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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

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.
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    Thanks, I'm not in finance but it seems obvious in retrospect that not being able to rely on things being eventually consistent is a bottle neck. Before thinking about this, the number of users that people threw around when talking about BTC exchanges seemed very small.
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
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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.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  Thanks, I'm not in finance but it seems obvious in retrospect that not being able to rely on things being eventually consistent is a bottle neck. Before thinking about this, the number of users that people threw around when talking about BTC exchanges seemed very small.

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

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