Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

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There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way. They likely experienced a DDoS and either didn't want to say it or didn't recognize it and actually believed it was because of their 20K new users. Either way, given the issues they have had and the ~$1.2 billion market cap loss just from this one incident, it begs the question: Should this company be at the center of something as important as Bitcoin?

These types of issues have been faced and solved by myriad other companies, many of them with fewer resources. It seems that every major player in the Bitcoin space has trouble conducting themselves as actual professional businesses and are just fine with causing losses ranging from thousands to billions of dollars in this case. If just a few decent companies came together to provide the services that Mt. Gox and other current "leaders" are failing to provide, Bitcoin could quickly become a much more powerful force than it already is. The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them.

IMO, the limiting factor has been the amount of people willing to sell bitcoins. So the price ended up going up and up and up.

And now that we've reached a point where the value of it is so unrealistic (determined by because everyone is so drastically delusional about it's value and also the causes of the given events -- as your post and other comments demonstrate), those same people are now willing to sell / cash-out, and others will follow their lead.

> There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way

I doubt its the 20k new accounts. It's probably the 20k new accounts' (per day) trading activity.

"The limiting factor for Bitcoin is no longer demand; it is the lack of reliable infrastructure for buying and selling them."

There is a big demand, I don't understand why VCs or YCombinator are not pushing a few startups in this direction.

see https://coinbase.com/

Coinbase is probably in it for the long run, and they are probably doing things to enable them to outlast the competition.

However.

On Monday I was planning to place an order for bitcoin on Coinbase and I was informed that the order would go through on Friday at the market rate at that time. That is somewhat worthless and extremely dangerous in a volatile market. For now, I consider their service unusable.

It's been that way for a while. I'm hoping they change the way that works, as right now the only way to guarantee you'll get a buy order in is to use a tool like coinbase-trader(https://github.com/martindale/coinbase-trader), literally polling their API until it goes through.

I know about coinbase and use it, but it's very limited. U.S. only, is not a real exchange (buying bitcoins is often not possible), etc. And quite frankly, support is lacking too.

Buying bitcoins is still extremely complex for most of the world. It needs to be simplified further.

Coinbase with its ACH stuff isn't really that workable. It takes too long. The opportunity is there, but Coinbase isn't meeting it. Bitinstant has turned into a Ponzi scheme and is well on its way to failing. If Coinbase or someone else started accepting Moneygram and cash bank deposits, they could quickly capture a huge pot of new business. On the selling side, no one is faster or more reliable than FastCash4Bitcoins.com. If someone could perform like they do on the bitcoin buying side, they would win a ton of business.

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