So this week I finally did the thing I said I wasn't going to do, which is put actual money into Bitcoin. Fifty bucks. Not exactly betting the house, but enough that I wanted the transaction to, you know, work.
It did not work. Not on the first try, not on the second, and honestly not really on the third either.
Quick context for anyone who's been ignoring this the way I mostly have been: Bitcoin blew past $10,000 for the first time last Wednesday, and by Friday it was sitting somewhere north of $11,000. That's roughly an 11x increase since January. I know this because I've watched approximately four different coworkers refresh a price chart on their phones during lunch this week like it's a heart monitor. One of them, a guy on our infra team who will remain nameless because he reads this blog sometimes, has apparently been "in" since it was $900 and will absolutely bring this up if you make eye contact with him near the coffee machine.
Anyway. I signed up for Coinbase on Thursday night, figuring I'd link my bank account, buy a tiny sliver of a coin just to say I own some, and go to bed. The signup itself was fine. Upload a photo of your license, take a selfie, wait for verification. Standard stuff. Then I tried to actually place an order and the whole thing just froze. Spinning wheel, no confirmation, no error. I refreshed, it asked me to log in again, and when I did, my account balance showed zero with no record of whether the trade had gone through at all.
Turns out I wasn't special. Coinbase has apparently been getting hammered with new signups all week because of the price run, and their trading engine (which is really just a rebadged version of GDAX under the hood) has been buckling under it on and off since Wednesday. There's a whole thread of people on Twitter posting screenshots of the same spinning wheel I was staring at. Some of them are convinced they got double-charged. I was not double-charged, for what it's worth, my $50 order eventually cleared about forty minutes later with zero explanation of the delay.
I don't say any of this to dunk on Coinbase specifically. Scaling a financial product for a 10x traffic spike in about a week is genuinely hard, and I'd rather they be slow and correct than fast and wrong with people's money. But it's a pretty good illustration of where things actually are with this stuff right now versus where the price chart makes it look like things are. The infrastructure underneath this entire market is being built by, from what I can tell, a handful of small companies who did not plan for this particular Friday.
The part that actually gets me isn't the outage, it's the tone of everyone talking about it. Nobody in my extended orbit talking about Bitcoin right now is talking about it as a currency, or as some hedge against inflation, or any of the ideological stuff people were saying back in 2013. It's just, "it went up, so I bought more, so it might go up more." That's not a criticism exactly (I bought $50 of it too, so who am I to talk), it's just an observation that this doesn't feel like the same conversation it was a few years ago. It feels a lot more like watching a casino fill up.
I'm not going to pretend I know where this goes. Maybe it's $20,000 by New Year's, maybe the whole thing craters in a month and my $50 becomes $12. Either way seems plausible right now, which is sort of the problem.
One last thing, unrelated but I don't have anywhere else to put it: if you're also trying to sign up for one of these exchanges this week, do it in the morning. Every outage I hit, and every complaint I saw from other people, clustered in the evening, presumably because that's when everyone's off work and staring at their phones deciding today's the day. Went back at 8am Saturday to double check my transaction history and the site loaded instantly.
Also, yes, I'm aware there's a giant net neutrality vote looming later this month that probably deserves more of my attention than a $50 crypto experiment. That one's getting plenty of coverage everywhere else already, so I'll leave it alone for now.