8 ms·

Coinbase is experiencing connectivity issues

90 points by obilgic 6y ago

DeafSquid 6y ago
Coinbase needs to fix this before their IPO. How are they still not prepared for traffic surges?
- xiphias2 6y ago
  When I was applying to Coinbase, the interviews were heavily biased against people using low level data structures to write efficient code. On my first interview I used C++, and it was very hard to pass their expectiations (the interviewer didn't know C++, so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language). I switched to Ruby for the next rounds, and got through easily. Then I went to their beautiful office, I loved the people and the culture there, but didn't code fast enough to join the startup (which I'm happy about...startup mindset is not for me).
  - thebean11 6y ago
    > so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language I don't think impressing an interviewer is a good reason to pick a language for leetcode type questions..
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I think it's all about whether you belong to a company or not. As I wrote, it's great that I wasn't accepted to Coinbase, as I wasn't a good fit (even though I was and still is a huge Bitcoin fan). In another interview at a quant hedge fund I had a lot of fun talking to the interviewers (even the CEO) about low level data structures, and I got some tricky questions about the CPU that I really liked.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    This sounds like a good thing for Coinbase IMO. An instinct to reach for low-level data structures and static typing to solve ambiguous or fast-changing business problems is usually a red flag for premature abstraction and sometimes also correlates with attitudes of superiority or looking down on other possible technology choices. I don’t know if they treated you fairly or not, but the policy at least of appraising an instinctual reach for low level C++ as a negative sounds correct to me and should be a much more widely used heuristic in software hiring.
    - lostmsu 6y ago
      I was up with you in the first 1.5 sentences. Genuinely, I expected the comment to be about the need for very strict security in a financial codebase, and C++ is a known tool, that enables shooting yourself in a foot. But then you started talking about static typing as negative, and suggesting to move fast and break things for a company, that probably hadles trillions in assets.
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        I opposed static typing because I favor safety, not oppose it. Type system designs prevent solving those problems. Most of my career has been focused on helping large companies use Python to achieve as-fast-as-C performance with extremely little code and extremely safety-focused non-OOP software architectures, including in high frequency trading (where I built a company’s entire core trading platform in Cython). The idea that static typing leads to safety is false. Static typing adds more code, more code is more liability. The cost of that liability is not recouped with any offsetting benefits.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I was specificially asking to work on the exchange trading backend, as that's what I was interested in. It was at a time when Coinbase was using javascript for the trading engine if I recall correctly (I think they moved to C++ since then, but not sure). When I applied to a quantitative hedge fund, I was being asked questions about synchronizing data structures between threads without using mutexes (again not something you often do in a high level language). I was accepted there, although I couldn't go to work there because of health reasons. At the end I went back to Google where I had to launch a new machine learning model without introducing even 0.1ms latency in the ads backend. Good luck doing that in a high level language.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Yeah, I was complaining about outages for high volume way back in June 2017. (Unfortunately, the links are relative and no longer point to the specific June events.) It's when I started trading, and why I never finished setting up the account, preferring Gemini. Edit: lol what a day to say that! For the first time I’m seeing unplanned outages on Gemini. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705898
onion2k 6y ago
Coinbase goes down every time BTC goes up.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Usually Coinbase goes down when the price goes down, not up. Probably because a ton of people are trying to sell their bitcoins as soon as the price starts walking downwards.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    It goes down in both directions :) The big difference is now they have lots of competition in US.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      Yeah it seems to be more an issue of volume than the price direction.
    - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
      An old joke among Bitcoin speculators was "All technical analysis in a nutshell is basically: Bitcoin may go down, but Bitcoin may also go up. Time to add a new punchline: On the other hand, we're all sure that Coinbase always goes down.
  - hndudette2 6y ago
    Bitcoin is one of the rare instruments with inverted skew in its options i.e. volatility is higher when the price is going up. So we would expect outages to be more correlated with price increases than decreases.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  That's not true it also goes down when the price crashes. Basically: Coinbase, we're going down. ps: I find that very .. cynical that when there are such opportunistic moves poor retail gets locked away. Alas.
lawn 6y ago
Kraken is such a superior exchange I always wonder why people use Coinbase.
- martinko 6y ago
  Are you kidding me? Kraken is down/laggy even more than coinbase (still think its the best choice for converting fiat to and from btc in europe, but come on :))
- 2bluesc 6y ago
  Another vote for Kraken. I discovered https://cryptowat.ch https://cryptowat.ch and thought it was the most polished and feature rich trading UI I had seen for crypto. I later learned this is a Kraken project that works with any exchanges and that they use mostly the same UI for their trade UI. After poking around the UI I was convinced they cared about UI/UX and their fees seemed better and I made the jump. Haven't looked back to Coinbase since.
  - beaner 6y ago
    Cryptowatch is the only decent part of kraken and that's because they acquired it from an independent developer. The rest of their website is horrid.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      It's almost funny how un-advanced trading platforms are. Nobody cares because those who manage to get rich on it can live with the limitations, those who get burn simply leave.
    - 2bluesc 6y ago
      Didn't know this, makes sense. Least the UI still seems pretty nice almost 4 years later and not ruined by other non "decent" parts. For those curious: https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-acquires-digital-currency-data-portal-cryptowatch https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-acquires-digital-currency-da...
  - 6y ago
prytzie 6y ago
Every. Time.
- beaner 6y ago
  Every time would have been every day for the past 25 days. Have you been paying attention? They made it exceptionally far this time. People are underestimating how much traffic is occurring right now.
  - prytzie 6y ago
    December 16's jump over 20k, where this all kicked off https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/93smh99lxtxz https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/93smh99lxtxz November 26's dump from 18.9 to 16.2k https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/yjq3bch7zgt1 https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/yjq3bch7zgt1 When there's a sudden, significant price burst, they seem to reliably flop. Look around, they have that reputation. It seems they first fail, then scale, so the fact that they first failed on the 16th and have stayed up until now isn't surprising. I'd love to pat them on the back, but this is the same old Coinbase, and with all their means they should surely be able to scale quickly by now.
esotericimpl 6y ago
Seems strange that it would go down today. There's nothing to discuss about the past 24 hours over at coinbase.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pazimzadeh 6y ago
Unrelated, but I wonder how much more money Coinbase would make if they took fees in cryptocurrency as opposed to USD during trades.
- richardxia 6y ago
  They do for crypto-to-crypto trades :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
thehazard 6y ago
Migrated to Gemini recently. Much happier.
- pk455 6y ago
  I'm curious, what big pluses have you found on Gemini vs. Coinbase?
obilgic 6y ago
might be a good indicator of the short term top
christiansakai 6y ago
I am really really curious, who are selling the Bitcoins? If you see the price these days, the conventional wisdom is to HODL, but lo and behold, there are sellers. Who are these people? How did they get so many Bitcoins and why are they selling?
- waynesonfire 6y ago
  Its a gamble at every price point. You're seeing the price go up because of what you're suggesting until it reaches a point where someone is happy to part with their coins.
  - christiansakai 6y ago
    but isn't that price means there are people who sell on that price?
- brokencode 6y ago
  It’s funny calling the prevailing opinions on (I’m assuming) online crypto investment communities as “conventional wisdom”. These sites are filled with garbage information from teenagers. Many investors in the space will sell when it’s high, and buy when it’s low. This is a highly speculative investment, and shouldn’t be treated like stocks or other investments. You hold a diversified portfolio of stocks because companies on average will eventually will grow or pay a dividend. Crypto though? It could easily crash and never return at any time, and has crashed dramatically multiple times before.
  - christiansakai 6y ago
    well I'm just generalizing about assets in general. I don't believe in Bitcoin but I want to know who are selling these Bitcoins in large numbers?
    - brokencode 6y ago
      As mentioned in my previous response, many investors will see the recent spike and decide to sell to lock in their profits, since the investment is extremely risky and could crash at any time. When an investment goes up hundreds of percent in a single year, that raises a lot of red flags amongst many investors about the potential for a crash. This type of gain is just not normal in investing.
reaktion 6y ago
My long-time account has been locked down since November - their automated identity verification tool random stopped working for me, and I haven't been able to get any meaningful support. I've opened multiple tickets but had no meaningful response from support. Completely unacceptable for a platform that's handling my money. So this type of recurring outage doesn't surprise me at all.
- v64 6y ago
  I've seen others have success complaining on the Coinbase subreddit [1]. It's run by Coinbase staff and they seem to respond better there than the ticketing system. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/
  - reaktion 6y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion. I sent a direct message to coinbasesupport from that subreddit three weeks ago and never received a response - public shaming must really be the only way to get traction. Which again is completely unacceptable!
    - capableweb 6y ago
      Just as a heads up, in the stickied post there is information about what the "rules" are for the subreddit. This is the third paragraph from there (https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/gbjetq/welcome_to_rcoinbase_help_helpcoinbasecom/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/gbjetq/welcome_to...): > If posting for assistance please provide your case number in your post. Moderators will only respond to PMs that have been requested in a post, and unsolicited DMs to individual moderators and chat requests will not receive a response. Maybe if you try to create a normal post, you can get help faster.
- mumbisChungo 6y ago
  This is beside the point, but unless you're using your fiat onramp provider to actively trade you should strongly consider being personally responsible for the custody of your crypto assets.
josh_carterPDX 6y ago
It's becoming increasingly frustrating that a platform meant to make it easier to trade crypto can go down so frequently. It leads to more skepticism by mainstream entities when Coinbase is their only experience into the cryptocurrency market. I echo the other comments here that they need to figure out their stability issues prior to their IPO. There's no way they can go public with such a poorly run platform. And I say all of this as someone that is an active user of Coinbase.
ur-whale 6y ago
Coinbase has historically been unstable during price fluctuations. Here are some possible explanations: 1. Conspiration theory #1:They somehow benefit from the instability. 2. Hanlon's razor, which means they need to replace their SRE team. 3. Conspiration theory #2: someone attacks them and somehow manages to benefit from the downtime (eg by creating a shortlived arbitrage opportunity).
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
All I know is that Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. -- regularly experience "connectivity issues" <g>... If a currency relies on a network to support it, that currency is only as good as the underlying network... In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency... Here, watch this, a Rick and Morty cartoon segment that will explain it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I (Disclaimer: I do not endorse any messages of violence that this Rick and Morty cartoon segment may imply. There's a quote in the Bible (and I am not a particularly religious man or anything!), and that quote is "Be ye as wise as serpents, yet as gentle as doves". I am not a particularly religious man or anything -- but I take that particular quote to heart! <g>)
- capableweb 6y ago
  > In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency... Many of us agree with that, hence it would be preferable that cryptocurrencies were the standard, not country-currencies. In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin ends up being more resistant and durable than the many ledgers each country runs themselves. Or in other words, if you trust in Bitcoin, use it directly, not via Coinbase. As peter_d_sherman said: "currency is only as good as the underlying network" For example, what would happen to the Turkish lira if the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey burned down and somehow couldn't restore data from backups? With Bitcoin and others, the risk is much lower from central failure. Although individual failure risk is much higher. Tradeoffs.
joeblau 6y ago
Can’t panic sell! Kraken also having problems. Coinbase crashing is how I know if the bull market is really here.

90 points by obilgic 6y ago

DeafSquid 6y ago

Coinbase needs to fix this before their IPO. How are they still not prepared for traffic surges?

xiphias2 6y ago
When I was applying to Coinbase, the interviews were heavily biased against people using low level data structures to write efficient code. On my first interview I used C++, and it was very hard to pass their expectiations (the interviewer didn't know C++, so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language). I switched to Ruby for the next rounds, and got through easily. Then I went to their beautiful office, I loved the people and the culture there, but didn't code fast enough to join the startup (which I'm happy about...startup mindset is not for me).
- thebean11 6y ago
  > so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language I don't think impressing an interviewer is a good reason to pick a language for leetcode type questions..
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I think it's all about whether you belong to a company or not. As I wrote, it's great that I wasn't accepted to Coinbase, as I wasn't a good fit (even though I was and still is a huge Bitcoin fan). In another interview at a quant hedge fund I had a lot of fun talking to the interviewers (even the CEO) about low level data structures, and I got some tricky questions about the CPU that I really liked.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  This sounds like a good thing for Coinbase IMO. An instinct to reach for low-level data structures and static typing to solve ambiguous or fast-changing business problems is usually a red flag for premature abstraction and sometimes also correlates with attitudes of superiority or looking down on other possible technology choices. I don’t know if they treated you fairly or not, but the policy at least of appraising an instinctual reach for low level C++ as a negative sounds correct to me and should be a much more widely used heuristic in software hiring.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    I was up with you in the first 1.5 sentences. Genuinely, I expected the comment to be about the need for very strict security in a financial codebase, and C++ is a known tool, that enables shooting yourself in a foot. But then you started talking about static typing as negative, and suggesting to move fast and break things for a company, that probably hadles trillions in assets.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      I opposed static typing because I favor safety, not oppose it. Type system designs prevent solving those problems. Most of my career has been focused on helping large companies use Python to achieve as-fast-as-C performance with extremely little code and extremely safety-focused non-OOP software architectures, including in high frequency trading (where I built a company’s entire core trading platform in Cython). The idea that static typing leads to safety is false. Static typing adds more code, more code is more liability. The cost of that liability is not recouped with any offsetting benefits.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I was specificially asking to work on the exchange trading backend, as that's what I was interested in. It was at a time when Coinbase was using javascript for the trading engine if I recall correctly (I think they moved to C++ since then, but not sure). When I applied to a quantitative hedge fund, I was being asked questions about synchronizing data structures between threads without using mutexes (again not something you often do in a high level language). I was accepted there, although I couldn't go to work there because of health reasons. At the end I went back to Google where I had to launch a new machine learning model without introducing even 0.1ms latency in the ads backend. Good luck doing that in a high level language.
SilasX 6y ago
Yeah, I was complaining about outages for high volume way back in June 2017. (Unfortunately, the links are relative and no longer point to the specific June events.) It's when I started trading, and why I never finished setting up the account, preferring Gemini. Edit: lol what a day to say that! For the first time I’m seeing unplanned outages on Gemini. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705898

onion2k 6y ago

Coinbase goes down every time BTC goes up.

capableweb 6y ago
Usually Coinbase goes down when the price goes down, not up. Probably because a ton of people are trying to sell their bitcoins as soon as the price starts walking downwards.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  It goes down in both directions :) The big difference is now they have lots of competition in US.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Yeah it seems to be more an issue of volume than the price direction.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    An old joke among Bitcoin speculators was "All technical analysis in a nutshell is basically: Bitcoin may go down, but Bitcoin may also go up. Time to add a new punchline: On the other hand, we're all sure that Coinbase always goes down.
- hndudette2 6y ago
  Bitcoin is one of the rare instruments with inverted skew in its options i.e. volatility is higher when the price is going up. So we would expect outages to be more correlated with price increases than decreases.
agumonkey 6y ago
That's not true it also goes down when the price crashes. Basically: Coinbase, we're going down. ps: I find that very .. cynical that when there are such opportunistic moves poor retail gets locked away. Alas.

lawn 6y ago

Kraken is such a superior exchange I always wonder why people use Coinbase.

martinko 6y ago
Are you kidding me? Kraken is down/laggy even more than coinbase (still think its the best choice for converting fiat to and from btc in europe, but come on :))
2bluesc 6y ago
Another vote for Kraken. I discovered https://cryptowat.ch https://cryptowat.ch and thought it was the most polished and feature rich trading UI I had seen for crypto. I later learned this is a Kraken project that works with any exchanges and that they use mostly the same UI for their trade UI. After poking around the UI I was convinced they cared about UI/UX and their fees seemed better and I made the jump. Haven't looked back to Coinbase since.
- beaner 6y ago
  Cryptowatch is the only decent part of kraken and that's because they acquired it from an independent developer. The rest of their website is horrid.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    It's almost funny how un-advanced trading platforms are. Nobody cares because those who manage to get rich on it can live with the limitations, those who get burn simply leave.
  - 2bluesc 6y ago
    Didn't know this, makes sense. Least the UI still seems pretty nice almost 4 years later and not ruined by other non "decent" parts. For those curious: https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-acquires-digital-currency-data-portal-cryptowatch https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-acquires-digital-currency-da...
- 6y ago

prytzie 6y ago

Every. Time.

beaner 6y ago
Every time would have been every day for the past 25 days. Have you been paying attention? They made it exceptionally far this time. People are underestimating how much traffic is occurring right now.
- prytzie 6y ago
  December 16's jump over 20k, where this all kicked off https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/93smh99lxtxz https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/93smh99lxtxz November 26's dump from 18.9 to 16.2k https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/yjq3bch7zgt1 https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/yjq3bch7zgt1 When there's a sudden, significant price burst, they seem to reliably flop. Look around, they have that reputation. It seems they first fail, then scale, so the fact that they first failed on the 16th and have stayed up until now isn't surprising. I'd love to pat them on the back, but this is the same old Coinbase, and with all their means they should surely be able to scale quickly by now.

esotericimpl 6y ago

Seems strange that it would go down today. There's nothing to discuss about the past 24 hours over at coinbase.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pazimzadeh 6y ago

Unrelated, but I wonder how much more money Coinbase would make if they took fees in cryptocurrency as opposed to USD during trades.

richardxia 6y ago
They do for crypto-to-crypto trades :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

thehazard 6y ago

Migrated to Gemini recently. Much happier.

pk455 6y ago
I'm curious, what big pluses have you found on Gemini vs. Coinbase?

obilgic 6y ago

might be a good indicator of the short term top

christiansakai 6y ago

I am really really curious, who are selling the Bitcoins? If you see the price these days, the conventional wisdom is to HODL, but lo and behold, there are sellers. Who are these people? How did they get so many Bitcoins and why are they selling?

waynesonfire 6y ago
Its a gamble at every price point. You're seeing the price go up because of what you're suggesting until it reaches a point where someone is happy to part with their coins.
- christiansakai 6y ago
  but isn't that price means there are people who sell on that price?
brokencode 6y ago
It’s funny calling the prevailing opinions on (I’m assuming) online crypto investment communities as “conventional wisdom”. These sites are filled with garbage information from teenagers. Many investors in the space will sell when it’s high, and buy when it’s low. This is a highly speculative investment, and shouldn’t be treated like stocks or other investments. You hold a diversified portfolio of stocks because companies on average will eventually will grow or pay a dividend. Crypto though? It could easily crash and never return at any time, and has crashed dramatically multiple times before.
- christiansakai 6y ago
  well I'm just generalizing about assets in general. I don't believe in Bitcoin but I want to know who are selling these Bitcoins in large numbers?
  - brokencode 6y ago
    As mentioned in my previous response, many investors will see the recent spike and decide to sell to lock in their profits, since the investment is extremely risky and could crash at any time. When an investment goes up hundreds of percent in a single year, that raises a lot of red flags amongst many investors about the potential for a crash. This type of gain is just not normal in investing.

reaktion 6y ago

My long-time account has been locked down since November - their automated identity verification tool random stopped working for me, and I haven't been able to get any meaningful support. I've opened multiple tickets but had no meaningful response from support. Completely unacceptable for a platform that's handling my money. So this type of recurring outage doesn't surprise me at all.

v64 6y ago
I've seen others have success complaining on the Coinbase subreddit [1]. It's run by Coinbase staff and they seem to respond better there than the ticketing system. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/
- reaktion 6y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. I sent a direct message to coinbasesupport from that subreddit three weeks ago and never received a response - public shaming must really be the only way to get traction. Which again is completely unacceptable!
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Just as a heads up, in the stickied post there is information about what the "rules" are for the subreddit. This is the third paragraph from there (https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/gbjetq/welcome_to_rcoinbase_help_helpcoinbasecom/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/comments/gbjetq/welcome_to...): > If posting for assistance please provide your case number in your post. Moderators will only respond to PMs that have been requested in a post, and unsolicited DMs to individual moderators and chat requests will not receive a response. Maybe if you try to create a normal post, you can get help faster.
mumbisChungo 6y ago
This is beside the point, but unless you're using your fiat onramp provider to actively trade you should strongly consider being personally responsible for the custody of your crypto assets.

josh_carterPDX 6y ago

It's becoming increasingly frustrating that a platform meant to make it easier to trade crypto can go down so frequently. It leads to more skepticism by mainstream entities when Coinbase is their only experience into the cryptocurrency market. I echo the other comments here that they need to figure out their stability issues prior to their IPO. There's no way they can go public with such a poorly run platform. And I say all of this as someone that is an active user of Coinbase.

ur-whale 6y ago

Coinbase has historically been unstable during price fluctuations. Here are some possible explanations: 1. Conspiration theory #1:They somehow benefit from the instability. 2. Hanlon's razor, which means they need to replace their SRE team. 3. Conspiration theory #2: someone attacks them and somehow manages to benefit from the downtime (eg by creating a shortlived arbitrage opportunity).

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

All I know is that Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. -- regularly experience "connectivity issues" <g>... If a currency relies on a network to support it, that currency is only as good as the underlying network... In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency... Here, watch this, a Rick and Morty cartoon segment that will explain it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I (Disclaimer: I do not endorse any messages of violence that this Rick and Morty cartoon segment may imply. There's a quote in the Bible (and I am not a particularly religious man or anything!), and that quote is "Be ye as wise as serpents, yet as gentle as doves". I am not a particularly religious man or anything -- but I take that particular quote to heart! <g>)

capableweb 6y ago
> In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency... Many of us agree with that, hence it would be preferable that cryptocurrencies were the standard, not country-currencies. In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin ends up being more resistant and durable than the many ledgers each country runs themselves. Or in other words, if you trust in Bitcoin, use it directly, not via Coinbase. As peter_d_sherman said: "currency is only as good as the underlying network" For example, what would happen to the Turkish lira if the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey burned down and somehow couldn't restore data from backups? With Bitcoin and others, the risk is much lower from central failure. Although individual failure risk is much higher. Tradeoffs.

joeblau 6y ago

Can’t panic sell! Kraken also having problems. Coinbase crashing is how I know if the bull market is really here.