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That works, so long as you've refactored your infra to the point that the computational resources (whether server nodes or hard disks or or database shards) are modular enough that you can just add more stuff and it will play nice with everything else. That objective -- not a cute UI that lets you change one of the numbers -- is the hard part.

And yes, it is to Coinbase's discredit that they haven't done so, but (assuming you're not joking), they could very well not be at that stage. It's typical for startups to have technical debt like that.




Can't they just get a bigger boat? Scaling via hardware is a good fix until systems can be made modular for scaling.


Most scalable systems have some 'singletons' somewhere in the stack. At a certain scaling point, the singletons must be made scalable to multiple instances, which often entails making a new singleton to manage these instances.

In this way, scaling often gives you an order of magnitude or two of available additional capacity, but periodically requires new dev work to support further increases.




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