back
140 comments
I think it's insane that Coinbase has not figured out how to scale their platform, you have to imagine by now that they will never figure it out.

That said, here's the truth: Liquidity always dries up when prices crash. If you look at a stock that is crashing, bid/ask spreads become very wide, it can be impossible to get a limit fill. Market fills will have big slippage from the quoted price.

It's hard, but you have to sell into strength. You can't wait for the top.

Also, how Coinbase lacks limit orders is beyond me. For a mission focused company they are not very focused.

I think they're likely in deep tech debt. They built their original trading system in Ruby. A trading system in a language as slow is Ruby is a completely insane choice and I have to wonder if it's now hamstringing them. I know they're transitioning to Go, but it seems like they need to poach some wall street people who have built much better systems for stock markets to get the performance issues ironed out.

From what I understand, matching engines don't scale horizontally, so you really need some people who can craft highly performant C, C++, or Rust. The algorithms are pretty interesting, and can process a very high number of transactions on even a single core if implemented tightly. I've watched some videos on exchange architecture (from the likes of Jane Street), and their systems are able to handle the entire stock market on a single machine!

At any rate, I think they'll get it sorted out, they certainly have the profit to throw into engineering. And I must commend them on their security, almost everyone else in the crypo space has been hacked, so they've done something right. I'm sure the IPO is going to blast off on day one, and it's an easy 10xer in five years given the current crypto markets.

Coinbase isn't an exchange; it's more of a vendor. (They do have an exchange, Coinbase Pro)
Coinbase pro has limit orders.
Yup. Coinbase totally sucks. Binance is where it is at.
In the big rally in 2017, the talk of the town was whether or not bitcoin could become a useful payments system with the aid of the Lightning Network, which has since completed development and has seen release.

Anyone who's up on crypto know if bitcoin is actually usable for sending payments now? If a local coffee shop or something accepts bitcoin, is there any chance I can go in and pay quickly + without a massive fee using LN?

Or is bitcoin still treated like a risky asset and nothing more?

> Or is bitcoin still treated like a risky asset and nothing more?

I always find this sentiment a little funny, because I think payments are the least interesting thing about Bitcoin. Fast and easy payments will come in time with crypto, but in most developed countries the credit card system is a safer and easier consumer alternative anyway.

Crypto is way more than payments, it's an entirely new financial system outside the control of existing governments and corporations. If you don't understand why this is way more important that being able to buy a coffee easily, you haven't been paying enough attention. There's only so many options for long term wealth storage, and crypto represents an entirely new class, so from a hedging perspective it makes sense for all high wealth individuals to have a small allocation. We're reaching the point where you're at a greater long term risk not holding any.

As more money is stored in crypto and more trust placed in it, there will naturally be more desire from those users to be able to easily use it for consumer purchases, so give it time. But again, the most interesting stuff is what's being built out now, which is an alternative to the legacy financial system, not a Visa competitor.

More BTC is transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of tokenized Bitcoin than on the Bitcoin lightning network. In fact, about 140K BTC are locked up and tokenized on ETH now: https://defipulse.com/btc

Personally, I am bullish on the use of crypto for decentralized finance: https://defipulse.com/ That is product/market fit for crypto, and this past year has proven out some of those smart contract models.

See: Synthetix (derivatives), Aave (lending), Stable coins (Maker DAI), Compound (lending), Uniswap (trading), etc.

LN situation is not perfect, but improved greatly last year.

With wallets like Breeze & Phoenix initial onboarding of new users to LN is quite painless because they offer in-flight inbound channel creation (for a tiny fee). So you can install and accept payment right away. Strike mobile app allows to easily fund your LN wallets with smallish amounts of money ($1-$1000) very quickly - just plug in your debit card.

I have been kicking tires paying for my coffee in LN-accepting Palo Alto coffee shop before the lockdown and it worked OK. But in other situations LN payments did have some problems (usually lack of receiving liquidity on the receiver end).

Another road to Bitcoin scaling for payments is using sidechains like Liquid. I haven't tried it myself yet.

But generally I agree that payments on Bitcoin are not critical right now, as it is becoming a trust-less collateral and saving device for bigger institutions for who $10 tx fees are irrelevant. It might however force smaller investors to try out sidechains/LN for casual payments.

I'm an early adopter of bitcoin, jumping in when I saw the original Slashdot post, so I've been following it and using it for a long time.

The flaws with using bitcoin as a currency today are:

1) It has a delay. When you send money it could take them literally over an hour to get that money. (Usually within 5 minutes though.) This is not ideal for a business. There are bitcoin services that smooth this over, giving them cash immediately, and automatically transferring it to USD so the company never touches a bitcoin. To the business it's basically a credit card.

2) Transfer fees. While not the end of the world in the early days, they're worse than credit cards today. Expect to pay a lot to buy a latte, almost 1.5x due to fees.

The bitcoin community for a while has been strongly pushing for BCH or Bitcoin Cash. It addresses these two issues, reducing fees significantly and accelerating transfer. It's the alt currency the bitcoin community has been pushing. However, I admit I have zero experience using it to buy items.

I've been involved in Bitcoin since 2011. Very few use the LN, most payments are still using the blockchain. There are lower cost options to BTC, but adoption has been slow due to the politics of crypto.
I don’t see Bitcoin being used directly to purchase coffees. It might be worthwhile to settle your credit card at month end via btc, but not for small payments.

Bitcoin has reached product market for for money laundering and avoiding capital controls. It doesn’t really need more to hit these valuations with inflation expectations and near 0 interest rates.

Given the timing of its rise, I’d say it’s being treated as a safe haven / hedge against dollar weakness more than anything else.
Not an expert by from my understanding bitcoin doesn't offer any reasonable transaction confirmation times and as such is of limited value as a currency. Instead it's being used as a commodity.
The point of bitcoin is NOT to make payments. That's not what it's for.

Bitcoin is a STORE of VALUE, like gold or Bonds.

We're currently in an age of unprecedented Fiat currency devaluation the likes of which we've never seen before in such a developed country. And we're only going to see much much more of it as the younger generations have made it clear they want much more from government in the way of fiscal and stimulus than they want taxes. Hence deficit spending will continue to expand and expand. The Fed will keep printing money until inflation runs super high: 2 to 4%, they said they would be happy with! and lets not forget the CPI is undervalued by at least 1%.

the monetary supply this year has expanded at a record pace, just look it up. Assets have been exploding over the last 10 years, both in the US and worldwide.

What all this means is that there is an unprecedented need for a stable STORE of value. It's not about bitcoin. It's about having a store of value that's guaranteed to not be inflated and the world has a huge burning need for it. this is why bitcoin will expand from 700Billion today market cap, up to 10Trillion or 20T or more over the next 5 to 10 years. maybe not in a straight line but it will get there and even exceed it maybe. Bitcoin may be the new bonds, in about 30 years time from now.

The FEDs of the world, that pump up the monetary supply have all agreed on the same game plan: It's call UP is the only way out. The only way to deleverage the economy is to inflate away all the debt. The Governments of the world are all on board with this policy. Why do you think they're all so desperate to create high inflation (3%-4%)? That's how you reduce the debt burden. 10 years of 5% inflation can reduce your debt almost in half, right along with anyone's savings. And by keeping interest rates at 0 or less, they want to make saving as painful as possible, so people will go out and spend their entire retirement savings on consumables to keep the economy going in the short run. the only way to protect yourself from this is to own: Stocks, real estate (not scalable or viable for most), and Gold. That's all there was. Until now. Now there's bitcoin, another way to diversify and not put everything into super high stocks.

Technically it's always been usable; it's just the benefits don't outweigh the cons to make it worthwhile. Nothing has changed on that side of things.

BTC will never be a widespread payment for things like coffee, as it makes no sense. It will always have to be pegged against a local currency (and that currency shown) so what's the point of using it to buy coffee?

At present, Bitcoin still an extremely risky asset. If it stays that way, who knows.

Nano (nano.org) is the cryptocurrency that could actually work as a means of payment. The transactions are fully confirmed in under 1 second, there are zero transactions fees, it's scalable, and there is no mining. It achieved this by using a block lattice where each account is its own blockchain.
Lightning is usable for sending micropayments. Lightning and Bitcoin make a perfect pair for implementing 402s for machine learning API calls, as one "killer use case" example.
it's treated like digital gold pretty much
That only makes sense if you want to pay capital gains on your daily purchases.
And Coinbase is blocking everyone from login into their account. Every time Bitcoin goes down quickly, Coinbase shuts down their servers.
I think they just get overwhelmed. Which is a problem itself, but I don't think it's malice.
is coinbase the only option in US ?
circuit breaker?
I'll admit I am surprised; after it retook the $20k peak from ~2 years ago, I was explicitly curious if it would hit $40k this time around.

I still neither like Bitcoin nor believe in its utility nor intend to ever hold any, but I also no longer feel comfortable forecasting its future peaks and troughs.

There is a general upward trend. A 1 year moving average is already enough to see that a lot of Bitcoin bubbles are purely psychological. It's purely a function of the popularity of Bitcoin and it's ability to grab the headlines. I haven't found a better cryptocurrency for the long term. You can take advantage of the bubbles because they are basically happening on a regular schedule.
You already admitted you were wrong. This is your own reality distortion field. God speed.
What’s interesting to me about BTC is not the price, but whether a fiat commodity can sustain itself long-term (fifty-plus years). I liken it to collecting modern art: There are enough people who like it and want it that there is a reasonable marketplace for trade, and while prices aren’t necessarily stable they’re stable enough.

So far it seems like there are enough people who continue to have faith in BTC it that it might just stick around long term. (But who really knows?)

Read about the "halvening", which is an important factor here.

The amount of bitcoins rewarded per block halves every certain amount of blocks, making blocks harder to mine and therefore makes coins more scarce and expensive.

The last halvening happened in May 2020, the next one may happen around March 2024.

https://digitalik.net/btc/sf_model explains this (you may want to zoom in).
tldr?
What does the liquidity look like at that price? Can you actually get those prices and then turn them into fiat anywhere currently? How long does that process take?
Falling now, and, what do you know, coinbase is down.
Is that cause or effect? When coinbase is down many retail buyers can't buy, so there's a lot less buying happening. AFAICT most selling is by miners to pay electricity bills. They're much less likely to use coinbase than buyers.
The most interesting thing about Bitcoin to me is that nobody knows who created it. The second most interesting this is that the creator holds a substantial amount of Bitcoin (estimated around a million).
This will end poorly.
"Another major milestone is toppled as Bitcoin price surpasses $40,000 in just the first week of 2021."
When it goes up it's "$40k", when it goes down it's "still worth 1 bitcoin"
Yet somehow bitcoin (and crypto) seems healthier than the stock market. Weird times
It's because bitcoin is a bankster coup, the cherry on top of an intentional devaluation of the USD as the world reserve currency since the 70's when modern China was created by normalizing trade relations with NATO-ally nations. This strategy will create the conditions which will lead to WW3. Alternatively, we could create an entropic crypto-currency that redistributes itself over a lifetime or 1.5, normalizing wealth inequality, obeying the laws of the natural universe and avoiding catastrophe, while unifying humankind under a common incentive, creating world peace. Choice is ours.
And all major Exchanges are down. Seems they learned nothing from 2017. Amateurs.

This is just sad.

I was hoping to buy a new GPU this year. I guess it's not happening...
I am bullish on Bitcoin. In the words of Elon "The best part is no part". Bitcoin gets rid of monetary policy. Think of all the wasted effort to maintain interest rates at a level that some economists come up with. Monetary policy will only result in some sort of inflation. Just delete all of that nonsense .
It's surely too late to hop on that bandwagon now, or is it :P
Someone is going to lose a lot of money when that bubble bursts
Down to $37k now...
100% not a bubble, your money is safe here everyone /s
Welcome HN bitcoin pessimists, what is this the fourth pump? I'll be collecting your responses.