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Coinbase Shows Balance as 0
- kulor 3y agoI got quite the fright thinking someone had cleared out my account.
- frabjoused 3y agoYeah, it took them about 10-15 mins to report it on their status page despite already trending on Twitter and downdetector having 8,000 reports.
- crayboff 3y agoTbf getting all of the engineers and leadership online to figure out what is going on, write and authorize a public statement is a pretty quick turnaround
- chefandy 3y agoDon't use coinbase, but this seems like the sort of thing they'd stick a warning about in a flash message on the account page itself. "We've recieved reports of our page incorrectly reporting account balances. Please standby for more info..." Maybe there's some useful procedure in place preventing them from doing that quickly? Seems like something most sites with authentication would have? I usually build it into my front-ends... it doesn't have to look good (if you're running a reliable site, anyway,) it just has to be visible.
- woobar 3y agoThey did exactly this. I see $0 balance and big red banner on top with the same message as on the status page. EDIT: looks like a scaling issue. Refreshed the page and balance reappeared. Refreshed again and it is gone, but the chart below with the balance history still has correct data.
- chefandy 3y agoAh, ok that makes more sense, especially because this would almost certainly trigger a whole lot of people logging in on every device they have to make sure it wasn't a device artifact, and maybe the APIs/systems were both affected by the same problem. My gut says an investment platform should have a more fault resistant messaging system, but I can't think of a reasonable fundamental security or stability threat they'd face without one, so maybe that money was better spent in other areas. Edit: Entirely theoretical, but I wonder if there's a bank-run sort of threat for a financial institution getting communication about a system like this wrong enough.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sarcasmatwork 3y agoNot the first time this has happened. 2022 during super bowl. Seems like they have scaling issues....
- latchkey 3y agoIt has been happening since 2014.
- ignorantguy 3y agoyes. happening to me too!! they updated their website with the incident.
- mvdtnz 3y ago"Your assets are safe," generally the last thing you hear from these grifters before your assets disappear completely.
- frabjoused 3y agoTinfoil is unnecessary, Bitcoin hit 64k, all the retail investors are seeing the news and logging in.
- orhmeh09 3y agoThis doesn't seem like a sensible reason to show a 0 balance, but maybe I haven't worked in enterprise enough.
- frabjoused 3y agoMy guess: the API is down, so the client attempts to get all coins and their balance and add them up. Because the API errors, no coins are returned, therefore the balance is 0. It's a bad design because its alarming, and I'm fairly sure they're going to change it after this.
- Hugsun 3y agoIt could well be errors caused by an overloaded system.
- eole666 3y agoWell, bitforex is offline since february 23th after a 57 millions withdrawal.. So coinbase going down wouldn't be that suprising : https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/02/26/bitforex-website-goes-dark-amid-reported-57m-outflow/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/02/26/bitforex-websit...
- hooverd 3y agoHey, this is Coinbase, not Binance.
- 3y ago
- Mistletoe 3y agoBitcoin is ripping upwards, this is just how Coinbase works.
- kulor 3y agoHopefully Coinbase learns from this to add a "Sorry we're experiencing issues" screen rather than showing the wrong data.
- hooverd 3y agoCrypto exchanges love having technical difficulties during sell-offs.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoThat makes no sense. Exchanges make their money when people trade. Sell offs are by nature high volume days. To boot internet play money is on a rip up 8 percent in 24 hour to near ath.
- DANmode 3y agoThis ignores their own holdings.
- jcranmer 3y agoHonest exchanges make most of their money when people trade (whether directly, via transaction frees, or indirectly, via selling order flow information or whatnot). But many cryptocurrency exchanges seem to be dipping into their customers' accounts to make speculative gambles and are consequently often illiquid (if not just plain insolvent) during market routs.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoFair enough. I also didn’t see the quick fall today before responding. The one true thing about crypto is it will move thousands of dollars to invalidate any comment daily.
- oldstrangers 3y agoFeel like a large portion of your responsibility as a financial institution should be reliability and uptime. This is just cartoonishly bad.
- Johnny555 3y agoBugs and mistakes happen, even with traditional banks: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2023/10/10/wells-fargo-customers-report-online-account-balance-problems/ https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2023/10/10/wells-fargo-customer...
- oldstrangers 3y agoYeah, and the same logic applies to traditional banks. You control billions of dollars, your threshold for mistakes is very small. And this isn't a case of "bugs or mistakes", it's a case of being underprepared.
- Johnny555 3y agoAnd this isn't a case of "bugs or mistakes", it's a case of being underprepared. How is this not either a bug in their software/systems or some mistake? Does being "prepared" mean 100% availability/uptime? Even very mission critical systems like the Sabre system that powers many of the world's airlines can't maintain 100% uptime indefinitely. I think regulators should be much more concerned with integrity than uptime. Losing temporary access to my account balance is bad, but not nearly as bad as the bank showing an incorrect balance.
- oldstrangers 3y agoBecause they've had multiple years and billions of dollars to build out their infrastructure. They got crushed during the Super Bowl and had a very clear example of what they needed to fix. An inability to handle traffic isn't a mistake, it's a strategic failure. There's an important distinction there. Additionally, you should be more critical of the institutions that make billions of dollars off your money. This isn't a small local business deserving our patience and understanding. It's a $50b company acting as the financial backbone for digital currency.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoCoinbase has suspicious crypto hedging. As a market maker, during huge crypto moves, generally to the upside, they have "outages". Its not that much different than robinhood shutting off GME trading. Behind the scenes Robin Hood likely got caught levered on the wrong side
- sram1337 3y ago> Coinbase has suspicious crypto hedging Any source on this? I've never heard that > during huge crypto moves, generally to the upside, they have "outages" Price increase -> increased web traffic -> outage
- DANmode 3y ago"Behind the scenes", Robinhood's broker/the DTCC casually flashed a revolver from under the table. https://qz.com/2184431/robinhood-nearly-defaulted-during-the-gamestop-short-squeeze https://qz.com/2184431/robinhood-nearly-defaulted-during-the...
- cs702 3y agoBitcoin's price jumped past $60K today. I'd imagine traffic to Coinbase's servers looks like this: | | | | _/\ /\_/\ _| \/\/ \/ ----- time ---->
- frabjoused 3y agoGoogle trends has Bitcoin searches at 4x where it was 24 hours ago.
- justinzollars 3y agoHa. Nice!
- novateg 3y agothe issue has been fixed
- simultsop 3y agodoes not look like that
- ignorantguy 3y agoyeah it comes and goes. saw my assets show up and now they are not.
- webXL 3y agoPerhaps people should get off these me-too-coin casinos and just self-custody their bitcoin if they are serious about saving.
- whynotminot 3y agoThe amount of friends I have with non-trivial amounts of bitcoin they are unable to access anymore due to “self custody” says this isn’t always the best idea either. I don’t know what a good idea is when it comes to storing your bitcoin. But if you’re gonna go with one of the major players, at this time, Coinbase seems relatively safest.
- webXL 3y agoOdds are they lost access because they didn't treat it as something really valuable. A good idea is to learn how to safely store and backup your keys (plural). If you allow others to hold your bitcoin, particularly a large one that could easily be nationalized, you're playing with fire.
- Filligree 3y agoI've got a couple thousand bitcoin in self-custody, mined out of curiosity a couple days after Satoshi's initial announcement. The key is of course lost, but not to worry; I printed it out on a sheet of paper, which I buried in the garden of my dead grandmother's home. It's underneath the chicken coop. Anyone want to go digging?
- webXL 3y agoSure, let's go!
- codegeek 3y agoI never understood Coinbase but then I am also a dummy when it comes to crypto in general and never understood it. But coinbase, isn't it a centralized service that sort of defeats the purpose of crypto/bitcoin which is supposed to be decentralized ?
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoCorrect. You trade security for convenience.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoWell…” convenience “ isn’t exactly being delivered at the moment!
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoYes, it’s utterly nonsensical if you truly believe in the original goals of Bitcoin.
- jrockway 3y agoI mean, it's for speculators speculating on the price. Crypto is too volatile to use as a currency. Like would you buy a pizza with your NVDA shares? No. You just hold them in the brokerage and turn them into cash when the price meets your target. People are using Coinbase to do exactly that with crypto.
- jxf 3y agoGitHub is also a centralized service that defeats the purpose of using decentralized technology. People will use centralized services when they contribute value in excess of the loss of value from being less decentralized.
- codegeek 3y agoI donno. With Github, I still have my source code somewhere stored locally. With coinbase, you are at their mercy because doing finance things is not that easy. Again, I think crypto/bitcoin is stupid but its just me may be.
- dustedcodes 3y agoFunny how every time an event happens where people would probably love to sell BTC and cash out these oh-so-great crypto marketplaces always have some issues why customers can't cash out on mass. It's so predictable at this point it's crazy how it's not criminally investigated yet.
- boringg 3y agoYou suggesting this has echoes of robinhood?
- kirse 3y agoYea I've switched to calling them "CoinBS" for this reason, and I've been with them since the GDAX days. Between the suspiciously inconvenient outages during market volatility and their forced switch-over to Plaid for bank account verification (during which they unlinked my previously verified accounts), I'm pretty much fed up with their absolute garbage customer experience over the past 3-4 years. Problem is Binance is not any better either. If someone rolled out a boutique crypto exchange that offers a quality customer experience & phone support similar to TDA/ThinkOrSwim I would gladly sign up in a second.
- deadbunny 3y agoI mean it seems to only be Coinbase. Hard to imply conspiracy when 1 site is having issues out of many.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DANmode 3y agoBelieve it was named in at least one complaint against them by the government.
- latchkey 3y agoAll of the decentralized exchanges have been running just fine. Once you onboard fiat -> crypto, there is no excuse to use coinbase any longer unless you want to go crypto -> fiat. If you really want to sell to fiat during a bull market where centralized exchanges are failing, sell to a stablecoin of your choice and wait until things calm down for a bit to convert that to fiat.
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoI have no idea why people use Coinbase. They charge exorbitant fees and will lock your account at the drop of hat if you try to cash out.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI use it b/c some vendors accept btc, and they do an easy payment option. The discount for using btc outweighs the fees.
- andrewljohnson 3y agoIt's because it's a great place to HODL for me, since they seem vastly more secure than all the sites that have gone down in thievery and flames over the years. I think it'd be disingenuous to suggest that there is any safer place to hold crypto, given they are publicly traded, have excellent engineers, have insurance, etc. I even think it's more likely I'd fuck up personally custodying my crypto than letting Coinbase hold it. I've had friends lose so much money trying to keep their crypto in private wallets and on shady exchanges.
- xbmcuser 3y agoBitcoin liquidated 8% in an hour. Likely someone closed a very large position. But the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that they shorted at the high stopped their users from selling. Now many users would panic sell their long positions after being down 5-8%. And coinbase closes its short position.
- mattlondon 3y agoIt is showing zero for me in Eth but I don't have any BTC.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chrisjj 3y ago> getting all of the engineers and leadership online to figure out what is going on We've seen nothing suggesting they've figured out what is going on.
- ignorantguy 3y agolooks like they are back now.
- beambot 3y agoNot your keys...
- AureliusMA 3y agonot your coins!
- mvdtnz 3y agoI wondered why this story rapidly disappeared from the front page then I remembered Coinbase is a ycombinator company.
- im3w1l 3y agoHN has a long history of impartiality on ycombinator matters, so I don't think such accusations should be made without evidence of a pattern of it happening consistently.
- kulor 3y agoAs the OP, I had the same thought and conflict of interest assumption. It has made me query the moderation as you could squint and class it as low-quality content, however, I feel (agnostic of being the OP) it's highly relevant news to the HN audience.
- DANmode 3y agoI agree. Many would not. Anything cryptocurrency news can be flagged, depending on time of day.