Ask HN: Does anyone know what's going on at Coinbase?

[joezydeco]

Maybe a Coinbase engineer can anonymously tell us what's going on over there, because nobody trying to trade with Coinbase can get a public answer.

Money is going missing. Transactions have been delayed for days and, in some cases, over a week. Even amounts already in BTC aren't leaving the system.

Coinbase claimed the other day this was all due to a database migration[1], but they're offline once again.

[1]: http://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1051063-pending-transactions

[FredEE]

Fred from Coinbase here.

There are still a few lingering issues, which we've been working hard to fix and will be looking at again today. To those affected, I'm very sorry for the wait. Funds are safe, it's just a question of opening the pipes properly to let them flow normally.

[eof]

I think you guys will pull through in the end, but your communication is honesty bewildering.

You guys are still:

* Waiting until the last minute (after they've been waiting a week!) to tell people their accounts have been flagged as 'high risk'

* Not updating your blog with problems as they arise

* Being completely untransparent about the obviously-a-lie "24 hour rolling limit".

* Letting emails about people's already confirmed bitcoins being locked into your "wallet" go unanswered.

* Generally being completely opaque about both what is going on, and why people are getting flagged at the last minute.

My recommendation: charge more for your services and fucking hire some people to do some damage control--AND BE TRANSPARENT. It's great that you are in the reddit threads, and now on here.. but for the love of god, you are pissing EVERYONE off. There are people falling over each other to be your "customer support specialist" or whatever you were hiring for the other day; have them do some friggin' support.

[barmstrong]

Just to chime in with that Fred said, very sorry for the delays. We added a blog post here: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/45976220890/pending-transactio...

Several pieces of the site scaled up about 10x in the past month or two, and this exposed some lingering performance problems. Somebody told us an analogy one time of rebuilding a car while trying to drive it down the freeway at 60MPH. That is a good approximation of what we're doing right now - in short, we are doing so carefully and with the help of great test coverage to make sure nothing breaks along the way.

Thank you your bearing with us. I wish I could say this is the last time we'll experience scaling problems in the next year, but it seems unlikely with the growth of bitcoin right now. If this seems like something interesting to work on, we are also hiring: https://coinbase.com/jobs

We'll post updates to Twitter as we come closer to a resolution. Thank you!

[PommeDeTerre]

Can you please describe the implementation of this system, and the problems encountered recently, in more detail?

Which database systems are involved in the "database migration" described in the support center article? Please list at least the product names and versions.

What was the nature of the "refactor"? What programming languages and implementations were involved, for instance?

What exactly happened during the "database migration"? Was there any data loss?

What sort of backup infrastructure is in place?

[wsladd01]

i second eof's reply, especially the high risk issue, I "bought" 14 coins at 34.50, emailed support as soon as it flagged and you basically responded with "whoops, I'm Sorry".... Meanwhile I had left the funds in escrow for a week waiting for the order to clear when I could have bought them through another source at a slightly higher rate and still profited in a large way. Then I emailed support again when I found that another customer had posted they had actually had the order forced through by support due to the issue being on Coinbase's end. That was two weeks ago and I still have not received a response as to why the order was covered for another customer but not for me.

[fuyuasha]

Unfortunately you guys hit a Satoshi Perfect Storm time to commence Beta - still, trial by fire, hang in there, lotsa Diet Dr Pepper/red bull!

[niggler]

This is absolutely an issue that needs to be handled immediately. When there is real money involved, trust/faith is by far the most important factor. If there is any concern about missing money, people will lose faith in the service and usually stop using it. To give an analogy, consider what is going on in the minds of the Cypriots while their accounts are in limbo.

[bayesianhorse]

If anyone was thinking his transactions with a bitcoin exchange or their bitcoin account with some website was remotely as safe as a bank in Cyprus, we can't really call him a fiscally responsible adult...

[znowi]

I agree that they should have been more vocal on this issue, cause information vacuum gives way to posts like this and surely it doesn't do them good PR-wise.

As for Cyprus, given how volatile and wild the bitcoin ecosystem is, I only tend to somewhat trust Mt.Gox and I view the rest as potential frauds (even if YC-backed).

[smallegan]

Not sure if my story syncs up with what everyone else is seeing: -I purchased 10 coins on the 14th. -Money came out of my account on the 18th. -They said they were available to me on the 20th via e-mail -Have tried multiple times to send money to external wallets with no success -My account balance went from 10 to 0 to 10 -Support has been horrible

[metaverse]

It's possible that they've been undercharging for their service, and as a result have simply run out of cash. With the recent price growth, their buy price sometimes fails to catch up with the current exchanges rates, resulting in losses for them that their fee of 1% does not cover for.

My friends trying Coinbase have raised concerns about the long delays as well, and I have a bitcoin transfer to my personal wallet that's been pending for multiple days. This needs to be resolved quickly to keep Coinbase and Bitcoins reputation.

[jessaustin]

...their buy price sometimes fails to catch up with the current exchanges rates...

This is an existential flaw in their business. Why don't they just reject transactions at expired prices? (If they wanted to be slightly more evil, they could do this in one direction only.)

[SkyMarshal]

>This needs to be resolved quickly to keep Coinbase and Bitcoins reputation.

Bitcoin's reputation has survived much worse. Mt.Gox hacking, Bitcoinica hacking, and several others. Bitcoin has intrinsic value independent of the private company infrastructure that springs up around it, no matter the foibles of the latter.

Coinbase's reputation on the other hand, is another matter.

[tibbon]

I don't think that exchange rates/fees is it. I've had some purchased coins in my coinbase account for over a month. Tried two days ago to transfer to an external wallet. Still pending. That shouldn't have to go through any cost really to transfer it right?

[rdl]

IIRC, Coinbase has a founder and an engineer, which doesn't excuse non-responsiveness, but is probably the reason. They're probably hard at work trying to deal with this problem, and haven't prioritized support or notification of affected customers. That might have been a good choice if the fix only took a few hours, but as it's dragging on a bit, it's probably better to take some time out from fixing it and communicate with customers.

[ashray]

I hope they figure this out soon. This is the kind of thing that scares me and the primary reason that I decided against speculating in bitcoins. For someone like me who can't really afford to lose a lot of money, I need to trade in historically stable stuff (even if they are as rigged as they are..).

I don't really understand bitcoin very well, that is reason #2. I hope the Coinbase folks though have a solid grasp of it and can fix this otherwise this is going to look very bad.

[wting]

If you can't afford to lose your investment, you shouldn't be investing at all.

Scared money is essentially lost money if you can't make rational decisions without being influenced by fear.

As for #2, that can be solved through self education. Why use an investment vehicle that you don't understand?

[jonpaul]

I'm a Coinbase customer, and as an additional data point, their customer service has been wonderful. Now granted, this was about a month ago. I did send them an email on Thursday and haven't heard back from them, but my request wasn't urgent, so I haven't thought much of it.

Overall, I'm rooting for them, and being YC backed, I'm confident that they'll figure out their issues. I do hope sooner rather than later, as I can't wait to use their API.

[joezydeco]

Sure, we're all rooting for them. But a mod just deleted the "YC ('12)" off the headline. What should I think about that?

[famulus]

This makes it pretty worthless: "Sorry, the maximum number of purchases on Coinbase has been reached for today"

[cobrabyte]

Sounds like they got outside of their reserves in the BTC run-up this month.

[waterlesscloud]

I'm rooting for them, but they definitely need to communicate more.

[merinid]

Am rooting for them too - they are in beta folks, that's quite an honest communication on its own.

[jensenbox]

Their lack of transparency is not a new problem.

I had a problem with their API and it took days for them to even acknowledge that I had even emailed them about it.

I doubt they will be around for much longer.

When it comes to money, customer service must be the first priority even if it is to say "sorry".

[jboggan]

That's too bad, I had actually set aside today to learn their API and integrate it into a project . . . nevermind.

On a related note, check out the insane price action on the exchange rate overnight.

[newnewnew]

I would give them six months to migrate off of mongodb first.

[djengineerllc]

I've had a pending payment transaction to a couple places for about a week now. :( Still waiting....

[taylorhou]

I tried to exchange for 10 coins a while back and they said somehow my bank didn't approve of the ACH... that was when it was like $21 to 1 btcn.

[mef]

Perhaps they were running the client that got rolled back and got screwed on a big double spend. Pure speculation but that did happen recently.

[im3w1l]

I thought the transactions were migrated over successfully?

[phormula]

I wonder if part of the current price drop is lack of transactions from coinbase

[wilfra]

They are actively hiring for customer support if anybody wants to tackle the job of improving this situation: https://coinbase.com/jobs

I know it's real money and people flip out but try to be understanding of their situation. Their business is exploding and they're moving 1,000 miles an hour in an industry that is literally being invented as we speak. Hiccups should be expected.

[yarou]

Strange indeed...I've never used Coinbase, but I had heard good things about them before. Hopefully they can resolve this issue in a timely manner.