There was a 4 hour stretch this morning in which Bitcoin lost over 20% of its value. In the last 45 minutes it is up 13%. I wonder what a long straddle would cost on this thing.
Bitcoin has recovered from dips really well in the past weeks due to major buy pressure. Unfortunately GDAX (and Coinbase), Gemini, and other exchanges all went down at the same time this time around, making it impossible to buy the dip.
Not sure about this incident, but I recall there was an incident earlier this year or late last year where there was major price action and evidence of someone DDOS'ing some exchanges.
And if not DDOS, it's entirely possible that these exchanges are not able to handle the rush of people logging in to buy the dip. I don't think any of these exchanges have the throughput of something like NASDAQ, not yet anyway.
Crypto is a really really new market —- expect exchanges to go down, have flash crashes, be complicit in manipulation, have terrible customer services, and maybe even lose customer funds.
I have seen comments that there is sometimes heavy DDOS attacks on the various bitcoin exchanges during intense price movements. Don't know much beyond that.
with Coinbase, the best I could do is buy @ 9400 and sell @ 9800 ...lost money because of their bad servers (for some reason downtime only happens when Bitcoin's value drops a lot)
Not sure why you are being downvoted - very precisely (and probably accurately) conveyed what was happening. What are the chances of all these exchanges having trouble at the same time? I'd really like to see postmortem on this.
There are various, arguably valid, orthogonal aspects that motivated the technology behind distributed ledgers. And when those utopian dreams are subjected to the cold hard facts (of this world) it elicits a non-rational response. That is the positive view of this group-mind phenomena. The negative view would posit that voices that point out that "the emperor has no clothes" can derail what very much appears to be a pyramid scheme.