 |
| Firefighting - best left to firefighters |
Imagine you are a fresh new Bitcoin exchange. You have a few hundred hardcore users, a few exotic currency instruments, the water feels fine. Everyone is happy, as new coins are added weekly, creating new bitlords and bitladies in the process.
This is
Cryptsy, circa July 2013. Your tech team is super genius, with great communication and even supports API trading right away. Everything is done with a minimum of manpower and a maximum of profit. Support tickets are handled quickly and the trollbox is content.
But then, along with success, trouble starts brewing. Wallets for some coins constantly need manual restarting, months after exchange launch. Withdrawals and deposits suffer as a result. The web interface is little help, often lagging behind transactions, or showing apparent impossibilities like negative spreads in orderbooks, where the highest bid is far above the lowest ask offer. API results are no better, if they come in at all.
The response from support is always the same: "Someone is working on it." Or even, "New hardware is on the way." And then, it's ok until the next time the problem recurs. At which point someone must once again work on it. It's beginning to look like
Chronic Hero Syndrome. The same fires are being put out multiple times a day. Scripts to fix the problems for good can't be written fast enough.
But wait, there is a solution! Cryptsy version 2.0 is promised to
launch soon and everything will be better. Except...it's actually not better, as it turns out. It's worse. Thousands of users are finding that everything on the website is slower. The same old problems with wallets/withdrawals/deposits are there, along with new problems related to the code update. The API no longer responds at all most of the time to remote clients, and market making functions are impeded - inefficiencies which are now affecting 50% of some coins' markets.
Many of us put faith (and money) in Cryptsy based on their early efforts. With over 3,000 support tickets created in the last 3 days alone, it's clear that Cryptsy has become a victim of their own success. What is not clear is which route they will take: will Cryptsy hire the staff they desperately need in order to fix their problems, and increase service availability for their growing userbase? Or, will they soldier on with business as usual, allowing pride to spell the end of the line for a once strong contender in the cryptocurrency exchange field?
