The number mentioned for the record is wrong: Coinbase has added 100k users in a day, it is not adding 100k users per day [0]. That’s not evening considering the number of users who may be fraudulent, they are hiring [1].
Down? They've had tons of money and time since June[1] to scale up to handle much larger volume. They don't have a real excuse for these major outages. I got a recruiter email but didn't want to go near them because of how flaky they apparently are.
(Gemini has been much better but they went down for a lot of today too.)
This is (as someone who hasn't played around with bitcoin much) something I've been curious about. How easy is it to get significant amounts of bitcoin turned into cash? This is particularly applicable at a moment like the present. If I had, say, 25 bitcoins that I wanted to trade into dollars _right now_ what hurdles stand in my way, and how long would it take to clear them?
There are liquidation limits on the exchanges. I think Coinbase limits to $10k USD in exchange for your Bitcoins. You can get increases by providing additional identity verification. IRS is way up in Coinbase’s business since this is essentially a huge potential avenue for laundering and tax evasion.
So it might be that bitcoin is rising and rising ever more not just because owners are bullish on future development but also because some of those who are not are disallowed from selling? Best store of value ever, backed by inability to sell.
That’s certainly possible, however I suspect many of them just keep watching their money go up (at least for now). If really motivated you can find other ways to sell like LocalBitcoins, it’s just not as convenient as pressing the “sell” button.
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NgvD2kFT69mSXuJPzPDu...
[1] https://www.coinbase.com/careers/923993