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Comment by wickedlogic | Hacker News Reader

I suspect they have some fixing to do yet... common prices listed on indexes are ~$3,539.82 USD at the moment. Coinbase UI has the UI pegged at $8,499.03 .. with console errors, and ssl to be distrusted errors.

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The UI's prices were/are accurate as far as I can tell. I think the trading was just that unstable. When it opened at 17:20 PST, the price was indeed ~$3.5k, then shot up and down violently until they pulled the plug three minutes later at ~$9.5k.

First trades started at 3100.

https://api.gdax.com/products/bch-usd/trades?after=50

Yeah, based on the screenshots I've seen people posting the effective bid-ask spread for anything beyond the most miniscule of transactions was $6000 when they pulled the plug, with almost all of the buy orders at around $3000, almost all of the sell orders at around $9000, and a very thin orderbook in-between the two. What a mess.

They screwed it up badly. If you checked BTC/BCH, there were open orders buying 1 BCH for 3 BTC, which is totally ridiculous. Obviously there was some effort on pumping it a lot.

Coinbase basically did one of the most basic mistakes for new markets (or any newly-online market), to not allow orderbooks to be filled before trades can take place. And so people took advantage of it. I just hope inexperienced people didn't get caught in the middle of it.

That's ludicrous. Do people not know what a limit order is? Do I walk into a car dealership and say, "Please sell me a car now. Here are all my personal and banking details. There is no price limit." What do you think is going to happen? How is this idiocy the exchange's fault?

This would all be fun and games, but I suspect the SEC will want an explanation and I'm not so sure Coinbase has a good one. I wouldn't be surprised if they are shutdown tomorrow before sunrise.

The USDA will want to have a word with them as well. However, neither has any regulatory authority over Coinbase.

They are registered as money transmitters in just about every state, not sure what the legal implications of that are exactly, but I doubt the regulatory bodies will just let it slip. If there is any suspicion of "fraud", then you don't need SEC (or USDA, lol) - the local police department and FBI are generally good enough.

https://www.coinbase.com/legal/licenses?locale=en-US

It would appear that you were wrong. They seem to be just fine this morning well after sunrise.

Must be fun to do testing for api failure modes with this...

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