

Coinbase grew 15x in the past 3 months - barmstrong
http://blog.coinbase.com/post/49782323057/coinbase-now-processing-15m-per-month-in-bitcoin-buys

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aneth4
Coinbase has been a serious slug in the bitcoin space.

"Most days we’ve been reaching our maximum amount of buys within an hour or
two. Some fixes for that are in the works."

Yeah, customers have noticed and moved elsewhere. The giddy "oh we're growing
so fast we can't keep up" worked for the first month. Now it just seems
incompetent. Top that off with all the complaints about execution-time
pricing, where execution time is some undetermined time up to a few days out,
transactions being endlessly stuck in the system, and delays in moving
bitcoins and funds, and you've got a dog of a Bitcoin player.

Sorry, these guys need to get it together fast and stop with the juvenile
dismissive language for their very serious technical underperformance.

~~~
pg
It's not uncommon for services that are growing fast to be overloaded. Twitter
is a famous recent example. Empirically it seems to be a predictor of success.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of one startup (Friendster) that died
because it couldn't handle its own popularity, and that was a pretty extreme
case.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
Friendster was the extreme case because, of the poor management behind the
company. For instance, they went through 4 CEO's over a short period of time
and they chose to do a full rewrite from Java to PHP instead of trying to
scale the service and because, the rewrite wasn't implemented properly it had
to be rewrote again a couple of years later. Moreover instead of
sharding/portioning, Friendster chose to scale their service by purchasing an
SAN and using daisy-chained MySQL which resulted in considerable slave lag.
For comparison, Facebook on the other hand used colleges to "portion" their
database in the early stages of the company.

Instead of doing the rewrite, Friendster should have focused on trying to
scale the service like Twitter did by bringing in PivotalLabs - if Friendster
sharded their database for instance it would have helped them immensely and
may have resulted in a different outcome for the company.

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barmstrong
Just want to mention this is mostly due to increasing awareness about bitcoin
generally (as opposed to anything specific we are doing). People are getting
really excited about bitcoin, which has been great for us and the community
generally.

~~~
MichaelGG
Well the lack of ability to actually buy coins via Coinbase is certainly
something specific you're doing. I know personally a few thousand dollars were
not sent to Coinbase because Coinbase simply cannot accept transactions most
of the time.

I'm shocked that months of running the service, and it's still very difficult
to buy, and the only remedy is to try at specific times. It seems terrifically
incompetent, despite the continual "we know and we're working on it!" line.

At the very minimum, you'd think you'd email customers that attempted a
purchase to tell them you have capacity open. Or let them reserve. Or really,
anything but what you're doing.

~~~
barmstrong
Every time we add capacity, we max out again in a week or so.

We are 3 people total, servicing 120,000 customers. We could start wait
listing new users into the service, but there are many of them who get value
out of the product as it is, so it doesn't feel like the right solution.

~~~
MichaelGG
I think the problem people have (including myself) is that the messaging
around the problem is horrible. We see this error, over and over, with no
solution, and a "we know" response. An update on the blog and emailed to
customers, explaining how tens of thousands of people sign up per week, how
you've upped your purchasing by 100% a week -- that'd go a long way. A note on
solutions you've considered but can't implement would also be helpful in
getting your customers _on your side_. People will be far more understanding
if they're given a reason. Most of them want to see Coinbase succeed.

I still don't see why someone shouldn't be able to reserve a purchase, even if
for a 15-minute time period. Or change the limit per-account so that more
people can get a piece.

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timmm
And I still can't make a bit coin acquisition on the site...

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lethrowaway
Gratz, guys. Big fan of coinbase and its ease of use. The only problem is, I
feel like there is a limited lifetime value on any coinbase user, because as
soon as you want to do more complicated trades, you need Mt. Gox or another
trading platform.

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blissofbeing
Does anyone know the type of charting / dashboard software they are using
there to display those graphs. There is also the "Add to dashboard" option
which makes me think this is a SaaS product they are using in their backend.

~~~
blissofbeing
Some quick investigation and I'm pretty certain its:

<http://www.statsmix.com/>

~~~
tmarkiewicz
Yes, it's definitely StatsMix (I'm the founder and former CEO - we recently
sold the business).

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noff
but given that price of bitcoins has skyrocketed over the past 3 months,
what's your actual growth in bitcoins being processed, not just dollar amount?

~~~
TylerE
Largely meaningless. BTC, as currently used, is essentially a USD proxy,
because just about every BTC retailer prices in USD, and then just charges
however much BTC at the current(ish) exchange rate.

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bredren
I'm bullish on Brian, his team and Coinbase as a product.

Given the recent high-profile flameouts, I'd rather see people disappointed
they can't use all aspects of the service today than none of them down the
road.

Bitcoin is still early and I don't think that the market of products and
services is outpacing the company.

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bifrost
Coinbase has really impressed me with what they've done and how they've
managed growth. Its a tricky market, especially with the exploding popularity.

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pbreit
Uh, is this extrapolating off of a one day peak? Given how inconsistent the
whole bit coin market is, I'd want to see more than one data point.

~~~
GigabyteCoin
The trend in that graph is incredibly promising either way.

~~~
avree
Promising in what way? It shows that Bitcoin is gaining more popular
attention, which is translating into increased sales for Coinbase.

The issue is that Coinbase has some serious flaws that make it immensely
unappealing to any serious Bitcoin enthusiast.

If you go to some Bitcoin communities and search Coinbase, you'll just see an
endless stream of negative opinion.

(Reddit search for Coinbase, first 5 results are complaints:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=coinbase&restri...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=coinbase&restrict_sr=on)

The same search on bitcointalk.org shows similar results )

It'd be more promising if they showed returning buyer stats; i.e., those who
bought a BTC and then returned the next month, let's say, to buy more.

I'm kind of disappointed in Coinbase. I really hoped they would be a serious
competitor to Mt. Gox, which would be a great thing for Bitcoin.

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Thiz
The strong points of Coinbase are the ease of use and the merchant APIs. Keep
polishing the trading part and you'll be in this for the long run and the
biggest share of a billion dollar market.

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stcredzero
Are they being DDOSed?

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aresant
I'd love to see this data plotted vs the average Exchange Trade Volume over
past 180 days:

[http://blockchain.info/charts/trade-
volume?timespan=180days&...](http://blockchain.info/charts/trade-
volume?timespan=180days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

If you correct for that HUGE spike to 1250k in the CB graph it looks like CB
is almost trending exactly w/the other exchanges.

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slosh
Oh I bet they did lol

