This blog post reads like an attempt to preempt a lawsuit after the price of BTC crashes and people are stuck with rapidly depreciating coins because Coinbase's servers were too overloaded to process a sell order.
It is important that they say this, as it appears to be true.
PSA: If you're a Coinbase customer, and you have never made a withdrawal, are you aware that there are weekly sell limits, priced in USD, not BTC? It was a surprise to me.
If you're sitting on a little BTC kitty at Coinbase that has grown large, do know that you may not be able to convert it all to USD on a single trade even if Coinbase has liquidity and buyers.
Which is a top result searching Google for "coinbase transaction limits".
I continue to be surprised that Coinbase doesn't allow instantaneous execution, if they really do have buyers/liquidity, and then allow the USD to sit in a cash account and trickle out slowly if necessary.
I was similarly surprised that I'd have to set up a GDAX account just to place a limit order. Making what is essentially a forex exchange with market orders alone is fraught with uncertainty.
I tried moving some prediction market contracts on US Election Day, couldn’t trade anything due to traffic volume. This feels familiar.
Decades of technical and legal work went into our stock exchanges, the bitcoin bucket shops are a few generations behind. It doesn’t matter until suddenly it does.