When I was applying to Coinbase, the interviews were heavily biased against people using low level data structures to write efficient code.
On my first interview I used C++, and it was very hard to pass their expectiations (the interviewer didn't know C++, so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language).
I switched to Ruby for the next rounds, and got through easily.
Then I went to their beautiful office, I loved the people and the culture there, but didn't code fast enough to join the startup (which I'm happy about...startup mindset is not for me).
I think it's all about whether you belong to a company or not. As I wrote, it's great that I wasn't accepted to Coinbase, as I wasn't a good fit (even though I was and still is a huge Bitcoin fan).
In another interview at a quant hedge fund I had a lot of fun talking to the interviewers (even the CEO) about low level data structures, and I got some tricky questions about the CPU that I really liked.
This sounds like a good thing for Coinbase IMO. An instinct to reach for low-level data structures and static typing to solve ambiguous or fast-changing business problems is usually a red flag for premature abstraction and sometimes also correlates with attitudes of superiority or looking down on other possible technology choices.
I don’t know if they treated you fairly or not, but the policy at least of appraising an instinctual reach for low level C++ as a negative sounds correct to me and should be a much more widely used heuristic in software hiring.
I was up with you in the first 1.5 sentences. Genuinely, I expected the comment to be about the need for very strict security in a financial codebase, and C++ is a known tool, that enables shooting yourself in a foot.
But then you started talking about static typing as negative, and suggesting to move fast and break things for a company, that probably hadles trillions in assets.
I opposed static typing because I favor safety, not oppose it. Type system designs prevent solving those problems.
Most of my career has been focused on helping large companies use Python to achieve as-fast-as-C performance with extremely little code and extremely safety-focused non-OOP software architectures, including in high frequency trading (where I built a company’s entire core trading platform in Cython).
The idea that static typing leads to safety is false. Static typing adds more code, more code is more liability. The cost of that liability is not recouped with any offsetting benefits.
I was specificially asking to work on the exchange trading backend, as that's what I was interested in. It was at a time when Coinbase was using javascript for the trading engine if I recall correctly (I think they moved to C++ since then, but not sure).
When I applied to a quantitative hedge fund, I was being asked questions about synchronizing data structures between threads without using mutexes (again not something you often do in a high level language). I was accepted there, although I couldn't go to work there because of health reasons.
At the end I went back to Google where I had to launch a new machine learning model without introducing even 0.1ms latency in the ads backend. Good luck doing that in a high level language.
Yeah, I was complaining about outages for high volume way back in June 2017. (Unfortunately, the links are relative and no longer point to the specific June events.) It's when I started trading, and why I never finished setting up the account, preferring Gemini.
Edit: lol what a day to say that! For the first time I’m seeing unplanned outages on Gemini.
Usually Coinbase goes down when the price goes down, not up. Probably because a ton of people are trying to sell their bitcoins as soon as the price starts walking downwards.
An old joke among Bitcoin speculators was "All technical analysis in a nutshell is basically: Bitcoin may go down, but Bitcoin may also go up. Time to add a new punchline: On the other hand, we're all sure that Coinbase always goes down.
Bitcoin is one of the rare instruments with inverted skew in its options i.e. volatility is higher when the price is going up. So we would expect outages to be more correlated with price increases than decreases.
Are you kidding me? Kraken is down/laggy even more than coinbase (still think its the best choice for converting fiat to and from btc in europe, but come on :))
I discovered https://cryptowat.ch and thought it was the most polished and feature rich trading UI I had seen for crypto. I later learned this is a Kraken project that works with any exchanges and that they use mostly the same UI for their trade UI. After poking around the UI I was convinced they cared about UI/UX and their fees seemed better and I made the jump. Haven't looked back to Coinbase since.
It's almost funny how un-advanced trading platforms are. Nobody cares because those who manage to get rich on it can live with the limitations, those who get burn simply leave.
Also I think it's admirable that the cryptwat.ch web page is mostly free and ready to use (+ features for some fees) and no where above the fold are they promoting Kraken to funnel users in.
Looks like they just want to make a solid trade UI. In my case I had to know who was behind the tools (I always look for conflict of interest in finance) and fell in love and made the leap.
They even post an actual _comprehensive_ changelog. How often does this happen? Usually it's some product marketing framed blog post.
Every time would have been every day for the past 25 days. Have you been paying attention? They made it exceptionally far this time. People are underestimating how much traffic is occurring right now.
When there's a sudden, significant price burst, they seem to reliably flop. Look around, they have that reputation. It seems they first fail, then scale, so the fact that they first failed on the 16th and have stayed up until now isn't surprising. I'd love to pat them on the back, but this is the same old Coinbase, and with all their means they should surely be able to scale quickly by now.
I am really really curious, who are selling the Bitcoins? If you see the price these days, the conventional wisdom is to HODL, but lo and behold, there are sellers. Who are these people? How did they get so many Bitcoins and why are they selling?
Its a gamble at every price point. You're seeing the price go up because of what you're suggesting until it reaches a point where someone is happy to part with their coins.
It’s funny calling the prevailing opinions on (I’m assuming) online crypto investment communities as “conventional wisdom”. These sites are filled with garbage information from teenagers.
Many investors in the space will sell when it’s high, and buy when it’s low. This is a highly speculative investment, and shouldn’t be treated like stocks or other investments.
You hold a diversified portfolio of stocks because companies on average will eventually will grow or pay a dividend.
Crypto though? It could easily crash and never return at any time, and has crashed dramatically multiple times before.
As mentioned in my previous response, many investors will see the recent spike and decide to sell to lock in their profits, since the investment is extremely risky and could crash at any time.
When an investment goes up hundreds of percent in a single year, that raises a lot of red flags amongst many investors about the potential for a crash. This type of gain is just not normal in investing.
Given the accelerated boom/bust cycle in cryptoland, selling while the price is still at all time high seems like a safe bet. You might miss out on potential gains if the price continues to rise, but it's better than waiting too long and panic selling when the crash comes.
Others who are happy with the gains they have made, and think it's too risky to keep holding. I've got a friend who sold his bitcoin recently to buy a house.
Unlike companies which have revenue as a marker, the bitcoin price seems very speculative, and if you think others might sell at 40k, you might do the same.
> Others who are happy with the gains they have made, and think it's too risky to keep holding. I've got a friend who sold his bitcoin recently to buy a house.
Yeah I'm not surprised about moves like this. 35k+ is when things start to get interesting.
A few years ago I grabbed one at $1,200 and then sold it like 6 months later for around $1,800 because I was like "cool a 50% gain".
If I had held onto it, selling at 35-40k seems reasonable because even after 15% capital gains tax that's enough to live comfortably in the US for an entire year. That's a life changing amount of money.
That's the other factor. At what point do you decide it's gained enough and make sure to cash in?
How many people have the discipline to buy something at $1,000 then watch it increase to $5,000 and not sell if it starts to come back down? Now imagine when it went to $20,000 previously and then back down to $6,000.
There's nothing wrong with cashing out. Can't go broke taking a profit.
I sold bitcoin to pay for Christmas. The downside risk was greater than my perceived upside potential. We might double our money at this point? Triple it? You could do the same with Silver with much less risk.
It is, but what I'm failing to understand is who are the source of Bitcoin. AFAIK the institutions are the biggest consumers now and also hoarding it, so who are the sellers? It can't be retail investors right, I don't think they have the capacity to absorb the demand.
Miners would be one party that get a regular supply of Bitcoins, and have regular bills to pay.
And any other party interested in selling would be particularly loud in publicly exhorting others to HODL, so the conventional wisdom is inherently suspect.
I have a few bitcoins from back when GPU mining was possible. Personally I don't believe it's here to stay, but I know I could be wrong. I have several price benchmarks, as each is hit, I sell off some, locking in the gains. This way if bitcoin goes to zero, at least I've got something out of it.
I wouldn't invest in BTC at this point - although it's a safe long term position, the capital injection required to move the price is pretty high as I think the market cap's around 600 billion. I HODL for now with Ethereum because of the utility factor as I also built a dapp although it's pretty much unusable these days due to gas fees - once those come down I'll starting spending ETH again minting strange ERC-721 tokens for my own amusement.
I've been watching the prices/news/volume recently on crypto generally - and it seems clear a lot of new people are entering right now with a poor understanding of the environment and that creates opportunity in the alt-coins. Look at something like Ripple which if people were informed about current news should be falling off a cliff but still seems to 3rd in market cap and sometimes having rallies that outperform coins that haven't been more or less labeled by the SEC as fraudulent. Although this seems irrational to me, I think understanding those newbie conceptions opens up opportunities for some bigger gains than on Bitcoin - yesterday I decided to buy something that was certainly the days winner on coinbase that went from 5 cents to around 15 cents overnight (tripled in less than 24 hours) and I wasn't totally surprised - it'll probably slow down a little - but still worth holding on.
The reason there was quick money to be made? Investing in something with a low-market cap relative to the others (also easily available on coinbase) - and maybe also a recognition that new buyers might like coins at certain price points. I looked at that coin and I saw the market cap was 30 million dollars (about $50 million behind the next closest on Coinbase), wasn't a total dud and also looked at the volumes of transactions happening on the market as a whole to see there was action happening anywhere and everywhere. I said to myself, if Bitcoin has a market cap of 600 billion, then to move the price 1% requires an additional 6 billion dollars injected there. If you take 1% of that 6 billion, 60 million and it went into that alt-coin (which is just about what happened) - it's a 200% gain overnight. For that to happen with bitcoin it would require 1.2 trillion dollars going in, not likely. Now will I sit on this alt-coin until retirement age versus a BTC? Nope - but in the short term if you're looking for moonshot consider what it really takes to move BTC price.
Aside from general enthusiasm about crypto, you could say people are hanging Ethereum for more utility based purposes these days - defi dapps built on top of the ETH blockchain have been on the rise and creating tokens also on the ETH blockchain that have their own liquidity. So if a token on the ETH blockchain is gaining value and to use that token you'd need Ethereum usually to pay for gas (to power transactions) and pretty much most of the defi boom is taking place on ETH blockchain, so without ETH existing, a lot of those other successful things wouldn't either - more like investing in the Power Company than placing a bet on which company will produce the most lightbulbs (maybe a poor analogy but that's all I've got for now).
The other thing that really drove ETH up recently and maybe I should have bought some then was moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and the rush to fill out the deposit contract. It seemed to just steadily increase from around $300 once people started getting enthusiastic about filling up the Proof of Stake contract getting it around $600. Once it was filled it seemed to kind of stagnate around $500 for a week and then started going bananas again. Part of that goes with the bitcoin rally - seeing a BTC push 40K opens peoples eyes and brings them in - and BTC sometimes outperforms ETH on the day. What I've noticed though when there is a market pullback for crypto, the pull back Bitcoin often seems to exceed that of Ethereum, which holds it's ground more so.
I'd say there are definitely people who believe more in ETH than Bitcoin for informed reasons. Whether they are like me and intend to use it or just think its a good economic bet at 1200 bucks a pop, can't say - but what I said above are definitely things setting ETH apart at this moment.
My long-time account has been locked down since November - their automated identity verification tool random stopped working for me, and I haven't been able to get any meaningful support. I've opened multiple tickets but had no meaningful response from support. Completely unacceptable for a platform that's handling my money. So this type of recurring outage doesn't surprise me at all.
I've seen others have success complaining on the Coinbase subreddit [1]. It's run by Coinbase staff and they seem to respond better there than the ticketing system.
Thanks for the suggestion. I sent a direct message to coinbasesupport from that subreddit three weeks ago and never received a response - public shaming must really be the only way to get traction. Which again is completely unacceptable!
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Maybe if you try to create a normal post, you can get help faster.
This is beside the point, but unless you're using your fiat onramp provider to actively trade you should strongly consider being personally responsible for the custody of your crypto assets.
It's becoming increasingly frustrating that a platform meant to make it easier to trade crypto can go down so frequently. It leads to more skepticism by mainstream entities when Coinbase is their only experience into the cryptocurrency market. I echo the other comments here that they need to figure out their stability issues prior to their IPO. There's no way they can go public with such a poorly run platform. And I say all of this as someone that is an active user of Coinbase.
Coinbase has historically been unstable during price fluctuations.
Here are some possible explanations:
1. Conspiration theory #1:They somehow benefit from the instability.
2. Hanlon's razor, which means they need to replace their SRE team.
3. Conspiration theory #2: someone attacks them and somehow manages to benefit from the downtime (eg by creating a shortlived arbitrage opportunity).
> In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency...
Many of us agree with that, hence it would be preferable that cryptocurrencies were the standard, not country-currencies. In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin ends up being more resistant and durable than the many ledgers each country runs themselves.
Or in other words, if you trust in Bitcoin, use it directly, not via Coinbase. As peter_d_sherman said: "currency is only as good as the underlying network"
For example, what would happen to the Turkish lira if the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey burned down and somehow couldn't restore data from backups? With Bitcoin and others, the risk is much lower from central failure. Although individual failure risk is much higher. Tradeoffs.
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadOn my first interview I used C++, and it was very hard to pass their expectiations (the interviewer didn't know C++, so he couldn't appreciate the effort of me using a low level language).
I switched to Ruby for the next rounds, and got through easily.
Then I went to their beautiful office, I loved the people and the culture there, but didn't code fast enough to join the startup (which I'm happy about...startup mindset is not for me).
I don't think impressing an interviewer is a good reason to pick a language for leetcode type questions..
In another interview at a quant hedge fund I had a lot of fun talking to the interviewers (even the CEO) about low level data structures, and I got some tricky questions about the CPU that I really liked.
I don’t know if they treated you fairly or not, but the policy at least of appraising an instinctual reach for low level C++ as a negative sounds correct to me and should be a much more widely used heuristic in software hiring.
But then you started talking about static typing as negative, and suggesting to move fast and break things for a company, that probably hadles trillions in assets.
Most of my career has been focused on helping large companies use Python to achieve as-fast-as-C performance with extremely little code and extremely safety-focused non-OOP software architectures, including in high frequency trading (where I built a company’s entire core trading platform in Cython).
The idea that static typing leads to safety is false. Static typing adds more code, more code is more liability. The cost of that liability is not recouped with any offsetting benefits.
When I applied to a quantitative hedge fund, I was being asked questions about synchronizing data structures between threads without using mutexes (again not something you often do in a high level language). I was accepted there, although I couldn't go to work there because of health reasons.
At the end I went back to Google where I had to launch a new machine learning model without introducing even 0.1ms latency in the ads backend. Good luck doing that in a high level language.
Edit: lol what a day to say that! For the first time I’m seeing unplanned outages on Gemini.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15988897
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705898
The big difference is now they have lots of competition in US.
Basically: Coinbase, we're going down.
ps: I find that very .. cynical that when there are such opportunistic moves poor retail gets locked away. Alas.
I discovered https://cryptowat.ch and thought it was the most polished and feature rich trading UI I had seen for crypto. I later learned this is a Kraken project that works with any exchanges and that they use mostly the same UI for their trade UI. After poking around the UI I was convinced they cared about UI/UX and their fees seemed better and I made the jump. Haven't looked back to Coinbase since.
For those curious: https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-acquires-digital-currency-da...
Looks like they just want to make a solid trade UI. In my case I had to know who was behind the tools (I always look for conflict of interest in finance) and fell in love and made the leap.
They even post an actual _comprehensive_ changelog. How often does this happen? Usually it's some product marketing framed blog post.
https://docs.cryptowat.ch/home/updates/changelog
*scared to put money in something they don't understand
I'm sure Kraken would like the trading fees from New York residents, just not the hoops that New York has put in place for Kraken to jump through.
November 26's dump from 18.9 to 16.2k https://status.coinbase.com/incidents/yjq3bch7zgt1
When there's a sudden, significant price burst, they seem to reliably flop. Look around, they have that reputation. It seems they first fail, then scale, so the fact that they first failed on the 16th and have stayed up until now isn't surprising. I'd love to pat them on the back, but this is the same old Coinbase, and with all their means they should surely be able to scale quickly by now.
Many investors in the space will sell when it’s high, and buy when it’s low. This is a highly speculative investment, and shouldn’t be treated like stocks or other investments.
You hold a diversified portfolio of stocks because companies on average will eventually will grow or pay a dividend.
Crypto though? It could easily crash and never return at any time, and has crashed dramatically multiple times before.
When an investment goes up hundreds of percent in a single year, that raises a lot of red flags amongst many investors about the potential for a crash. This type of gain is just not normal in investing.
Unlike companies which have revenue as a marker, the bitcoin price seems very speculative, and if you think others might sell at 40k, you might do the same.
Yeah I'm not surprised about moves like this. 35k+ is when things start to get interesting.
A few years ago I grabbed one at $1,200 and then sold it like 6 months later for around $1,800 because I was like "cool a 50% gain".
If I had held onto it, selling at 35-40k seems reasonable because even after 15% capital gains tax that's enough to live comfortably in the US for an entire year. That's a life changing amount of money.
How many people have the discipline to buy something at $1,000 then watch it increase to $5,000 and not sell if it starts to come back down? Now imagine when it went to $20,000 previously and then back down to $6,000.
There's nothing wrong with cashing out. Can't go broke taking a profit.
Bitcoin (BTC) was hijacked years ago by Blockstream and corporate interests to be a settlement layer for Blockstream's products.
Smart people are selling for USD, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Monero
And any other party interested in selling would be particularly loud in publicly exhorting others to HODL, so the conventional wisdom is inherently suspect.
I've been watching the prices/news/volume recently on crypto generally - and it seems clear a lot of new people are entering right now with a poor understanding of the environment and that creates opportunity in the alt-coins. Look at something like Ripple which if people were informed about current news should be falling off a cliff but still seems to 3rd in market cap and sometimes having rallies that outperform coins that haven't been more or less labeled by the SEC as fraudulent. Although this seems irrational to me, I think understanding those newbie conceptions opens up opportunities for some bigger gains than on Bitcoin - yesterday I decided to buy something that was certainly the days winner on coinbase that went from 5 cents to around 15 cents overnight (tripled in less than 24 hours) and I wasn't totally surprised - it'll probably slow down a little - but still worth holding on.
The reason there was quick money to be made? Investing in something with a low-market cap relative to the others (also easily available on coinbase) - and maybe also a recognition that new buyers might like coins at certain price points. I looked at that coin and I saw the market cap was 30 million dollars (about $50 million behind the next closest on Coinbase), wasn't a total dud and also looked at the volumes of transactions happening on the market as a whole to see there was action happening anywhere and everywhere. I said to myself, if Bitcoin has a market cap of 600 billion, then to move the price 1% requires an additional 6 billion dollars injected there. If you take 1% of that 6 billion, 60 million and it went into that alt-coin (which is just about what happened) - it's a 200% gain overnight. For that to happen with bitcoin it would require 1.2 trillion dollars going in, not likely. Now will I sit on this alt-coin until retirement age versus a BTC? Nope - but in the short term if you're looking for moonshot consider what it really takes to move BTC price.
The other thing that really drove ETH up recently and maybe I should have bought some then was moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and the rush to fill out the deposit contract. It seemed to just steadily increase from around $300 once people started getting enthusiastic about filling up the Proof of Stake contract getting it around $600. Once it was filled it seemed to kind of stagnate around $500 for a week and then started going bananas again. Part of that goes with the bitcoin rally - seeing a BTC push 40K opens peoples eyes and brings them in - and BTC sometimes outperforms ETH on the day. What I've noticed though when there is a market pullback for crypto, the pull back Bitcoin often seems to exceed that of Ethereum, which holds it's ground more so.
I'd say there are definitely people who believe more in ETH than Bitcoin for informed reasons. Whether they are like me and intend to use it or just think its a good economic bet at 1200 bucks a pop, can't say - but what I said above are definitely things setting ETH apart at this moment.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase/
> If posting for assistance please provide your case number in your post. Moderators will only respond to PMs that have been requested in a post, and unsolicited DMs to individual moderators and chat requests will not receive a response.
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I have not tried to login since, but now I tried and it is locked, verification failure :(
Here are some possible explanations:
If a currency relies on a network to support it, that currency is only as good as the underlying network...
In other words, if the underlying network is useless -- so is the currency...
Here, watch this, a Rick and Morty cartoon segment that will explain it better than I can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mweTc7tDO3I
(Disclaimer: I do not endorse any messages of violence that this Rick and Morty cartoon segment may imply.
There's a quote in the Bible (and I am not a particularly religious man or anything!), and that quote is
"Be ye as wise as serpents, yet as gentle as doves".
I am not a particularly religious man or anything -- but I take that particular quote to heart! <g>)
Many of us agree with that, hence it would be preferable that cryptocurrencies were the standard, not country-currencies. In the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin ends up being more resistant and durable than the many ledgers each country runs themselves.
Or in other words, if you trust in Bitcoin, use it directly, not via Coinbase. As peter_d_sherman said: "currency is only as good as the underlying network"
For example, what would happen to the Turkish lira if the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey burned down and somehow couldn't restore data from backups? With Bitcoin and others, the risk is much lower from central failure. Although individual failure risk is much higher. Tradeoffs.
Coinbase crashing is how I know if the bull market is really here.