Bitcoin Forum

People want to get away from the monetary policies of the government simply because of too much manipulations and potential risks on our fiat savings.

Which make it simplier to think upon Bitcoin as a new means of securing our assets. BUT

What the hell does happen to our beloved crypto exchanges trying to halt prices by suddenly going "offline".

Have you heard the Black Thursday (March 12, 2020) when Bitcoin plummeted its price to 3,800, some says if not with Bitmex went offline at that time, the price may goes to 1,000 usd each; imagine you bought bitcoin at that price.

Funny is it, because right now as Bitcoin price tries something in this trying times ::) to go up, Coinbase suddenly went offline maintenance, isn't it odd?

Read Me.... (https://www.publish0x.com/johnwege/the-biggest-threat-to-bitcoin-xllzxmk)

It is odd. And the pattern that is somehow established over a certain period of time is more worrisome.

And, worse, this is not just happening on global platforms such as BitMex and Coinbase; this is also happening locally. I cannot tell whether this is also true in other countries but here in mine there is also a similar pattern observed in one of the most popular local wallets.

We also have a similar local cryptocurrency exchange that holds bitcoin and several altcoin wallet. Unfortunately, when bitcoin price soar, there is always a frequent maintenance on their side which results to having difficulty of bitcoin to altcoin or crypto to fiat exchange and vice versa.

What do you expect from having these type of businesses? We're dealing with crypto and manipulation is not surprising. Leaving only a small amount of crypto on day to day transaction is still the best practice to avoid such kind of fraud.

At the time of major market swings these exchanges goes down for maintenance, this seems normal in the first place but as this is happening frequently now so it seems odd and these exchanges are most probably trying to manipulate the markets at that point of time. Just recently when the price jumped above $10k coinbase and bitmex went offline and on bitmex there was a sharp decline in price to $8100 in a short period of time. These exchanges are doing shady things behind the curtain and we are still trusting them with our money.

Good point! This is something that wasn't came in my mind before. This is pure manipulation we can say. Most likely traders became over panic that time and that's why Bitmex went offline to stop over panic. You are right, likely we missed a great opportunity to accumulate some btc hothat day due to their clever movements. But we have to admin some traders would lose huge amount of funds if they weren't offline that time, you will accumulate in lower price means someone will sell it other hand. Anyway it wasn't right decision IMO since Bitmex have huge influence on the bitcoin markets.

If they are not offline, they'll be on a sudden maintenance. They can't be stopped from doing that unless there will be a ruling of law that will be pushed just for the sake of it stopping them to do those unexpected maintenances and being offline.

In the future, there will be more of this and not just for those known exchanges. They do this when there's a surge for bitcoin price.

In my country top local exchanges are always online, but when there are rapid price changes, the offer very unwelcoming exchange rates (I'm talking about centralized websites that offer the rates and services of exchanging BTC for local fiat. I use them because it is the cheapest way of exchanging BTC for fiat for me). Big exchanges closing like that is alarming because it might mean some manipulations going on, but there's always a choice on this market, and most exchanges operate no matter what the price is. And just to reiterate, I don't think Coinbase is closing on purpose because it's somehow unprofitable to it. It's been pointed out on the forum before that this is not the case and that closings happen both when the price is rising and when it's going down.

It must be nice to buy bitcoin to get away from centralized monetary policies of the government and secure your assets only to rely on another centralized platform to pump the value of your savings.

We should all know by now that anything centralized is subject or, should I say, more prone to manipulation.

Coinbase is a shop and they can close at them moment they want. Bitcoin is not an essential commodity nor Coinbase has total monopoly over bitcoin fiat trading. Whatever maybe the reason for sudden maintenance whenever the price moves sharply, traders if hurt by this, should punish Coinbase by not using them.

I think it is not the first time coinbase going offline. They have this issue happened for couple of times before. I can not find the thread which I read last week. I doubt it is a maintainence issue. They are such a big exchange. There must have some hidden reason behind coinbase going offline.

It is a legal practice from real world stock exchanges and it is known as "Circuit breaker". This practice has been mandated by many stock exchanges where the trading of an asset halts for a pre-specified time if it goes down by 5%, 10% or 15% within a very short range of time. This is exactly what Bitmex did back in March. Apparently it helped bitcoin price not to slide back to 1000 usd level.

But what coinbase is doing is unexplainable. Instead of supporting the increasing price, it is going offline when bitcoin price is showing signs of bull run. But Coinbase is not really a full fledged exchange. Their operation is more similar to a gold bullion merchant where they hedge against the market price.

There are almost similar thread that i have read recently but have not booked mark so i cannot share here.

Anyway Does this situation normally happens when there are a big turn over from the prices?

Even our local exchange experience the same,but what i am thinking is why does other exchange manage not to go offline in times like this?
why there are still exchange that continues to operate and served their users no matter what the situation of market is?
though yeah there are some delays or high fees recorded yet they are functional.

Some say that the crypto trading platforms are going offline due to the increased activity on their servers,to me this explanation sounds ridiculous.If you are the CEO of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world and such thing happens,you will have to resign,because your incompetence is obvious and the owners/shareholders might lose money.
I believe in the conspiracy theory about going offline deliberately,for the sake of manipulating the prices.
Unfortunately we can't do anything about it.

You can stop using them. Stop their income and punish them so they'll run out of business if they keep doing this. But that's the problem, most people keep using them because there is simply no alternative (or it's equally bad) for their needs.

Once can be called an accident, twice an accident, but thrice? or maybe even more? Then something's up. Exchanges are probably enforcing such "emergency maintenance" to minimize their losses. After all, a sudden surge downward doesn't really give hodlers an advantage, even more so for an exchange that manages thousands of BTC every day. Still, I suppose a sudden downpour of more than 10-20% requires the exchanges to curb their site temporarily to avoid an asset to go down to the bottom. Not much we can really do about it though tbh, whether it be for the good of the traders or for the good of the exchange, if they decided to shut down trading temporarily, then that's that.

Absolute bs, increased activity? They're pretty much exchanges that operate on a global scale, they should at least be prepared for at least that much.

It's a huge loss on the user's end since they can't trade with their crypto during that period and if they can just make a little compensation about it then it's fine I guess. Coins.ph somehow do this and it didn't just happen one time, it happens most of the time, not good hedging of them.

Coinbase does say that their servers go down because of the sudden spike of the usage. When the price starts to increase suddenly, the network load on Coinbase also starts to increase, which also results in increased latency. Thus, it causes a lot of problem (to their API and stuffs) and the servers it self goes down.
They say they are further investigating into it, but never updates us with anything. True, its weird that don't actually work on solving this, as it happens quite frequently.

I don't know but I know I'm not the only one who actually expects these exchanges to go offline when shit like this happens. It wasn't even a big piece of turd this time, just a regular Bitcoin doing it's thing day.

I don't trade so I don't need to feel the pain of traders who can't access stuff. But they should all know better than to leave funds on exchanges, right?

Or set orders. I mean, offline or not, those orders should all execute regardless. Why the need to panic buy/sell?

They want to protect the traders against panic sell that might further crash the price. This so called manipulation by the financial institution that use fiat cannot be totally comparable to this. This is because their own way of manipulation mostly do not favour individuals. Most people are victim compare to the crypto exchange scenario you mentioned above. Traders a protected from possible worse cases. I have begin to noticed also recently that most crypto exchange are beginning to protect their traders more by giving them tips to reduce their risk. This is part of the reason why binance delisted that FTX leverage token from their exchange because they discover that traders are losing huge amount of their money to this token when traded.

That is actually a simple solution to this problem. Coinbase has repeatedly done this in the past and now again. I think traders or crypto users should avoid them and just use other reputable exchanges. For sure, they will do such tactic again in the future. If less to no more traders will use their exchange, I don't think they will do such trick to their users. They need a wake up call to stop this from repeating again.

Of course, it's odd. Just about the price to go up, they just went offline without notice. I think this is similar to our local exchange whenever a bull runs occur the site will slow and congested to result in slowing the site at some point. But this time we are not currently experiencing bull run but a slight increase in the price. therefore, there is no problem at all. it's so strange when something like this occurs, the price will stop to raise. which will lead me to think that there is something going on.

It's quite unfortunate how these exchanges get hacked and people end up losing their funds. I think it's high time we all take into great detail exchanges that we trade on for the safety of our funds. It's best to stay away from newly opened exchanges who promises huge gains on any investment plans they offer their customers.

Damn. So what exchanges can I trust? Seriously. I mean, I don't store any assets on them, but which exchanges could you advice (I'm interested only in BTC) that have at least good reputation?

I think you missed the point, it didn't matter with exchanges being hacked nor early introduced market.

Simply because these exchanges I've mentioned are well known market in the network; thus for sure you're already aware of.


The repeated market maintenance during high buy-on and huge sell-off may spell incompetent market exchanges.

Note that this exchanges were considered pioneer and are very one of the largest market in the network.

So, surge of transaction is not an excuse.

If they will there to protect the market crash then they will be there too to avoid market surge. Therefore, market manipulation.


I'd quote this one for you. Try to research this one:



Binance are trying hard to protect its single investors/traders... (https://www.google.com/amp/s/cryptobriefing.com/binance-delists-leveraged-tokens-cites-user-confusion/%3famp)

At the end  if there were such rules in the market like "circuit breaker", I think its about time to know and be more aware about our market.

We need to do research of our own...as an investor/trader, ignorance is no longer an excuse.

I don't know why but I think we are using that same local crypto currency since I've been so mad with the local exchange I am using since I've been needing the money to buy some essentials during the quarantine. It is continuous maintenance and it is really like that they are doing it on purpose. They really are a greedy bunch.

I also realize that, exchanges do that to manipulate prices. And not only large exchanges do that, small exchanges and local exchanges
do the same thing. When the price of bitcoin rises or falls suddenly exchanges going offline or going maintenance. I have experienced
that since 2017, even some wallets do the same thing. Therefore do not store all our coins in exchanges or try to save our coins in several
exchanges.

Probably do not want to buy BTC for higher price so they shut it down so people can't sell for higher price.  Its not just coinbase that did this. But I don't think they are going to shut down though. The lastest news I've heard is that coinbase is providing surveillance tools for the government, its not even sure what this sort of surveillance tool is but its definitely not a good thing for cry[tp users.

Of course exchanges wouldn't want to go bankrupt that's why they do those dirty tricks to fool us traders thinking its just a program issue.
But in reality they're just trying to avoid massive liquidation.

One of the best solutions is to get off your Bitcoins in exchanges or to move it to much more trusted and reputable exchanges like Kraken.

If you traded stocks you would know this is not odd. Stock exchanges have a failsafe logic where they disable all Sell Orders if a market drops more than 8% in a day.

Crypto exchanges haven't adopted that yet, so instead they just go offline.

It did not happen to me but it did with my cousin.

He cashed out using Mlhuiller and went there to get it. When he arrived there, coins.ph is at maintenance and he can't get the money unless the maintenance are done. The bad thing about this is that it is still lock down and it is really hard to get a quarantine pass at that time. That maintenance went by for 3 days, I don't know if that is on purpose or just a coincidence.

This kind of exchanger's trick is already happening globally, even in the local exchanger. They come into some reason, system maintenance, upgrades, or whatever it is. I don't know if they are working on it or they just want to fool their traders and in order that they can't sell their coins when the price is high.
Not only it happens to non-reputable exchanges but it is also happening to the top exchanges.
We think about not using our local exchanger but we don't have another option to take that makes us still kept it.

And Local wallets are also affected meaning this is somewhat global problem in exchange business.

- Maybe at some point are intentional ?

- Maybe this is Normal reaction of the system?

- Normal case because of the Cryptocurrency flows?

what ever the problem is,this must be addressed and take action because it is not Joke if you cannot withdraw when the price are pumping and need to wait for dumping before the exchange went on again.

None. None of the centralized. Use decentralized ones - they're harder to get accustomed to, but they're much better and you don't have the possible "doors closed" scenario, be it for maintenance or whatever else.

I agree with @joniboini: just stop using centralized exchanges. We're consciously helping them out by using them and we clearly see there's a correlation between price drops/bumps and their maintenances/closures. As soon as we'll all move to free & decentralized ones, it's going to be much better :)

That just shows that many exchanges just don't do their business like they suppose to and they don't respect their clients, simply lack of fair and honest businesses code. And that always leaves some space for rumors and ideas of something fishy.
They should be open and trasparent and announce such activities and not act suddenly and without clear explanation. People should know that they are reliable and legit.

This often happens when the fact that the price pump is an agreement between the project, the whale and the exchange. To push the price of a crypto will involve a lot of steps and delays, network congestion, wallet maintenance or even self-control the price to stoploss scanning is what exchanges do often. Therefore, you must pay attention to all your investment actions and always monitor to be able to adjust accordingly