Bitcoin Forum

I wonder if they will pull this off.  If they do, will the BFX tokens actually gain in value?  Will they finally become equal to the loss?  How long could that take?  This is going to be an interesting journey from a large hack.  Hopefully it goes better than the way MtGox went.  Liquidation doesn't seem like a very good path either.

Chances are it's going to be a fairly long time before the BFX tokens are able to pay off everything that was lost, especially considering the lost business from the hack and the mistrust of the website now. It is definitely better than what happened with Mt.Gox, and I hope they'll able to get everyone their funds back, but I wouldn't be betting on it personally.

What is the chance they'll get this issued and keep operating compared to going into receivership / liquidation?

They'll only keep operating if they don't have a bank run when they open withdrawals. If they survive that they can issue their coins and keep operating, unless some bigshots with money to pay lawyers decide to sue them. If they start trading their tokens I think their price won't stay near a dollar. Almost everyone will dump.

I would think they will be like any other alt coin. They can lose value over time.
If that is the case then the customer's of theirs with double lose out on this. :-\

This. Price will fall sharply the minute people are able to sell them.

Now, considering that 1 goxcoin was valued at 0.1 BTC even when gox was pretty much dead, we at least know that the bfx tokens won't go to zero. They will keep some value (0.1 USD at least?)

Now that just sounds like a scam and a ponzi scheme. How can something like that start trading at a higher value ? As a trader, no one will buy into that .

What gimmick is this? They lost their customer's funds and now their planning on releasing their own tokens? For what? To make money out of those poor people who lost money in their site? That is some whole new level of scumbaggery right there. Just withdraw all your BTC from the site and demand that you get the whole amount.

If you had a 100 bitcoins on the site, and as a customer lost 36 on it, and were issued  BFX tokes with a claimed value of 1$/BFX, then even you would try and see it to get as much value as possible and not return them and complain about being paid when they have outrightly said they won't be refunding coins. This mentality unfortunately just makes their case easier and allows them to scam their customers.

What? That is a scam. I think Bitfinex users should start to be getting concerned now. They should pool together whatever resources they have left and look for a good lawyer and fight this. If Bitfinex gets away with this they'll continue on playing with their customers by releasing more scam tokens or some other gimmick.

What are these tokens backed by?

I assume this is like a company share which pays dividend aka fees sharing.
any other scenario makes no sense because there would be no value in this coin.

I wonder what the commission will be for trading their iou's...

I dont really think that an exchange can ever win back the trust of induviduals after a hack like that, if they do then fair play to them..... ;D

Even if they get a lawyer and they are surely right in the rules of law, it will only produce an outcome less than what they would get if the let the plan play out.  The lawyers will be paid a shitload - and they don't take crypto.  The company only has so much liquid assets now.  Not enough to go around.  If everyone joins a lawsuit and the judge rules, the lawyers will be paid handsomely and everyone will get 85% haircut instead of 36%. 

Even thought the plan is not exactly legal - it could yield a better end result THAN ANY OTHER PLAN.  Running to the lawyers is almost always a sure means to produce a serious or total loss. 

What Bitfinex is doing is wrong.  Totally wrong.  However, it is the best wrong.  All other plans produce greater losses. 

This will be fun to watch. I guess by the second this BFX token gets added in Poloniex, we'll see the classic massive flash crash just like when every coin gets listed at first.

Why would it keep a minimum value? I don't think anyone will be supporting this token on purpose and making walls to stop it from collapsing, it an perfectly go to 0.


Poloniex? The token is an internal one on BFX's book records... I won't be a fully fledged coin :D (I don't think a coin named BDT - Bitfinex Debt Tokens would have much success lol).

BFX tokens will be dumped whenever it get listed for trading for sure because many would like to take few % of their loss back by exchanging those BFX tokens and bitfinex have actually lost majority of their bitcoins so even what left in their pocket can't pay off those loss.

There is also a bizzare irony to all of this.  Since BFX is issued on Omni, you can use their desktop wallet http://www.omnilayer.org/download.html#download (http://www.omnilayer.org/download.html#download) to trade them on a decentralize exchange.  Therefore, for safety, use a decentralized exchange to trade your new BFX which is really just debt from a centralized exchange hack.

Tokens going to zero value means that no one has even the slightest hint of faith in them. That's not going to happen. Someone will believe that the tokens will be ultimately redeemed for USD, at some price greater than zero. Just look at the altcoin market: for some reason there's lots of useless alts that won't go to zero—that's because there are some freaks out there that believe in them. Human diversity guarantees this.

I ain't so sure this is an idea that's gonna survive. there's a lot of legal uncertainty that needs to be ironed out. many people have made the point that if you touch your bfx coins you're implicitly accepting bitfinex's terms. that doesn't work for a lot of people.

they might find out their plans have a huge spanner thrown in them when they realise there are real people at the other end of their website and they're not happy.

Depends if they get investment, im thinking if the BFXtokens price is low thats beacuse they have investment.  The price of BFX will be more clear when we find out exactly what they mean.

I wouldn't touch the tokens if you are considering being part of a class action or any type of legal proceeding against finex. The token terms say a transferring them also transfers any legal claims against the Bitfinex Group to the transferee. If you sell your tokens you might not be able to sue finex.

https://www.bitfinex.com/bfx_token_transfers


If you don't touch them the finex token terms say the tokens don't waive any legal claims against finex.

https://www.bitfinex.com/bfx_token_terms

The Bitfinex CTO has said they will be paid back in full in 3-6 months is the aim or if not you get shares in finex instead.  Seems alright but we need further details.

We are seeing a bank run being traded. There are two basic scenarios:
1. People panic, start withdrawing all they have in BFX, this puts presure on their baking relation and USD reserves, delays pile up, people start hitting the exchange to get BTC at any price, and withdraw that instead, a large BTC premium is seen on Bitfinex, the exchange becomes useless for outside traders and the revenue and deposits drop, BFX tokens plunge to zero, eventually the lawyers take over and pick the remaining meat off Bitfinex bones, with some people recovering some parte of their money in a few years time.
2. People keep calm, Bitfinex keeps functioning and keeps generating revenues, withdrawals and deposits work fine, BFX tokens recover to 0.6-0.9 their nominal price in a few months, most people get almost all their money back by selling BFX, some traders make a profit when Bitfinex redeems the BFX at nominal price a few years down the road.

It's entirely up to us, the investors, how it's going to be. For the moment the market seems to think we will have scenario 2. A coordinated lawyer attack might still turn it into scenario 1.

After hearing more talk from finex today im pretty confident the tokens are worth double the current rate.  They have many options to clear the debt, crowd funding was mentioned, im holding for now and buying any at cheaper price.

Hard to tell for sure, but I doubt it will reach 1$ any time soon. On Fairlay.com (https://www.fairlay.com/market/what-will-be-bitfinex-tokens-value/), you can bet what price range it will be on December 31, 2016, and it looks like the favourite is 25%-49.9% worth with odds of @3.21, so it isn't a huge favourite. Thought it would be worth mentioning though. Also, the odds are @5.66 for 1 BFX token to reach 1$ by January 1, 2018, so it seems pretty unlikely to me.

They will definitely be worth something, and they are already right now.

A consistent 2-4$ BTC price differential has started to be seen compared to other exchanges. Seems more people are withdrawing BTC than the market can absorb. Since Bitfinex lost half it's Bitcoins but applied only a 36% haircut to existing BTC deposits, they are now functioning as a fractional reserve on the BTC side: they can't match 1:1 even the bitcoins people see in their accounts after the haircut. And since Bitcoins are easy to transfer out, they are bound to run into BTC liquidity problems as more and more people cash out. Since they are solid on USD, they will probably purchase additional BTC from other exchanges and drive the price up. This is quite a fragile situation, Bitfinex is in efect short on BTC, a rapid price increase can kill it if they run out of USD to cover BTC withdrawals at inflated prices.

Finex have to consider the longer they are outstanding the more people will remember, pretty sure they wont be a BFX token by 2018.  They'd either die or clear the debt i see it as very binary.  The volumes are still looking good im going with they clear it.

I think a call to boycott Bitfinex is in order. How can they scam their own customers?

And what did their customers say? I assume they all played along since I don't see anymore news about it. Stupid. I almost want to say they deserve to lose 36%.

People wont boycott because the exchange is still the best to trade on. Margin trading is now back open.  People already expect risk and are used to it who invest in crypto, this is the single biggest reason why finex will have zero problems with recovery, they are still #1 of real exchange volumes as i look today.

By now, we know much more about the tokens. This reduction in uncertainty has already led to a surge to 0.60$ per token from initially 0.30$.

In my opinion, the conversion offer to get Bitfinex shares is worthless. Even if everybody converts their tokens, it means that everyone has to wait three times as long to get their money back. This can seen simply by considering that token holders will be paid back first, before any dividends are emitted. But only (up to) one third of the dividends will flow to the converted token holders. Thus, it will take much longer to get the money back... if they make 10 millions in profits per year, it will take 18 years. But on the plus side, you will own a piece of Bitfinex which lasts as long as Bitfinex exists. But I would not bet on that.

So if you don't convert, what are these tokens worth? If Bitfinex continues to repay about 1.2% every month, that amounts to 14% per year. In that case, it will take roughly 7 years to get your money back. But at a price of 0.60$, it only takes about four years to get your investment back and the next three years will be profits.

In other words: if you are confident that Bitfinex can last for another four years and get your money back after that time. And if it lasts for another seven years (with flat growth), you will get a return of about 8% per year over the. That's not great, but better than nothing.

To conclude: if you have an investment opportunity that yields more than 8% per year at a similar risk, you should sell your BFX and go for that. For example, if you believe that Bitcoin will double in price every four years, that's a much better investment.

Regardless of the state of the BFX token market, it certainly beats the pants off being a Gox victim. Years down the line there's still no money and still no answers. The way Bitfinex operates has always been a tad whiffy but at least there's a fighting chance of being made whole still.