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The USDT thing is making me extremely worried about Poloniex. Poloniex is pretty much the only place to do altcoin trading with decent volume, if Poloniex crashes it's going to be bad. Im withdrawing all of my coins from Poloniex for the time being, until the USDT situation is resolved. I like trading and having some liquidity in exchanges (I understand the risk) to take advatange of quick market moves but this is making me too nervous to have single satoshi there.

In their offical web page, the tether says 1 USDT is always equal to 1 USD and this does not change. Yet, we see that they actually lied to us!

are you sure about this because i have never seen anywhere on their site saying this, also they assure you that they don't guarantee any exchange to fiat.

There are enough stable exchanges.  Bitfinex, Chinese exchanges and arguably BTC-E don't represent all exchanges, you can just go to Bitstamp, Coinbase or Kraken where you can deposit and withdraw Bitcoin and fiat quickly and freely.

USDT is crap but it doesn't apply to everything.

Not all of exchanges as there are a lot of reputable which has been around for years, what you've mentioned was the new one maybe.
I trust local exchanges in my country, people behind who founded and support this exchange are famous and trusted people, that's why people believe and trade on their site. Furthermore, exchanges has make great amount of profit from traders which we know as withdrawal fees. But, you are right, better not to save coins and money inside for a long time.

They don't guarantee exchange to fiat - which is why Tether dollars are so suspicious - but they do say on the website that 1 USDT is always equivalent to 1 dollar, and they even have a transparency page (https://wallet.tether.to/transparency) where they talk about their US dollar reserves.

That is correct, but that is unavoidable, if you collected large capital somehow you are in a state when you don't need to work anymore.
Your financial benefits will accrue from reinvesting itself. This ugly truth is still more visible in fiat money ecosystem.

So what are you suggesting Op? Boycott all exchanges? Not the best or wisest idea IMO.

I agree with you totally, the whole UST situation is very frightening for many investors and traders , especially the ones who are mostly involved in doing their business on poloniex.
As far as i know, Poloniex is right now the most widely used cryptocurrency exchange, the volume on every altcoin is simply great, thanks to many people doing it in there.
But if we will see a Polo crash, that might really influence whole altcoin market, and most importantly: bitcoin market.
 
It currently holds more than 15% of the overall volume, Im sure that would be a really important day for a bitcoin.

Those exchanges require way too many data to trade. Most of us just want to trade BTC into altcoins and back to BTC without having to give our personal data, so those 3 exchanges you cited are useless for that as far as I know since they require personal data for withdraws.

If you want to trade anonymously you are going to accept some risks unfortunately, at least until someone can come up with a proper decentralized exchange.

Mt. Gox had been around for years, but it "went bankrupt" and took about 200,000 Bitcoin.  It was huge.

The lesson is that Bitcoin exchanges are barely regulated and they're not insured.  People like to talk about whether banks are trustworthy when we say that exchanges are unsafe, but banks are insured by governments usually up to around $100,000 per year - they're also heavily regulated and
usually have been running for many years rather than just a few like Bitcoin exchanges.  Banks do mess around with your money but your money is safer than a Bitcoin exchange (although not a Bitcoin wallet, since those can be very, very safe).

AFAIK there are numerous tiers of exchange accounts. Most of exchanges are not require that you provide any confirmation of your ID if you only want to trade BTC <=> altcoins.
Thy ask for your credentials only when you want to buy BTC with fiat money, or in case when you sell BTC for fiat (in large quantities).

We have decentralized exchange - Bitsquare, not the most popular place to trade BTC, last time I checked.

Anybody have any thoughts about the creditability and solvency of Bittrex?

Haven't heard anything about Bittrex yet, but I am still removing crypto

That is not really a credible source...

And I am sure you have an agenda for posting that.

Oh wait!
You actually believed the USDT every coin is backed by a dollar crap?

Oh god, save me I've just looked at the trading numbers!
For real? Poeple are really buying this ?
"Each USDT unit is backed by a U.S Dollar held in the reserves of the Tether Limited"



This is from their website.

Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD.

If they start twisting their own words, that's the sign to dump it.

Prophet of God we are really grateful for the heads up but at the same  time I would appreciate a more distinct and more evidence to arrive at this position. Its ok to castigate the exchange sites because of their excesses which might not be in tune with you own level of thinking however, its not all bad as people have predicted the extinction of bitcoin several times which I believe if it happens, there won't be any need for exchange sites in the first place. So, I hope your prediction does not come true.

So if I got everything correctly, your presumption is that every single cryptocurrency exchange is a shell game, which basically means that you consider all of these websites as a scams.

And now, take a look at the probably most known and widely used exchange-Poloniex.

Can you even imagine what influence poloniex may have  got on BTC if it is going to run away with the customers money?

In my opinion, you need to be really stupid to say things like that. Few incidents doesnt necessarily means that all websites like that are shell games.

I agree with the OP its only a matter of time the top exchanges don't have enough funds to cover all outstanding debts. If everyone tried to cash out they would all go under.

Did I miss something? What's going on with USDT on poloniex? I haven't heard anything about it.

Yobit and Kraken don't require personal ID to trade btc-->altcoins as far as I know.  Not sure about Polo, but I think that's true for them as well.  I don't entirely agree with the OP here, but a lot of the exchanges are certainly dodgy as fuck.  That includes Yobit and others.  Don't know anything about how or who runs them, and that's kind of important when you're entrusting them with large amounts of money.

Lol, you can be right, but what can we do? We need exchanges to deal with money, to buy/sell currencies, to trade, to convert BTC to fiat... The risk is everywhere, but we have no choice here, or you use exchanges or you don't use Bitcoins. The only thing we can do about this is to withdraw our money from exchanges often, to use trusted sites, this way we are minimizing the risks.

Lots and lots of exchange websites are available for the users to make a better profiting. Very few have gained popularity as a recognised exchange service provider such as Yobit, Liqui, bitrex, etc. Most of the trading services through the same have provided the access into all forms of altcoin and other exchange moves.

A smarter idea would be to use decentralized exchanges only. The problem is I don't know of any and if I did I doubt the volume would be any good on them.

Figured that one out all on your own, huh.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wYACw3ELpiY/UPiA6IB7NwI/AAAAAAAAGC4/ZaGJDAzVU0A/s1600/Ryan-Reynolds-confused.gif

this is perfectly expected and if anyone thinks otherwise then they don't know how the world works! we have bitcoin which is offering some sort of anonymity to those using it then we have these "websites" working with it. and the funny part is that they just exist, there is no safety guarantee, there is no regulation, nothing!
and they DO run away and they DO do shady things.

and unless we start seeing either some decentralized (good) exchanges or at least regulations that makes it much harder and nearly impossible for them to scam, we will continue trading in fear.

I do agree your concerns are legit, but to say all exchanges will fall flat, is a bit too much of exaggerated don't you think so? I don't see any need to remove coins from exchanges I am using and I am happy to keep it safe out there and nothing is going to happen. Yes few rotten exchanges might be there but then there are other trustworthy ones to. All you need is to weed out the rotten ones and stick to legit ones. Kraken or coinbase in my opinion are legit. So if ones holds his coins out there I see no reason him/her to be worried about exchanges going flat.

Poloniex has already shown how to make customers pay for a security hole:

http://www.bitcoinx.com/poloniex-hacked-12-3-bitcoin-supply-withdraws-difference-user-accounts/

Honest customers paid this 76 BTC bill with a higher fee and Poloniex even made it look like it was a good and professional way to do it.

NEVER TRUST EXCHANGES!
They will definitely run with your money. It's only a matter of time.

How will you grow Bitcoin if you not going to have some platform where you going to trade for Fiat? Localbitcoin is one option and as you can see

the Chinese has already figured that out. The Chinese exchanges are the only exchanges with some problems these days and people are getting

ways to go back to the way that things were supposed to be done. {P2P}  ::)