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This is a settlement problem. Coinbase is unable to settle money between different accounts. And there is a perfect solution for this. We can use blockchain....

This is a settlement problem. Coinbase is unable to settle money between different accounts. And there is a perfect solution for this. We can use blockchain....Oh Wait. /s On a serious note, building a production level real time two book entry system is hard. Many times money just disappears because both legs of transactions don't match. The only way to track is some real good amount of sleuthing. But given the amount of customers Coinbase is adding left and right, it might be difficult to find time to get down to this sleuthing. It would have been best for Coinbase to temporarily hold new accounts to get their shit together. But I guess lure of money from constant trading was too much.

mkirklions 8y ago
How does money go missing? Ive been reading about money in a database and it seems pretty straight forward. Each transaction has an ID and a user ID, how does money disappear?
- sanderjd 8y ago
  On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult; the system Coinbase is running is definitely not as straight forward as whatever you've been reading about. On the other hand, this is their core competency and it is absolutely not acceptable for money to go missing; it's a tough problem but its their business and they have to make it work or they're in for major trouble.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult Banks have scaled systems like this with mainframes and COBOL for decades. It's probably not as hard as you think to get it right if you have your priorities straight. IMHO, for banking, you need to KISS and avoid all unnecessary complexity (especially in the name of "scale"), at least for your master source of truth.

mkirklions 8y ago

How does money go missing? Ive been reading about money in a database and it seems pretty straight forward. Each transaction has an ID and a user ID, how does money disappear?

sanderjd 8y ago
On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult; the system Coinbase is running is definitely not as straight forward as whatever you've been reading about. On the other hand, this is their core competency and it is absolutely not acceptable for money to go missing; it's a tough problem but its their business and they have to make it work or they're in for major trouble.
- 394549 8y ago
  > On the one hand, it's hard to scale a system without making it distributed at some point and consistency in distributed systems is really difficult Banks have scaled systems like this with mainframes and COBOL for decades. It's probably not as hard as you think to get it right if you have your priorities straight. IMHO, for banking, you need to KISS and avoid all unnecessary complexity (especially in the name of "scale"), at least for your master source of truth.