Coinbase fiasco!

tebbins

And the moral of the story is - avoid crypto

A_Lert

Not your keys, not your crypto.

fwor

tebbins said:

And the moral of the story is - avoid crypto

That's maybe a little harsh in this specific case - but it does highlight the issue that arises where the (so-called) perfect world of crypto meets the imperfect real world, where human operators can make mistakes and put the decimal point in the wrong place, for example.

Outside of the crypto environment, ledgers can (with appropriate overriding authority) be changed to correct the stupid mistakes that happen from time to time. But cryptocurrencies are almost entirely based around an immutable ledger (in the blockchain). Typically nobody has the power to change this retrospectively - so how do errors like this get corrected?

Of course, they do get corrected - in this instance Coinbase won't be willing to swallow the losses involved. But that "correction" may not be entirely fair to all of the parties involved...

Scottex99

And yes, I can't get my head around a "stablecoin" that can rise to three or more times it's supposedly "stable" value - but you could argue that that is not Coinbase's problem. Quite why anyone would choose to buy a "stablecoin" while the price is rising is another question - but that is a moot point now.

Actually 100 times, hence the obvious error.

Here's the chart, lol

Scottex99

tebbins said:

And the moral of the story is - avoid crypto

Correct.

Sell it all, now

Section62

Scottex99 said:

tebbins said:

And the moral of the story is - avoid crypto

Correct.

Sell it all, now

Welcome to the light side. 

fwor

Scottex99 said:

And yes, I can't get my head around a "stablecoin" that can rise to three or more times it's supposedly "stable" value - but you could argue that that is not Coinbase's problem. Quite why anyone would choose to buy a "stablecoin" while the price is rising is another question - but that is a moot point now.

Actually 100 times, hence the obvious error.

Here's the chart, lol

I don't think that's what happened. If you look at the published price, it never got anywhere near 100 times what it should have been.

Reading between the lines, I think that there was an error at Coinbase that meant that for every cent's worth you bought, Coinbase gave you a dollar's worth. The word got around and just the pressure of lots of people trying to buy and get some "free" coin forced the price up - but not by 100 times, or anywhere near that..

At that point, the buyers divided into two - the smart ones who took their coins out onto a wallet, and the dumb ones (with apologies to the OP) who left them on Coinbase and expected to be able to keep them.

Scottex99

I completely agree but looks like the 100x incorrect price did actually register, at least on Gecko

fwor

Ah, Ok - there are no figures on the axes of the graph that you posted, so I couldn't tell from that. I checked somewhere else and that didn't show a peak anywhere close to 100x the (supposed) pegged price.

Whatever, it makes you wonder what Coinbase could do to correct the loss side of the equation (from their point of view) - and it makes me wonder if they are trying to recover their losses from the "dumb" half of the buying population.

Unless the OP comes back with some meaningful figures, we'll probably never know...

esteban003

Thank you for all your comments. I appreciate that my £ 46,000 is dissapeared from my Coinbase account, but also my original investement of £875 has now decreased to a half ( £ 423.00 todays price) as a result of my account been suspended and unable to trade.

Below is the latest reply from Coinbase after my complaint:

Hello Esteban,

Thank you for contacting Coinbase Support. On 19 November 2021, due to technical reasons, trading on GYEN and POWR was adversely affected.

As a result, all buys, sells, and trades of GYEN and POWR have been temporarily disabled on Coinbase.com while we work to correct this. Sends of GYEN and POWR have been reenabled if you need to move this crypto out of your Coinbase account.

We apologize for this and we’re working to correct this to ensure that customers impacted can buy, sell, and trade these assets as soon as possible.

We will keep our status pages updated and we recommend periodically checking back into your account as well to check the status of trading for GYEN and POWR:

Kind regards,
Coinbase Support