had ~450 million users when they were acquired by Facebook. I assume that the average user sent quite a few texts, some pictures, occasional video... they also supported voice calls... I don't know how much computing power is actually needed when you're just buying BTC. When I used Coinbase recently to take a small BTC position, I only made maybe 4 transactions in total. Is this really a lot to handle?
  - nikanj 9y ago
    There’s a lot less dangers involved in double-delivering Whatsapp messages, delivering them out of order, etc. Less constraints=easier optimizations.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    I don't have any experience in this area, but I imagine that fintech is a bit different than messaging. It's not the amount of data, but the nature of the data. I'd imagine you can't use scaling tricks like eventual consistency or simple sharding here. Traders are going to be pissed if their most up to date information from the exchange is a second behind what they can see. It's already at the point where they have a line in their FAQ for the GDAX API that tells people where to colocate from for the lowest latency. And all of that data needs to be stored damn-near indefinitely, and securely. And integrated with traditional financial systems. I'd love to see some information on what it actually takes, as i'm just guessing here, but seeing as there aren't any bitcoin exchanges that can seem to keep the servers running smoothly during spikes, i'm guessing it's not a trivial problem to solve.
    - wbl 9y ago
      And yet the NYSE keeps on ticking.
      - Klathmon 9y ago
        ... from 9 to 5, monday through friday, with a fairly predictable load, and decades more experience. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the amount of growth they have seen is substantial and unprecedented. Nobody could have predicted it, and the rate of increase just keeps going up. They are clearly new in this space, as all cryptocurrency companies are. I don't think that means that they should just give up and go home because they couldn't keep the servers up during spikes of insane activity...
        kornish 9y ago
        > ... from 9 to 5, monday through friday, with a fairly predictable load, and decades more experience. And a lot more operating capital, too.
- nikkwong 9y ago
  That, followed by the fact that many of their users probably sit on the site a good part of the day constantly refreshing the page/taking up websocket bandwidth to watch price changes. Yeah, load is a serious issue.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    I'm genuinely amazed that they can do streaming updated to GDAX as fast as they do.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wonderwonder 9y ago
I think its also a matter of funding and company financials as well. You have to make money to justify spending money and each company has a different idea on what an acceptable infrastructure spend is. While it might be great to spend a ton of money and build a bullet proof infrastructure, if traffic slows down or revenue dips they are in the very negative position of having a lot of hardware and not a lot of money in the bank. They have to scale at the rate their revenue or financial backers will be able to sustain. Based on the number of new users signing up to the service the down time is not yet a significant deterrent. If use drops because of downtime they will likely need to reevaluate a large capital spend to solve the issue.

pishpash 9y ago

Coinbase probably deals with lots of bot trading. Most consumer-facing startups deal with human-scale behavior, not bot-scale.

chickenfries 9y ago
Ah that's good point, they probably generate a lot of traffic and could increase rapidly while the number of users remains somewhat small.

Klathmon 9y ago

I don't know about Stripe or Whatsapp, but I know coinbase has had an average of 30,000 new users a day for a while, with spikes of over 100,000 new signups in a single day around thanksgiving. It's absolutely bonkers amounts of growth! Edit: more concrete numbers: In January of 2016 they had around 2.6 million users. On November 29th they announced they had over 13 million users.

njarboe 9y ago
Jan 2016 to now is 23 months. Still big but half as much.
chickenfries 9y ago
Whatsapp famously had ~450 million users when they were acquired by Facebook. I assume that the average user sent quite a few texts, some pictures, occasional video... they also supported voice calls... I don't know how much computing power is actually needed when you're just buying BTC. When I used Coinbase recently to take a small BTC position, I only made maybe 4 transactions in total. Is this really a lot to handle?
- nikanj 9y ago
  There’s a lot less dangers involved in double-delivering Whatsapp messages, delivering them out of order, etc. Less constraints=easier optimizations.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  I don't have any experience in this area, but I imagine that fintech is a bit different than messaging. It's not the amount of data, but the nature of the data. I'd imagine you can't use scaling tricks like eventual consistency or simple sharding here. Traders are going to be pissed if their most up to date information from the exchange is a second behind what they can see. It's already at the point where they have a line in their FAQ for the GDAX API that tells people where to colocate from for the lowest latency. And all of that data needs to be stored damn-near indefinitely, and securely. And integrated with traditional financial systems. I'd love to see some information on what it actually takes, as i'm just guessing here, but seeing as there aren't any bitcoin exchanges that can seem to keep the servers running smoothly during spikes, i'm guessing it's not a trivial problem to solve.
  - wbl 9y ago
    And yet the NYSE keeps on ticking.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      ... from 9 to 5, monday through friday, with a fairly predictable load, and decades more experience. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the amount of growth they have seen is substantial and unprecedented. Nobody could have predicted it, and the rate of increase just keeps going up. They are clearly new in this space, as all cryptocurrency companies are. I don't think that means that they should just give up and go home because they couldn't keep the servers up during spikes of insane activity...
      - kornish 9y ago
        > ... from 9 to 5, monday through friday, with a fairly predictable load, and decades more experience. And a lot more operating capital, too.
nikkwong 9y ago
That, followed by the fact that many of their users probably sit on the site a good part of the day constantly refreshing the page/taking up websocket bandwidth to watch price changes. Yeah, load is a serious issue.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  I'm genuinely amazed that they can do streaming updated to GDAX as fast as they do.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

wonderwonder 9y ago

I think its also a matter of funding and company financials as well. You have to make money to justify spending money and each company has a different idea on what an acceptable infrastructure spend is. While it might be great to spend a ton of money and build a bullet proof infrastructure, if traffic slows down or revenue dips they are in the very negative position of having a lot of hardware and not a lot of money in the bank. They have to scale at the rate their revenue or financial backers will be able to sustain. Based on the number of new users signing up to the service the down time is not yet a significant deterrent. If use drops because of downtime they will likely need to reevaluate a large capital spend to solve the issue.