Bitcoin Forum

Note! We've exceeded our normal buy limits for today. If you would still like to purchase you will receive the market price of bitcoin on Friday Aug 22, 2014 at 11:04PM PDT after your funds have arrived.

How much bitcoin will I receive?
Due to higher than normal buy volumes, we are unable to provide exact price quotes right now.

Instead of pausing buys entirely, we decided to give people the option to purchase bitcoin at the market price in a few days. Once your USD funds arrive, we will exchange them to bitcoin at the market price at approximately Friday Aug 22, 2014 at 11:04PM PDT.

Note that you can cancel your order at any time up until your bitcoin arrive from the transfer history page.

The market price of bitcoin changes frequently. Below are some recent prices to give you an idea. These do not guarantee what the price will be in a few days.

USD Price Per Bitcoin
15 Aug 2014
16 Aug 2014
17 Aug 2014
$500
$515
$530
$545
$560



Thoughts on what is happening.

1- Are they actually out of fiat?
2- Are they wiring more money to exchanges?
3- Are they buying all the bitcoins themselves?
4-Are they manipulating the market?
5- Are they buying all the coins with insider info that by next friday the price will have risen significantly and then they will sell the coins to buyers at massive profit. they will have minimized their risk since they will have buyers lined up off the exchange :p.

Might be the signal many people need to quickly buy back in as demand for btcs seems to have increased based on this info.


The way to buy bitcoins quickly for people in the USA is either through coinbase or localbitcoins. Localbitcoins will probably start selling at a premium now that coinbase has dried up until next week.

True story. I took a screen shot for the disbelievers. Bullish indeed. Now if only ethereum will stop selling all those coins.


https://i.imgur.com/hgoMUXf.jpg

http://imgur.com/hgoMUXf

yea seems very sketch to me (If I understand it correctly) So you don't get the price locked in, you get the price on the 22nd? IE you buy now at 515 but on fri it is 600 you pay 600??

precisely.

No, you will still have paid the same amount of USD, but you would receive more or less bitcoins on the 22nd when the transaction actually goes through.

"I acknowledge that the amount of BTC I receive will vary based on future exchange rates. "

Front running.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg8393167#msg8393167

Which would mean that they are aware of a price increase coming (which would be great) OR they actually had enough buys so that they currently ran out of BTC stock and have to wire more money to an exchange such as Bitstamp for the buys (which would also increase buys and potentially help price).

Or the price is fucking low right now, and they're not retarded, so they're buying.

-B-

No. First, they'd have to expect the price to be lower on Friday, August 22nd if they are offering you that price. Otherwise, they are losing money. Second, with the market having turned upside down over the past few days, who in their right mind would purchase with a price to be determined several days in advance?

I don't think this is Bullish at all. I see it as problematic (maybe not enough to turn the tide, but Jesus not bullish). Especially because this is where a lot of average Joes buy their coins.


Inverse of that... still doesn't strike me as bullish.

If price will increase soon, they would still allow customers to send them money and they reap the benefit of giving less BTC on the 22nd.

Bingo!

Be skeptical of Coinbase if they offer you to purchase at a market price 3-4 days later.  Also, many times if you try a few hours later, or even the next day, your purchase will go through immediately.

I'm not expecting people to buy several days ahead. What I can only see as good is that coinbase is SOLD OUT. If they aren't selling coins, how do they make any money? That would be a terrible business model. So...why are they sold out? Were there too many buy orders and not enough sell orders? Did people buy more bitcoin than they had predicted and thus didn't have the reserve for? Or are they front running?

Give me an example where coinbase makes money by NOT selling coins or there not being enough buy orders to make them unintentionally run out of coins.

There was more volume than normal. That volume is going to be on both sides of the tape. But, it is volume that already occurred... purchases that already occurred. At best it is already priced in. Again, they are hardly going to be doing any business over the next few days except with absolute lunatics. So, very bearish news.

Don't be silly. If there was more volume on both sides (buys and sells) they would have plenty of supply to keep selling to us. Can it be already priced in? Sure. But now those people that wanted to buy bitcoin from coinbase would have to go to bitstamp and it may create some buying pressure over there. More importantly though is that there were clearly more buys than sells, and coinbase ran out of stock.

The fact that there were enough buys compared to sells to make coinbase run out makes me happy. The alternative that they may be front running, would make it even better.

Biggest bitcoin retail seller in US run out of coins to sell due to high customer demand.

Some serious buy the dip going on.

Of course it is not bearish. Newbie it just doesn't fit your trading view of bitcoin dropping further.

Paranoid much? They earn 1 to X% per order, why the fk would they not wanna sell as much as possible?

Provide proof or be outed as the tinfoilhhatwearer you are.

Sound suspiciously similiar to Gox. Now Coinbase got hacked and are covering it up with this story?

Coinbase is no exchange...

So?
Do they have hot wallets? Then its just as possible they got hacked and coins stolen.
And seriously, 5 days? You dont need 5 days to transfer fiat to an exchange and buy some coins ...

takes time for ach from bank to coinbase and then coinbase to exchange.

So, Coinbase needs to transfer fiat from their bank account to "themselves" and then to an exchange.
I really think they just need to transfer from their bank account to the bank account of an exchange. That doesnt take 5 days.

It is up-to 5 days you tinfoilhatwearers

Yeah, and Gox is alive and well. All the promises were nice and reassuring there as well.

Guys. They are a broker, nothing more. We know nothing about their volume. All we know is that they do what is profitable for them. Meanwhile, the charts are bearish.... ;)

I got that message when I woke up. But just now Coinbase allowed me to make a purchase of 0.2 BTC. I wonder if they let me do it because it was a small purchase or because their day rolled over.

Me too.  Went to use the bathroom twice this morning at $510 and then $500 but got that error trying to buy.   ???

When I finally woke up for good at $490's I could finally buy again.  

Actually was a blessing in disguise. ;D

Coinbase is back to normal, just bought 10k bits for $5.

Coinbase is a retail broker. They hold some Bitcoins as inventory, and buy or sell on an exchange to refill or dump their inventory. If they stall out, it's probably because whatever exchange they're dealing with didn't do a withdrawal fast enough.

What exchange do they use?

I'm fairly certain Coinbase uses Bitstamp

I just bought 0.2 BTC on Coinbase (Sunday 1pm Central Time) to see what would happen and everything was back to normal...

BTC-E has been acting weird lately too, I'd cash out everything you have ASAP, whatever currency. I smell big scams coming.

This.

This thread is ridiculous. You can come up with all kinds of theories, but at the end of the day, they are probably just having cash flow issues. I used to run a bitcoin brokerage. It wasn't unusual for me to have an unexpectedly high number of buy orders for the day and run out of funds. I would then shut down buy orders for the day until I had enough sell orders or when my fiat transfer came in. Seeing as how the buy function is reportedly back to normal on Coinbase, they must have regained enough liquidity through sell orders or other means of obtaining fiat.

I highly doubt such a reputable company with venture capital from a number of highly respected firms is front- running to make a quick buck while jeopardizing their long term business plan.

This is the 3rd or 4th time I've seen this happen with coinbase. It must do with a high demand and not enough coins to sell, so they probably have to get more money on the exchanges and get more. I wish I could remember what happened to bitcoin the last times this happened but I dont think it was bullish..

If places like btc-e and coinbase turned scammer, then you can pretty much kiss bitcoin good-bye.. Coinbase Is a strong company, but I worry about those guys at btc-e.. who knows who owns them, probably the russian mafia..(fud, of course)

It doesn't matter. This is neither a bullish or bearish indicator. They are simply a broker. When this happens, it means their cash flow is tapped out.

If it has to be seen as bullish or bearish, it would be bullish though, because they've had a higher than anticipated imbalance of too many buy orders.

Damn, I did not know a company as big as coinbase could go through something like this. I am excited for bitcoin.

I know it doesn't, I just wish I could remember if it was a bearish time or bullish, just out of curiosity.. I makes me wonder why they dont open up their cold storage, you know that coinbase probably holds millions worth. i highly doubt every coin that they own was sold...but who knows, its all speculation. glad they are back to selling...They probably moved some coins out of cold storage, for all we know they need multi sigs to move from cold to hot and couldnt find enough people to sign them because of the weekend..

But good hell, when will the bleeding stop, i know a lot of people want the price to plummet so they can buy cheap coins but some of us want it to go up..

Yeah, the bleeding is disheartening, but just remember the fundamentals.

Also, I don't believe Coinbase holds any bitcoins as an investment. If you are talking about selling customer funds that they hold in cold storage and then replenishing them when their cash flow is back on track, well it's a good idea when done responsibly. It's called fractional reserve, and it's what banks do, very irresponsibly. But I think Coinbase is wise to not play the fractional reserve role. It probably also would open them up to new legal frameworks they aren't interested in dealing with.

Btc-e is pretty much collapsing.

if bitcoin buys a large order from bitstamp, doesn't it mean that once the coins are purchased, the price will be bumped by a small margin?

Don't you guys remember March 2013? This was happening to Coinbase day after day. During that ramp, they were constantly out of coins to sell. Remember that they were much smaller then, and still on their initial seed investment. So they had a tiny liquidity pool, probably few developed relationships with coin suppliers, a small customer base, and little (relative) funding. So clearly when demand for coins rose, they weren't able to meet it, and gave users the "sold out" message.

I would expect their supply channels and volumes to be A LOT more flexible these days, so I'm slightly surprised to see this happening again. Perhaps most of the selling occurs on exchanges, while the retail outlets like Coinbase capture tons of small buys when they price drops quickly.

Guess it is a good thing I'm not wanting to buy bitcoin with fiat right now.

 ;D

I think the OP is either forging the picture or he has reached his limit for trading for that day. Coinbase is really not an exchange but rather a broker and all "trades" are done via the customer's bank account. Once his limit has been reached he is not able to purchase/sell additional bitcoin until his limits reset.

just bought 10 from Coinbase, No issues

This is also observed on other brokerage firms, a bitcoin liquidity problem :D

I believe that they still hold some amount of coins, but who would be so stupid to sell at low? They would rather forward the money to exchanges and lift the exchange rate instead of selling their precious coins at low

The brokers can feel the real demand, while exchanges are highly speculative and manipulated