Bitcoin exploding, exchangesites starting to fail | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin exploding, exchangesites starting to fail

61 pointsGrumpyNl26 comments

GDAX down, additionally, Bitfinex says it is under a significant denial of service attack.

This--and just about everything else about BTC--makes me question the sustainability of this currency. I think a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money when this all comes tumbling down.

That said, I also had similar feelings when the price was at $1000. Maybe I'm just regretting selling those Bitcoins I had when they were only worth $10 each.

heh you're falling prey to FUD.

And you're falling prey to hype. I'm going to make a guess that whatever happens next is going to be more painful for you then for briga.

You sure about that? My 1100% gains say otherwise.

Put your money where your mouth is - screenshot them BTC shorts ;)

Why are all threads about Bitcoin nuked from the front page? Threads with great discussions disappear in a blink. I'm sure the same will happen to this one.

Fatigue? Half a dozen blockchain related posts hit the front-page every day, more than any other individual topic, and most of the discussions are not that great.

That and there's almost never any new discussion. 90% of the posts degenerate into "how do I get rich off of this?" or "it's a bubble" comments.

> It's a bubble.

> It's not a bubble.

> Why can't people see it's not a bubble?

> I got into bitcoin when it was still $x so I'm holding even though I know its a bubble.

> <Quote from a famous person about a bubble>

> <Link to an article about bubbles>

Here is a summary.

I wish there was more discussion around the technical stuff, especially the things in the pipeline: The lightning network, Schnorr signatures, Hashed TimeLock Contracts, Merklized Abstract Syntax Trees, the Simplicity language, etc.

I'd say that it is noteworthy that the bubble is exploding (and bursting)

All the salty people down voting them.

16K baby!

Bitfinex seems to be working fine. I didn't try to buy or sell though.

Edit: The layout gets funky from time to time and needs a reload though. Probably not helping if they are really being attacked.

$19,697 was the high on GDAX, admittedly due to a thin order book. It'll take a bit more effort to get there again ($33m in market buys at the time of writing this.)

Is $33m really a lot if institutional investors want to position themselves before futures become tradeable? For a $10bn hedge-fund (and there are a few of those) that's only 0.3% of assets.

EDIT: As I write this, levels with sell orders of 100BTC often get cleared in less than a second. Probably because people who would sell aren't aware where the price is now but for now, demand seems to clearly dominate.

$33M seems like really light volume.

for reference just one midcap biotech stock i looked at has like $700M in volume in just the first half of the trading day. thats just exectued trade volume; the order book would be much larger

cryptowat.ch is still reporting price updates from GDAX

EDIT, as of 11:48 CST, GDAX is showing 16849 USD per BTC, while the other USD exchanges have gone down to ~15200

Bitcoin isn't the bubble bro, it's the pin.

https://www.coinbase.com/ is down

GDAX is up for me.

Edit: Just been force logged out?

It could also be because of this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/technology/coinbase-bitco...

Coinbase has an error message stating "Bitcoin sales currently disabled." This is straight out of pre-Exchange Act history.

> pre-Exchange Act history

I googled this but couldn't find anything relevant. Can you give some background/context?

The United States overhauled its regulation of securities exchanges, broker-dealers and other intermediaries in 1934 [1]. Before that, it was not uncommon for random exchanges to (a) run away with peoples' money while claiming they went bankrupt, (b) actually go bankrupt, and (c) leave small investors stranded while big ones cashed out. In other words, all the market dysfunction the cryptocurrency markets took half a decade of unsupervised activity to re-invent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Exchange_Act_of_193...

I have been trying to move some money off Kraken with no luck today. Can't withdraw. It says:

Feature Disabled This feature is not currently available.

And the site is awful slow with intermittent Cloudflare error pages.

Kraken has never been very user friendly, imo.

Looks like GDAX is back, trading at $17.278 as we speak

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