Bitcoin Forum

When I see the Exchanges section in the Service Discussion every day, there's no single day I don't see a complaint against one of these exchanges.

Now, I understand that every company with a rather big amount of users is going to have complaints.

However it is unreasonable that there are so many complaints and so many problems with all three exchanges I mentioned.

Do you think they are purposely making some of these problems "appear" it is it just a consequence of the increase in volumes in the last few weeks?

Even if that's the reason, they have no reason not to hire more people and get better servers.

I am not happy with Kraken's trading engine, but I've not heard any horror stories about accounts being blocked or withdrawals being "stuck".

Some examples, just the ones I can see in the first pages:

Poloniex
Example #1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2063536.0), Example #2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1950880.0), Example #3 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2066337.0), Example #4 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2063262.0)

Bitfinex
Example #1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2067335.0)

Bittrex
Example #1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1663636.0)

I've never been happy with their security options; they offer things like "static" 2FA, which is simply nonsensical. I think they had a database leak last year because a lot of accounts got drained. Apparently, users could set 2FA only on withdrawal (not login), and 2FA could be removed from within the account more or less immediately. I hope that vulnerability has since been fixed.


Poloniex is definitely worrisome. It was understandable back in May or June when the ICO craze was at its peak and their userbase was understandably getting bigger and bigger. But now? It's scary that people are saying they've been waiting for withdrawals for months. That's Cryptsy-level stuff right there.

Exactly my thoughts. They must have real financial issues, else this level of problems would be impossible to think of.

laziness, underinvestment, arrogance.

they print money and enough users are happy enough. that's no incentive to really get things in order.

kraken is another one. almost every day you see someone complaining about the trade engine failing them somehow.

at this stage of the game i was expecting the whole infrastructure to be much slicker than it is now.

Regulators have, so far, taken a very lax approach. Bitfinex was charged a small fine ($75k IIRC) for mismanaging their margin assets with regard to US customers. I wonder if things will change after the BTC-e seizure.

To be honest, I would have thought that regulated exchanges would face more backlash for the constant API and trade engine failures. Coinbase comes to mind in particular.

Considering Poloniex is based in the US, I have to wonder if they might face some action from regulators/law enforcement given the constant stream of complaints not just about the trading engine or margin lending, but about unwillingness to pay out funds on deposit....

They could have quadrupled their support staff (or more), hired lots of competent engineers, etc. in this time. They have been making incredible amounts of money, so it's worrisome that they haven't fixed these issues months later.

I hope they don't have bigger legal concerns occupying their time and money.... they did just update their terms, but I can't understand what they changed exactly.

Basically they added in multiple places "we aren't responsible of anything", a class action waiver and you allowed them to share your information with third parties.

Indeed, it seems like that in recent days a lot of exchanges just are having a lot of issues with withdrawals, deposits etc. I don't think that it's because of the high trading volume because the trading volume in bitcoin hasn't actually incerased that much.

What has increased is only the bitcoin trading volume.

Personally i just think that firstly there is an influx of new users, meaning that there is a heavy load on the support system that a lot of exchanges are dependent on because they can't just put their site on autopilot and secondly, a lot of exchanges seem to think that they are too big to fail now that they've gained reputation and slacking off.

Especially poloniex, in my opinion. Nobody should be using them.

To be honest i don't really see any complaints against bittrex and bitfinex. The majority of complaints is basically poloniex alone.

But I agree - a lot of exchanges seem to have accounts being suspended and no customer support all the time. And when you compare these exchanges to dice sites you'll quickly realise that even though dice sites are unregulated, they run a lot more seamlessly and admin is a lot more responsive.

I think the fact that exchange admins aren't directly dealing with users is a big issue. Dice site admins are actually actively monitoring and participating in community, whilst we don't even know who the admin of an exchange is half of the time.

It's got nothing to do with big numbers of users. It's everything to do with the amount of effort an admin is willing to put in to make sure everything is going alright, and it's very small in many exchanges.

hi,
hi,


i have to report that poloniex withdrawn issue is present for month now..

NOT  POSSIBLE TO WITHDRAW money

i'm unable to withdraw from poloniex...
confirmation email never arrived.. resend not helping at all..
support is so slow...in last month i had more than 22  tickets, some are still open in process status for long time..

This is so typical. Sorry for your experience with Polo, kikan..... Mike from Poloniex has often responded and expedited requests when people make a big stink on Reddit. I would suggest making a thread on Bitcoin and Bitcoinmarkets and maybe ethtrader as well. Explain your situation as clearly as possible, and put the most relevant support tickets. I wish I could remember the handles of Polo support people so you could tag them; try to look them up.

hi,
thanks for replay..

i have account on polo for years, so i went through a lot of issues, but last months is so problematic, it is unpossible to trade and i lost a lot of money lately, mostly because polo issues, lags etc..

hope that someday we will have one exchange that will work..

nice day
by
kikan

I personally think they have worse problems than they dare to admit.

These things that you said was very true and Same as yours when I do visit this service discussion I do mostly see complaints on exchanges and most of them are we known as reputable ones. They do really suffer issues as of now and I'm quiet curios what would really be the reason on such thing  to happen. They should really not go into this thing specially we need them the most specially on trading up altcoins and even bitcoin. Slow transfers/delay transaction deposits and withdrawals would really affect out trading works.

Yes I agree. Bittrex do have negative feedbacks too but not as much as Polo (based on topics created here in the forum). Complaints about Polo aren't just connectivity issue, support, deposits and withdrawals, there are times that placing and cancelling orders aren't working fine as well.

Most unregulated exchanges are run as autopilot money machines for their owners. And an exchange needs maintenance, support, solving problems related to transactions and infrastructure investments.

The problem on poloniex in my experience, when i was login to poloniex it will be logout automaticly couples times tried to login but the same problem came to me and i have heard about the coins on poloniex could not be withdrawal,
The problem on bitfinex the verification on there are very difficult because many documents be needed to get verified
The problem on bittrex is on their website doesn't support be accessed by smartphone devices, so right now i used Kraken to trade popular altcoins.

The main problem I have had with Poloniex is support, there just isn't any, the have never replied to even one of my support tickets.
Tickets just sit there saying "Being Processed" for weeks upon weeks. I have never had such a poor support response from any other exchange.

Today Bittrex replied to a user's complaints on their thread. Exchangers should provide a better support and through their official channels. There should be no need to "catch them" on forums and social media just to solve a ticket, which should be more efficient on the first place (both for them and for their clients)

That's worrying. Not because adding such terms absolves them of responsibility, but because their legal team is dumb enough to think adding these clauses can save them from US law enforcement and civil proceedings. There are two large worries at this point: 1) a Cryptsy-like hack/scam where, slowly, more and more users are unable to withdraw. 2) A shutdown by US law enforcement for lack of registration as an MSB in all the states they serve. I'm leaning towards the former as the most likely to happen first.

Yes. I had just actually answered one of these threads.

It really seems like exchanges that were extremely trustworthy before are now somehow all having problems of some kind.

Is it a consequence of the increase in volume? I think that is definitely a part of why there has been so many complaints. Bigger volume simply is going to be more trades, and more people complaining about their trades/account balances.

The thing is all of these exchanges are semi-regulated, they are not deregulated nor completely regulated, meaning that you can't really land your finger on who to blame and where to complain.

The only way that you can establish contact with the actual exchange is through support tickets which often go unanswered for months in polo's case. This in my opinion is probably one of the biggest problems. There needs to be some kind of movement where startup exchanges offer 24/7 phone support that is responsive. So IMO, poor customer support is where the issue is right now. This NEEDS to be addressed.

The exchange situation has been getting progressively worse for years. Kind of odd, given all the opportunity for exchange operators in the space. Scottrade and E-trade are charging low flat fees per trade, and we chumps are paying a percentage! It's highway robbery when you think about it. To boot, the well-regulated exchanges, Bitstamp and Coinbase, are fairly illiquid and have subpar trading engines and APIs.


I'd really like to think so, especially for Poloniex's sake. The fact is, they could have (and should have) hired zounds of new support staff and engineers to get their system working reliably and to keep their customers happy. Instead, people keep telling me they are waiting for withdrawals for weeks upon weeks. That's scary as hell.

I have no funds left now on Bittrex or Poloniex, never had a problem at Bittrex and the one problem I had at Poloniex was long ago, wasn’t a withdrawal issue and was quickly dealt with but it is clearly getting too hectic at the exchanges now and stuck withdrawals are a torture even for small amounts.

For the record, no problem with the last withdrawal yesterday. (XRP)

If things quieten down a bit I might use either again at some point or in the meantime anyway for a one off trade if I can’t find anywhere quieter, just not comfortable leaving funds there for any length of time which is bad practice anyway.

Come to think of it I’m not sure anywhere is quiet nowadays.

That's the general feeling. US law enforcement is very active targeting darknet markets; now it seems they are going after unregulated exchanges as well. I honestly didn't expect that.... maybe a hefty FINCEN fine against BTC-e, but I never expected a seizure like that. They must have known that they wouldn't be able to recover most of the crypto, and that this would likely guarantee massive customer losses.

For this reason (even though I don't think the US government views Polo and Bittrex like BTC-e), I am wary of using exchanges that serve US customers without proper licensing in every US state.

so what is conclusion? because of course we all have our stashes in safe, but when you want to transfer them to fiat .... you simply have to trust exchange till they deposit your money to your account

as I can see in here, there are random problems everywhere.
I've done withdrawal from stamp to my bank without issues last year, but since then a lot of things going on so how we can be really sure? :(