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by throwaway12351 3102 days ago
Does anyone else find it highly suspicious that Coinbase goes down whenever there is any major movement in prices?

You can explain this as just the natural result of too much traffic, but that's not convincing. This is a business valued at over 1 billion dollars that has been operating for years. If this is still a problem, it's either unbelievable incompetence, or because they see no reason to fix it.

And here is a worst-case theory, by way of speculation not accusation. Being down whenever there is a lot of movement lets them beat all of their customers. When there is a crash, they can sell before their customers can. When there is a boom, they can buy before before their customers can. And because such a big portion of the market trades through them, this is more than trivial gains.

I have no way of knowing if this is what's happening, but it seems to be worthy of discussion, given how many people are placing trust in them. They don't really have an adequate explanation for the constant downtime, and I think they owe one to their customers.

7 comments

They aren't frontrunning their customers. Their whole brand is being the one trustworthy option in a world of scammers; they already make a fuckload of money off of transaction fees, no reason to throw out that trust and ruin their cash cow. It's just a scaling problem, turns out it's hard to make Ruby on Rails handle their needs.
They could be doing it to make up shortfalls in their own BTC holdings relative holdings promised to customers, either in actual quantity, or in price actually acquired vs. price paid by the customer.
& MongoDB
They're already earning million's USD per day [0]. I doubt that they would risk that lucrative business by doing something illegal as front-running. That being said, they really should fix the performance of their platform. Yesterday they reduced their API rate limits to be able to handle the load. That's just annoying for traders.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/#gdax

24h volume = $2,179,471,700 x 0.25% commission = $5,448,679.25 revenue (per day)

Has it ever been tested in court that the laws that make various forms of trading halts a tool to protect fairness in conventional markets can be reliably applied to an exchange of virtual toy tokens? Overloaded front-end servers that stall the bulk of sell orders while willing buyers get through to be matched with "preferred sellers" using lots of careful handholding seems very likely to me in a bitcoin panic, it could happen without any premeditated ill intent at all.
The track record of billion dollar companies building working software is not exactly impeccable.
The word for this is called front running.
They have shut down numerous times when there is large (usually downward trending) volatility. It is very suspicious. This has been happening for years now.
And yet there's nothing you can do about it unless you can prove they did it for personal gain; they operate a service outside the requirements given to e.g. the NYSE, and you the consumer agree to that risk by giving them your money.
So long as they don't actively mess with customer owned BTC (as in: only stall transaction orders, not outright take them away if that is even possible) I would not even be sure that provable personal gains would be courtroom material. (At least for and user vs exchange company, not for exchange company vs employee)
According to Twitter, they're in the ballpark of 500k concurrent users.
It is called "separation of fools and their money". This was popular before SEC showed up. It seems crypto-clowns refuse to learn from others and insist on re-learning the lessons