| OP said this: > After not paying attention to cryptocurrency for a few years and then opening a Coinbase account earlier this year, I was SHOCKED how fast and easy everything was. I read this as having just created the account and impressed by the platform, not a comparison between the past and now shrug They've definitely done tons of work to try and address scaling problems, have solved many and will continue to do so, but it's not like you just "solve" scaling once and never have to think about it again. The scale they are seeing now is nothing like they saw in previous runs, so it's always new milestones, something new breaks and then something else to fix. There's also been a lack of a clear vision from engineering leadership at the top for many years which hasn't helped either. > We recently know that Coinbase has had bad behavior of manipulating the price and find a measly $6 million for market manipulation, so it seems not outside their character. My understanding of this is that a couple of internal systems accidentally interacted in a way that was later deemed bad, not an intentional manipulation. And when the COO noticed this action was taken to replace the system with a version that fixed this issue [0]. This was in 2015-2018 when they company was significantly smaller with less expertise on that front. If this had had a significant impact on consumers I would expect to see a larger fine, but I'm not at all well informed on the topic. Having worked at various startups, the old adage of "don't ascribe malice to what can be explained by incompetence" resonates with me. You so regularly see wild speculation happening on the outside when inside you're just like "wtf that was just a bug, not some grand conspiracy". I expect that this issue falls under that category, lack of knowledge rather than part of their "character" [0] https://decrypt.co/62155/coinbase-fined-6-5-million-over-tra... |
If you have a link to a writeup provided by the SEC's investigation outlying this as an accident - I'd like to see that.
Plausible deniability is used by bad actors, and the existence of investors investing in founders who will do anything to protect their investment isn't a myth - it gets discussed a few times per year in threads on HN and Reddit.