Dogecoin pronunciation guide
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As bitcoin raced to another record high on Tuesday, one of the biggest providers of digital currency wallets, Coinbase, went down under the weight of traffic, leaving many of its more than 10 million customers unable to access their funds. The latest outages show how the market infrastructure for an immature and volatile instrument that millions of investors have piled into may be ill-equipped to cope with sudden shifts in demand, which is worrying some investors.
Bitfinex said it had been under a sustained DDoS attack since last week. Daniel Masters, founder of Global Advisors Bitcoin Investment Fund, worries the exchanges would struggle to cope if there were a sudden rush for the exit. The liquidity itself could be an issue. Charles Cascarilla, chief executive of New York-based company Paxos, which operates cryptocurrency exchange itBit, told Reuters that dealing with spikes in volume was a problem faced by all exchanges, not just cryptocurrency platforms.
Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of the Gemini exchange, an early bitcoin investor and an outspoken supporter of the cryptocurrency, said the risk the wider market would suffer badly if one exchange went down no longer existed, as trading volume had become more evenly spread. Gox accounted for 95 per cent of volume. The demise of Mt. Gox left more than 24, customers unable to access hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency and cash.
More than three years later none has recouped a cent. But Tim Swanson, a bitcoin expert and founder of Post Oak Labs, a technology advisory firm, said he was concerned that if the futures liquidity increases there could be an incentive for someone with a large bet against bitcoin to disrupt or attack the network to make money from the ensuing price fall.
CME Group and Cboe declined to comment. Flooding the bitcoin network with tiny transactions could potentially send the price down sharply, said Swanson, as could sending many sell-signals to the market that are not honoured — so-called spoofing, which is illegal in regulated markets. A surge in bitcoin trades in recent weeks has also left the blockchain network that the cryptocurrency relies on to process and verify transactions struggling to keep up.
As of Wednesday at GMT, more than , bitcoin transactions remained unconfirmed. In the past week, more than half a million new users have opened wallets with retail-focused bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain, the firm said, taking the total number of users to more than 20 million, from 10 million last year. Created in , bitcoin uses encryption and a shared blockchain database that enables the anonymous transfer of funds outside of a conventional centralised payment system.
But there is little evidence to suggest buyers are using bitcoin as a means of exchange and payment. As a result, some banks say they are worried that a collapse in bitcoin would have a knock-on effect on investments by individual investors in other asset classes.
Periods of high volatility are not uncommon in other currencies and asset classes, particularly in commodities and emerging markets. Moves of a similar magnitude for the US dollar, for example, are extremely rare.
Its biggest one-day move against a major currency was in January when the Swiss central bank abandoned a cap on the franc, sending the dollar down 18 per cent. Some bitcoin watchers, such as Swanson, also worry about the risk of one of the big exchanges being suddenly shut by authorities. BTC-e, which is no longer operating, could not be reached for comment. The top three exchanges out of more than — Bitfinex, GDAX and bitFlyer — are home to more than 60 per cent of all trading, according to data provider Bitcoinity.
Another issue specific to the market is the risk of hacking and theft. More than , bitcoins have been stolen from exchanges, Reuters has found, with the Mt.
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