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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

Is Coinbase still using MongoDB as their primary database? Article talks about moving deliberately and fixing things but then talks about double transaction problems that weren’t fixed for weeks, something that would be easy to make impossible in an actual mature database solution.

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That issue had nothing to do with their use of MonogDB (though I’m not defending that choice) and as the article mentions it wasn’t even their fault [1]

1. https://blog.coinbase.com/joint-statement-from-visa-and-worl...

The article also mentions that the double transaction issue was with Visa/MasterCard not coinbase.

That's only according to Coinbase. Those companies never said it was their fault, and I know I'd trust Visa not to lie over CB.

Coinbase released the statement from Visa on it's blog. If that statement was false why hasn't Visa denied it?

Nothing’s easy with growth at the rate Coinbase has experienced!

This is certainly a true statement - but there are known technologies that provide better characteristics for scale than others (looking at big scale names such as Netflix as a start). Simply writing it off as “well they scale so fast, whatever!” is completely sidestepping the issue of using knowingly error prone tech at scale, and frankly is a bit irresponsible. (Note: this isn’t a statement on what CB uses or if they’ve tuned it appropriately or not)

Keep in mind that Coinbase always had to expect being banned by other companies if they adapt a no-crypto currency. I would've been very careful putting all infrastructure on some easily scalable cloud service. You'd probably want to be able to run with at least two cloud providers at the same time (preferably two providers from different jurisdictions). That means you'll have to build a lot of scale infrastructure yourself.

Oh c'mon now, this is not 2007 first year of Twitter. I'm sure there is bunch of tools and brilliant engineers that they could handle it. My guess is, that dealing with Coinbase from pretty much non-existant customer support side, they probably have/had few junior programmers putting something semi-working together, for as long as they possible could hold on to it (and saving money of course)

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