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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase goes through this charade every time this happens with a major digital currency. It wasn't a legitimate excuse the first time, and it's not an excuse the 7th time.

Scaling is a solved problem. You have AWS, Google Cloud, and MS Azure to choose from with financial institution/HIPAA-level offerings.

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Bitcoin doesn't scale with "The Cloud". If anyone can get the private key, they have the money... sending it off to any other provider is going to end badly. Sure any other company doesn't care if "The Cloud" leaks.. it's just the customers problem, cause it's their data... However Bitcoin leaks, it's the companies money, so it's now again their problem.

Spoken like someone who truly knows nothing about scaling.

Imgur was reporting being over capacity just this morning.

By most engineers in the field it is a difficult problem with ongoing work.

Lol scaling is not a solved problem. Garbage collection is a solved problem. Scaling is always a challenge.

Scaling is by design, seems it was not designed to scale (serverless architecture and db)

Alas, those silver bullets don’t work either. Scaling still remains a multi-faceted, complex problem with a lot of variables.

The thing about scaling is that you can't justify the engineering involved in overscaling until you're reasonably sure you'll need the capacity. Otherwise that's called overengineering. Managers get fired for approving spending on things like that when the demand does not appear. It's also hard to simulate real traffic because they don't always behave how you predicted they would.

Also, your system gets more and more complex as you scale. More monitoring systems needed, more attack vectors to watch for, deployment systems, backup systems... Imagine the security level coinbase needs to have. It's somewhat unprecedented since a hack could make off with a lot of valuable assets in an instant. (even just from their hot-wallet)

You saying scaling is solved makes me question what you think their infrastructure looks like. It's not just an AWS loadbalancer with some shards behind it. It's A LOT more complex than that.

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