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.
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.
Some good reminders for all of us. Case study material, in fact (hopefully it won't turn into a full-blown, "oops, where did all the money go" case study).
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!
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?
Im a Coinbase customer. I'm waiting for my pending transaction to go through, and for USD to hit my bank account. And I'd rather have Fred and the rest of Coinbase working on solving that problem than explaining what, exactly, the glitch is, and while they're at it, what their entire infrastructure looks like. There will be time for explanations later.
maybe if enough people get sick of losing real money, we will finally be able to put some regulation around ecomerce sites security, privacy and data protection
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.
Comments
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.
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.
Some good reminders for all of us. Case study material, in fact (hopefully it won't turn into a full-blown, "oops, where did all the money go" case study).
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!
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?
Im a Coinbase customer. I'm waiting for my pending transaction to go through, and for USD to hit my bank account. And I'd rather have Fred and the rest of Coinbase working on solving that problem than explaining what, exactly, the glitch is, and while they're at it, what their entire infrastructure looks like. There will be time for explanations later.
False dichotomy. I'm sure someone in the entire company has five minutes while fixing the problem to explain to us what's going on.
You may be overestimating how many people 'the entire company' is ;)
Judging by the design, two? :P
maybe if enough people get sick of losing real money, we will finally be able to put some regulation around ecomerce sites security, privacy and data protection
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.
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!