Kraken Is Down | Hacker News Reader

Kraken Is Down

status.kraken.com

70 pointsfrabjoused60 comments

As trades are frozen, there is now a 10+% price difference between the last trade and the current market. It's going to be interesting when it comes back online.

.. wow, I wasn't expecting this to be zooming upwards. I suppose chaos is good news for the price.

What's Kraken?

I have no idea. But I heard it would be released this winter.

Cryptocurrency exchange, first result on Google

Don't forget that Google personalizes your search rankings. Not everyone will see the same results you see.

DuckDuckGo gives me the same thing (I think that avoids personalization right?)

I'd wager that DDG results are skewed towards tech, since it's mostly tech people who use it.

That's interesting because I use DDG by default but I find it terrible for tech searches. I wind up using it for everything except tech stuff.

Google might also personalize his results.

I'm sure they and the rum vendor spend a lot of money on SEO, too, so it'll fluctuate over time. My point was mostly that the snark wasn't helpful and if you wanted to contribute something of value you could have suggested searching for the domain name which is more accurate.

I figured the original comment was snark, since it seems so trivial to answer the question oneself..

It was a joke, like "What's cracking?"

Oh haha, whoosh

I like it when somebody asked in comments here and there is an answer already, saving me and probably a bunch more people the some seconds of time.

I like it when instead of asking, someone Googles on their own behalf, and then shares the answer because they realize that others may also be curious.

The requests for spoonfeeding are always irritating.

It was a pun on "What's cracking?"

Isn’t there also a git client called kraken?

I was like, why does a git client need access to the vendor server?

I've been the following the election litigation stuff so much my first thought was that this was about the frivolous suits being filed to overturn Biden's elections. Although I was completely at a loss to think what it might be talking about in that regard, since every Kraken lawsuit has been lost at this point and there's no likelihood that any of the pending appeals will go anywhere.

Quadriga still up?

Coinbase is also down, but that’s hardly a surprise

Posted this last time and posting this again as a PSA:

A bit of a side-note, but this needs to be said: articles like these should be a good wake-up call for crypto users that are still using web-based wallets (and their accompanying apps for mobile platforms) especially for storing LARGE amounts of cryptocurrency -- you're essentially trusting a third-party exchange (with many of them using opaque ToS and PP) with your private keys and as a result your funds (especially those platforms that don't use multi-sig architecture). And crypto exchanges' data breaches/hacks is getting more common by the day. [0] Even Bitcoin.org has stopped recommending web-based wallets, like they were doing just a couple of years ago.

The best alternative is hardware wallets, but a good middle-ground is using self-managed, 'semi-cold' software wallets like Electrum, Armory, etc. [1][2]

[0] https://selfkey.org/list-of-cryptocurrency-exchange-hacks/

[1] https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/wallets/online/

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1741339.0

Yeah I lost quite some coins on bitgrail :) gone ... with the wind ...

This is a common claim in crypto circles, but my experience rings the other way. Sure, some crypto exchanges have fallen, but there have been many many people that stored their funds on their own, improperly, and lost them. I had a friend that kept the keys in plaintext in google drive and lost them.

IMO, the average user has weak opsec and is safer to keep crypto on exchanges. Get a good reliable one and use 2FA and you should be fine.

I did pretty much all options. Kept the cryptocurrency on paper wallets, multiple exchanges and now on a HW wallet( I use a Trezor) but I don't advise this for all.

You are 100% incorrect. Not your keys, not your coins. Any meaningful amount of Bitcoin out to be stored on a hardware wallet.

If user can't be bothered to learn anything or read anything or accept months-pending Windows update, he should not touch cryptocurrency.

So, for the "average user", the answer is not storing on an online exchange, but to never touch cryptocurrency in the first place.

I really don't see why crypto will end up different than the banking sector in the long run when it comes to this. They're still my dollars even if Bank of America technically has possession of them.

Nobody argues that the only safe place to keep your money is in a safe in your basement, what's up with the crypto world where the advice is reversed?

IMO, this comes from the origins of bitcoin, they were used and developed by a bunch of cypherpunks and privacy enthusiasts. For them, key handing is paramount! They then created this mythos and sets of advice that were handed down.

But it can be used wither way. What matters is the freedom to chose.

> You are 100% incorrect. Not your keys, not your coins.

Yes, I know the theory but saying this 10000x times does not change the fact that for some use cases, it might be the wrong decision. I feel the crypto community is WAY too dogmatic about this.

The beauty of the way cripto is working is that it can be both ways. You can control your keys as much or as little as you want.

If things were the way you say, crypto would not be what it is today. Simply wishing that things were this way or say that they're "using it wrong" feels silly to me.

Do you have any preference towards a Ledger, Trezor or other?

I believe Trezor is fully open source, while Ledger is not. Both obviously have a good track record though, and have been around for a while. Personally I feel safer with the Trezor, I think the biggest risk to these things is that the key generating algo or hardware is flawed and the key is guessable, which seems less likely for an open source device with many eyes on it.

Lots of shenanigans going around recently as almost all of Ledger’s purchaser history was leaked:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/

Doesn’t help that almost everyone recommended buying direct as the safe choice to avoid fraudulent devices and/or unscrupulous vendors leaking their buyers...

oh christ, I guess time to get a new phone number?

Of course managing your own wallet leads to other risks, potentially more likely ones - the cries of those who forgot passwords or lost their bitcoin drive have been heard far and wide.

Hence, all modern advice pushes towards easy hardware wallets with an UX-enforced physical paper backup.

People still enter the private key if asked nicely by scam mails. Also paper backups can be copied without any visible sign and thus are super easy to steal. There simply isn't a fool proof way yet and people who dont fully understand it are at risk of loosing everything trough simple mistakes.

Define "large". What's a good rule of thumb for "too much to have on an exchange" and why that figure?

You make an argument against trusting exchanges but your proposed alternative is trusting the hardware wallet company.

I don’t understand how generating your own private key yourself (dice or deck or cards or whatever) never caught on.

And then using only that crappy 2010 laptop with wifi card removed and superglue’d USB/Ethernet (to protect you from yourself) to sign transactions offline. Or an rPi, but who cares about power use; this sucker is going to be off 99.9% of the time.

At what point does this border a scam? You can't sell when it matters the most. This isn't the first time. And this isn't the only one down.

I'd guess at the same time we accept the stock market is a scam when it shuts down when trading goes full crazy? Helps prevent runs on them?

> Helps prevent runs on them?

Sorry for my ignorance, but what do you mean by this? I have zero knowledge about the stock market.

He's likely talking about trading circuit breakers which trigger when the market is down a substantial percentage in a short time. Trading is suspended for a period

With COVID it happened twice iirc - the stock market has been automatically stopped to prevent panic runs.

Online trading platforms also go down...just like crypto exchanges. The tech stack has to be incredibly resilient and fast, several steps above most software in terms of performance and reliability.

There have similar issues with Merrill Lynch recently.

I've had issues accessing Schwab too on days the market tanks.

Aren't they a crypto exchange and, similar to Coinbase, make their money on fees? If so, being down, especially when prices are soaring, hurts. If people cannot trade on their platform, they're not getting any fees.

It sounds like a pretty dumb scam if you as me.

You're assuming their not trading themselves.

And before you mention it: yes, that'd likely be illegal under US law, but still, it's a scenario.

You're missing the forest for the trees. If crypto crashes, and retail goes away permanently, they lose their entire business. These are 100% planned circuit breakers by the exchanges to halt panic selling.

This only works if all the major exchanges go down. Is there any evidence of this conspiracy?

In the past, Mtgox being offline caused crashes, not prevented them. And that was at the time when it was the major bitcoin exchange.

Thats not how the crypto markets work. There is no breaker needed. They allow people to bet on falling and rising prices. A crash doesn't make people go away it makes winners and looser just like if the price goes up. The more it move in one direction the more people will be interested in betting on counter movement anyway so if it swings more its swings more likely back too.

There are certainly "cheating" exchanges out there but cheating by stooping trades every once in a while is absurdly inefficient and makes people leave the exchange even if they dont know about the cheating. Exchanges can cheat way way simpler by front running the order books.

How is this a scam? Kraken makes money on trading fees. How is it in their interest to shut down when volume is high?

See my above comment. They are playing the long game.

Poloniex still running strong!

The local highschool running track was fine when the Boston Marathon was bombed, too.

Hmmm - where are the scaling issues with building a Bitcoin exchange!? Am I mad to think it’s trivially scalable?

Scaling with satisfactory security is never trivial.

Yes, you are mad to think that. You literally have 400k users trying to execute trades in parallel (some many per second) on a common order book. Add leverage, a liquidation engine, etc.

I think my conceptual problem here is what is done on the Bitcoin part and what is done at the exchange level. I thought the Bitcoin network handled that part and obviously I’m wrong about that.

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