Btw, I tried to send my son $100 for Xmas and I told him to give me a Bitcoin Cash address because I didn't have any BTC right now and because the transaction fees are too high. And I told him to be careful because BTC and BCH addresses are not distinguishable algorithmically. He said he had Coinbase and then I remembered Coinbase had recently suspended BCH because of some insider trading investigation (presuming that their acceptance of BCH is what lead to the recent pump to $4000). He opted for me to have a check mailed from my Wells Fargo bank even though it would be 5 days delayed.
Crypto is still not ready for prime time. It's too difficult to use, too many caveats and snafus, and too many centralized large players with too much dominance over the market. But probably these are just growing pains, not catastrophic, because some project will deliver on decentralization at sufficient scale.
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You would have been fine sending BCH, coinbase only suspended coinbase buys (maybe sells) deposit and withdrawal were not affected. regardless im pretty sure they've been turned back on for days.
i doubt there was any trading done by coinbase employees. I was watching on GDAX that night (I'm holding my bch, wasn't worth risking my stack trying to flip the fomo/dump) and the mayhem was caused by GDAX traders on the BCH/BTC sell book. Some hero offered 3 BTC for a single BCH, keeping the market price there. Maybe he thought it was 3 bch per btc, maybe he knew or gambled that the BCH/BTC book wouldn't open at first. Either way, because of this(imo) the starting market price on the BCH/USD book was significantly higher than other exchanges (I think it was around 4500, not 50,000 like it would have been at 3.0 btc). This caused other exchanges to pump before the USD book opened on coinbase, which surely amplified the FOMO from coinbase users.
Since coinbase is straight market buy, there was some crazy slippage as MILLIONS of USD flowed through in a couple minutes. This ate up the GDAX order book to 9k before the servers caught up enough for someone to notice.
Honestly the only manipulation done by Coinbase was to pause trading in order to stop the rise. They have no control over traders other than following TOS. Of course normies don't understand how trading engines work (that's why the Coinbase app even exists), so they assume Coinbase the company was fucking with them.
If you ask me Coinbase should have just left it alone.