Definitely an omen, this has been occurring frequently recently. When bitcoin inevitably collapses as the hype subsides, its highly likely that Coinbase will go down due to the overwhelming amount of users all trying to sell on the exchange at the same time. Can easily see a situation where bitcoin loses 50% in a single day and people are not able to get out by selling their coins.
Coinbase temporarily disabled my buying last week when I tried to link my bank account in GDAX and it error'ed out twice. Their support continues to be abysmally unresponsive.
I'd say try keeping that pop up open after you upload...even though it says it will email you the results. It may or may not work for you - could be a coincidence for me. On my 3rd day of trying I just kept it open and got an email a few minutes later saying I'm verified.
At some point, even for a moment, exchanges serve as a wallet. Ideally you'd only have coins there long enough to trade, but many users make it their long-term storage. (Myself I generally buy on Gemini and transfer to Trezor)
(to be fair, there is a fee each time you move in and out of an exchange)
All the popular exchanges are facing scaling issues: I know about Poloniex, Coinbase, Bittrex, bitfinex.
It's all because of the higher and higher interest in bitcoin and crypto currency in general. Even CBOE had issues earlier today when they launched their futures, even though they were not doing active tradings and have many more years of experience (and time to scale).
There are interesting times ahead. Something we've never seen before in the history of humanity. Not even the internet was so disrupting as the blockchain technologies will become.
> Not even the internet was so disrupting as the blockchain technologies will become.
The internet was a paradigm shift for how we communicate. It seems like blockchains are just sort of an opportunity to do things a different way.
From my perspective the main advantage of the blockchain is zero-trust transactions. Everything that can be done on the blockchain can be done easier/better off the blockchain as long as you choose to trust someone.
And currently from my perspective, no one is seriously using a blockchain for anything but speculation.
In your opinion, what makes the blockchain comparable or more influential to the internet?
If 20% of bitcoin miners 'wasted' block space with a very high minimum transaction fee to drive up average transaction fees you get a huge problem. (This could actually be a net gain depending on the demand curve.)
If you look at the actual block chain there are many empty blocks so this is less theoretical than you might assume.
Another attack is if you get say 40% of miners to block transactions for a specific company you could create a lot of issues for them at minimal costs.
The rest of the finance industry if we stop trading for 20 minutes it is a very big deal, and is considered absolutely unacceptable from both a business and regulatory perspective. I don't see why crypto exchanges shouldn't have the same expectations to deal with.
(1) Nevermind the fact that BitCoin is only 10 years old, whereas financial markets are two orders of magnitude older.
(2) Equities+bonds trade less than 8 hours a day, no more than 5 days a week in most markets. BitCoin is a 24/7 marketplace. Not exactly apples-apples.
(3) You are comparing a company (CoinBase) with an industry (financial equities market-making). If it's "unacceptable", the company's reputation will pay a price and they may be sued by regulators and/or AGs.
(4) As late as last week, Gary Cohen stated that the WH is going to be hands-off of BitCoin for now, so there is no "regulatory perspective" unless (presumably) there is actual provable fraud or their stance changes.
(5) "absolutely unacceptable" is what a significant portion of US voters thought of the financial and automotive bailouts, yet they still happened and the people swallowed it. At least CoinBase is a voluntary contract with their end-user.
While I don't take issue with the spirit of your comment, and I tend to agree with it, I found myself thinking about it a little bit -- that is, the differences between the world of finance and the world of Cryptocurrency.
The reality is that while they feel related, they have enough subtle differences that comparisons fall apart. The world of finance is one of the most heavily regulated worlds, around[0]. It's also something that touches every one of our lives whether we want it to or not. Crypto-exchanges, on the other hand, are very lightly regulated (or not at all -- even to the point where Coinbase doesn't send 1099s and the IRS is having to figure out exactly what to do with them). The light regulation has led to things like people losing their entire wallets -- often with no recourse -- when they're held by third parties (and sometimes first- parties, but that's nobody's fault but the hacker and the individual who failed to protect his wallet properly).
Part of this is government not having caught up[1] but I'd like to think that part of it is the fact that cryptocurrency is a financial vehicle that doesn't compare well to other parts of finance. In some ways it's a lot like cash -- I lose it, it's gone and there's little that I can do about that. It also can be anonymous like cash. It, however, has the portability (is that the right word?) of a regulated account held by a bank (credit/checking/savings)[2].
Those who don't feel that privacy is important in financial transactions[4] will argue for regulating it similarly to other forms of banking and with that will either come more robust systems (because failure to provide said systems will result in fines/loss of licenses) or the collapse of the whole thing[3]. On the flip side, with values as high as they are, the probability that someone will set a new standard of uptime and security (along with insurance of account holdings) as a matter of pure capitalistic competition is also a strong possibility, but things are way too young to know with any degree of certainty where that will fall.
And then there's the issue of the value of privacy[6] to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Would regulating it to acquire the reliability required from a business perspective result in the elimination of the value that cryptocurrency offers (assuming, as I would assume, that regulation would include elimination/penalizing anything short of the lack-of-privacy offered by traditional financial instruments).
I'm in the "bubble" camp (and have been for 4 years ... so, in other words, I've been wrong for at least 4 years). I find all of this fascinating from more than just an "I love crypto" side of things. Economic behavior is supposed to avoid things with efficiency problems like this, not reward them (and obscenely at that), but that's what's happened. What does that say about the economic state and choices available to the average person?[7] On the one hand, it could say that crypto-currency has filled a need (and I think regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of "it's a net good/net bad thing", you can't ignore this fact -- these aren't baseball cards -- they're worse -- they're bits in a distributed database). On the other hand, it speaks to there being something very wrong with how money is regulated, or finance is handled as a whole if these same bits are the single best investment you could have made among any of your choices in the last 8 years or so. If, for instance, I want to be a day trader, I need to have $25,000 available. If I want to investigate a privately held company for investment, there are similar financial requirements. If I want to trade BTC for ETH for PIRL for XMR for ZEC and do so over a period of minutes (well, maybe longer in the case of BTC), I don't need to ask for permission. While those regulations are there to protect ignor...
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] threadHA! I was being sarcastic. Good one! Thanks!
(to be fair, there is a fee each time you move in and out of an exchange)
It's all because of the higher and higher interest in bitcoin and crypto currency in general. Even CBOE had issues earlier today when they launched their futures, even though they were not doing active tradings and have many more years of experience (and time to scale).
There are interesting times ahead. Something we've never seen before in the history of humanity. Not even the internet was so disrupting as the blockchain technologies will become.
The internet was a paradigm shift for how we communicate. It seems like blockchains are just sort of an opportunity to do things a different way.
From my perspective the main advantage of the blockchain is zero-trust transactions. Everything that can be done on the blockchain can be done easier/better off the blockchain as long as you choose to trust someone.
And currently from my perspective, no one is seriously using a blockchain for anything but speculation.
In your opinion, what makes the blockchain comparable or more influential to the internet?
If you look at the actual block chain there are many empty blocks so this is less theoretical than you might assume.
Another attack is if you get say 40% of miners to block transactions for a specific company you could create a lot of issues for them at minimal costs.
(2) Equities+bonds trade less than 8 hours a day, no more than 5 days a week in most markets. BitCoin is a 24/7 marketplace. Not exactly apples-apples.
(3) You are comparing a company (CoinBase) with an industry (financial equities market-making). If it's "unacceptable", the company's reputation will pay a price and they may be sued by regulators and/or AGs.
(4) As late as last week, Gary Cohen stated that the WH is going to be hands-off of BitCoin for now, so there is no "regulatory perspective" unless (presumably) there is actual provable fraud or their stance changes.
(5) "absolutely unacceptable" is what a significant portion of US voters thought of the financial and automotive bailouts, yet they still happened and the people swallowed it. At least CoinBase is a voluntary contract with their end-user.
edit: I derped on how old BitCoin is now
The reality is that while they feel related, they have enough subtle differences that comparisons fall apart. The world of finance is one of the most heavily regulated worlds, around[0]. It's also something that touches every one of our lives whether we want it to or not. Crypto-exchanges, on the other hand, are very lightly regulated (or not at all -- even to the point where Coinbase doesn't send 1099s and the IRS is having to figure out exactly what to do with them). The light regulation has led to things like people losing their entire wallets -- often with no recourse -- when they're held by third parties (and sometimes first- parties, but that's nobody's fault but the hacker and the individual who failed to protect his wallet properly).
Part of this is government not having caught up[1] but I'd like to think that part of it is the fact that cryptocurrency is a financial vehicle that doesn't compare well to other parts of finance. In some ways it's a lot like cash -- I lose it, it's gone and there's little that I can do about that. It also can be anonymous like cash. It, however, has the portability (is that the right word?) of a regulated account held by a bank (credit/checking/savings)[2].
Those who don't feel that privacy is important in financial transactions[4] will argue for regulating it similarly to other forms of banking and with that will either come more robust systems (because failure to provide said systems will result in fines/loss of licenses) or the collapse of the whole thing[3]. On the flip side, with values as high as they are, the probability that someone will set a new standard of uptime and security (along with insurance of account holdings) as a matter of pure capitalistic competition is also a strong possibility, but things are way too young to know with any degree of certainty where that will fall.
And then there's the issue of the value of privacy[6] to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Would regulating it to acquire the reliability required from a business perspective result in the elimination of the value that cryptocurrency offers (assuming, as I would assume, that regulation would include elimination/penalizing anything short of the lack-of-privacy offered by traditional financial instruments).
I'm in the "bubble" camp (and have been for 4 years ... so, in other words, I've been wrong for at least 4 years). I find all of this fascinating from more than just an "I love crypto" side of things. Economic behavior is supposed to avoid things with efficiency problems like this, not reward them (and obscenely at that), but that's what's happened. What does that say about the economic state and choices available to the average person?[7] On the one hand, it could say that crypto-currency has filled a need (and I think regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of "it's a net good/net bad thing", you can't ignore this fact -- these aren't baseball cards -- they're worse -- they're bits in a distributed database). On the other hand, it speaks to there being something very wrong with how money is regulated, or finance is handled as a whole if these same bits are the single best investment you could have made among any of your choices in the last 8 years or so. If, for instance, I want to be a day trader, I need to have $25,000 available. If I want to investigate a privately held company for investment, there are similar financial requirements. If I want to trade BTC for ETH for PIRL for XMR for ZEC and do so over a period of minutes (well, maybe longer in the case of BTC), I don't need to ask for permission. While those regulations are there to protect ignor...