Bitcoin Forum

Hi Everyone!

I just published a review of Bitfinex here: https://blog.shrimpy.io/blog/bitfinex-exchange-review

I would love to hear what you think. Can Bitfinex still be trusted? It has a long history of questionable decisions, hacks, and mystery.

A solid review of the shadiness, borderline scaminess, that is iFinex and Bitfinex. I think your final score of 3.3 is way too high, though.

I would have expanded the section about Tether a little. Not only did they loan themselves Tether to bail themselves out, but around the same time they also quietly changed the Tether Terms and Conditions from "Backed up 1-to-1 with USD" to "Backed up 1-to-1 with USD and other assets" to "Some of it is backed up by anything we want, including other cryptocurrencies and the interest on the loan we paid to ourselves". Essentially, they printed Tether out of thin air, loaned it to themselves, sold it for bitcoin to bail themselves out, then claimed the Tether is backed up by their future loan repayments to themselves. What a joke.

This behavior, followed by their IEO, leads to only one conclusion: They are insolvent and have been for some time. I would have given them a lower score, plus added the advice to withdraw any funds stored on their platforms and sell your Tether holdings as soon as possible.

I have been trading at Bitfinex for some time now and I like working with short positions in this system.

Whales still swear by it. Even Mike Novogratz was found to be trading there not long ago. I'm very confident they aren't out to exit scam but the problem is more complex. They are being probed by the CFTC and DOJ, and the state of New York is pressing ahead with a civil case against them too. They also had nearly a billion dollars seized in an international law enforcement bust.

They were able to cover the insolvency with their IEO but they are one or two seizures/indictments/horrible PR stories away from total ruin. I would act accordingly.

Good summary.

I find the final score a little bit weird when most of it is a laundry list of incompetence and dishonesty. I suppose not terminally raping everyone, yet, counts to some people.

I truly thought that by this point Bitfinex would long since be a footnote. It's one of the final holdouts of crypto's amateurish phase. Maybe they realised that too so chose to burrow themselves into crypto's arse with Tether rather like a disease-spreading tick.

When every aspect of them has been pulled out and mashed up we'll finally be able to progress.

While Bitfinex got hacked in the past and they definitely did some really shady stuff with Tether(USDT), I think we should treat all exchanges almost the same- with the assumption that they will be hacked someday. With that said, I'd probably trust Coinbase Pro or Kraken significantly more compared to Bitfinex, as I doubt the Tether controversy wouldn't be their last shady move yet. The move they did with the IEO just to have funds to back the Tethers was just something else.

Almost every cryptocurrency exchange during its existence is attacked by hackers and make fraudulent actions, this is not an indicator.

Yes it is.

Places like Bitstamp and Poloniex have been hacked. No customers were expected to bail them out and they moved on from it without any outrages since.

It doesn't matter for some fuckhole like Yobit. It certainly does when an exchange and its offspring makes up a huge part of the market.

Coinbase Pro ranks high on my list of "services I wouldn't trust with a single Satoshi", alongside Bitfinex.

They are kind of like Facebook - they put on a good front, don't get me wrong, and they have plenty of users, but scratch the surface and it's clear they care only about profits, and will abuse their customers to no end to achieve that. They launched support for a bunch of altcoins that their shareholders were bag holding and dumped said trash on their userbase. They sold customers' data to third parties without their knowledge or consent, and offered no compensation when customers complained. They paired up with a company which manufacturers and sells surveillance software and equipment, including the ability to hack in to victims' microphones and cameras without their knowledge. Your coins may be slightly safer in Coinbase than they would be in Bitfinex, but that's hardly saying much. Your data, on the other hand, is likely in the hands of 20 different people before your account even gets verified on Coinbase.

I wouldn't touch Coinbase with seven proxies a 10 foot pole.

I think that is important because it's an indicator how little some exchanges invest in security. And that also shows how (little) they care about their clients. For me that is all an indicator if I can or can't trust money to exchange and how trustworthy they are, how they handle with issues.

Bitfinex cares not a single bit about their users, but seeing how people still use that exchange, they don't seem to care about themselves either. One must be some kind of a special person to still use Bitfinex after everything that happened. We're not just talking about an incident or two, but multitudes of incidents.

Smart money has left Bitfinex a long time ago. The whales who usually terrorized their orderbook are nowhere to be seen. They took their money off that exchange because they no longer trust it. Follow what the smart money is doing and stop using that exchange. Not that difficult with how many capable alternatives we have today. :-X

IIRC, Bitcoinica wasn't hacked twice, but thrice :)

The founder's involvement as a passthrough for Pirateat40/Trendon Shaver's ponzi scheme also shouldn't have been left umentioned: https://archive.is/I8WzL#selection-3491.0-3491.51

And afaik the owners admitted to trading on their own exchange, you can search google for the recordings.

Aside security which I don’t use as criteria to judge exchanges that much because the security of our money and our wallet is right there in our hands, there are rules governing the storage of money on exchanges wallet and I think if we abide by tat rule, we should be able to secure our own coin. Bitfiniex has been a very good exchanges and I think that they have never had any issue with their customers, they might be operating silently, but they are really gaining much recognition a lot.

I have use them severally, I mean severally because the two exchanges that I use most now Is bitfiniex and Binance, and I have never found them wanting of anything. There trades has almost been going on smooth, so as Binance too until the scammer came to disrupt its services temporarily.

It's really not worth being trusted. because so many traders condemn bitfinex for maintaining exchanges regularly and often cause long and short kills (about margin trading).
Professional traders also have to fall into their trap because they are the largest exchange for margin trading.
I suppose they are working with some sharks to take traders' money.

OP,I think that this thread should be moved to the "Exchanges" forum board.After all,your are promoting your review article about a crypto exchange platform.
The simple answer is NO and I don't have to read your review in order to answer you.We shouldn't trust ANY crypto exchange platform,not just Bitfinex.It doesn't matter how big it is and it doens't matter how many positive reviews there are posted online about the exchange website.

Hi. I see you've done a good work. Your review was very informative. The more truthful and honest reviews of exchanges, the better it will be for the community. If you wrote your review of Bitfinex here: https://revain.org/exchanges/bitfinex, you could get a reward for that. All work must be paid. Work on the creation of reviews including. Of course, if the review is of good quality and deserves it.

 

This is what I'm talking about, but today I use Poloniex with pleasure just diversify my assets to separate exchanges.

Hacking problems almost always occur at all major exchanges and this is not the first time that Bitfinex has been hacked because in the past there have been many other hacking attacks so this exchange should not be a safe choice in investment . In addition, a lot of news related to Tether makes this exchange more and more dangerous because they can print money freely without anyone having control. I personally don't like this because it will greatly affect this market in the future

Their trading interface is hard for newbies but maybe you just didn't use Kraken before. :)

You have been to kind with Finex for giving them a rating of 3.3. After all the shady stunts they have pulled off to the majority of their users in a span of a year, I don't think they even deserve to have a rating of 1 at all, and that's from a point-of-view of someone who used the said service during my vacation in the US just 3 months back. CS replies are extremely infuriating, mostly just copy-pasted texts without any real emotion or tone of at least some concern and genuine help. I haven't been scammed, but man, if you see the long list of those they screwed up even in just a few months, idk, you might change your mind with  that rating honestly.

What is bad about Bitfinex trading interface? As for me, trading on the  Binance exchange is even more inconvenient.

I think so. Binance also be hacked but both exchange handle their situation properly i think. Hacking exchange or crypto wallet is the most dangerous threat at this moment. And in your article about Bitcoinica, i think this exchange hacked more than twice. In my opinion Bitfinex trusted than Bitcoinica.

I wonder though, with how shady Bitfinex has been for quite a long time now, and with how you seem decently aware of these practices based on your post, why did you even bother to use them in the more recent times?

My question is, what did you need Bitfinex for that other exchanges couldn't provide you? I can easily find multiple alternatives that provide a better and less shady service than Bitfinex without all too much effort and time.

therefore, all exchange are prone to hacker. And it can be hack anytime whether it is centralized of decentralized exchange platform.
But honestly, I never try to use bitfinex but I heard that it has a history of being hacked before, so it will be not safe for me or for sure
I will not be comfortable with if there was a background history which is bad. But this is just my opinion only.

If you are a normal customer, there will not be any problems if you participate in trading at Bitfinex because this exchange has very good liquidity for investors and the withdrawal is very fast so this exchange is still A good choice. Maybe Bitfinex has a lot of Fuds related to USDT but that is good for this market because they only use USDT to buy Bitcoin and make this coin stable until now.

I recall when there were big problems on the bitfinex exchange in 2016, in the summer, when hackers broke into the exchange and stole funds.  But I am sure that no one is safe from this and any exchange can be susceptible to attack by hackers.  The fact is that very often the administration of a resource can be implicated in an information leak, but with regard to bitfinex such information has not been confirmed.  Today, this trading exchange is one of the most popular among traders, as it provides a lot of advantages over other trading exchanges.  I think that not only the number of positive reviews, but also the number of users who work on this resource today speak about trust in Betfinex.

This isnt only applicable with Bitfinex only but in all exchangers in the market including top tier ones.Come to think that even Binance being hitted up with exploits and hacking (7k btc issue).The difference here is that they do able to protect their reputation and ranking by giving out on point solutions in regards to that problem which Bitfinex failed to do so.
As expected its ranking plummet down and ive remembered those days where Finex is one of of the top exchangers on previous years together with poloniex & bittrex.
I wouldnt say that they arent trustable these days but on my side its much better to stick on the current top ones than risking out once again to these exchangers.

Honestly, I do think that once beaten twice shy is appropriate in this regard. I wouldn't trust any exchange that has once had a history of scam with my hard earned cash. And I do really think that people should keep off Bitfinex or any other manipulative exchange. After all, there are a couple of hundreds good exchanges to choose from on CMC.

As far as I know, many experienced exchanges store their funds on Trezor, and I see nothing wrong with that.

hehee....this is crypto we're in buddy. You can't trust any of the companies with 100% assurance. You always have to give everything a shot but with carefulness. We all witnessed great crypto and blockchain companies closing down somewhere last year. Bitfinex has history of bad things happening but they're aren't alone. Binance also got hacked once and got info leaked. It all depends on how project managers deal with the aftermath other than exit scamming. So I think for now, Bitfinex is somehow not bad even tho ut can't be perfect.

It absolutely we can't escape from hacking incidents but not to the extends that it often to happen cause that it means that they don't care about their security and also the security of their investors. The troubles that it happens to Binance is not the same as what it happens to Bitfinex. And considering the numbers of the issue with Bitfinex, it makes traders give some doubts.

It needs Bitfinex to solve it otherwise, traders will leave this exchange pretty soon.

As solid as binance is, they still got hacked, so that is not an excuse at all to judge those exchanges, I know that security should be number one, but it is not like they are not protecting their own system too, but there is no way that they can get it all right, which boils down to individuals, the security of our money is in our hands, first, people always advise against keeping money on exchange wallet, except maybe traders, and that is why some of them do have safu funds, because they know that it is impossible for a trader not to keep money on their platform, but what of those that are not traders and just long term holders and still keeping money on the exchanges platform, how do we justify those kind of people, do we still, say that exchanges are responsible for their security?

Bitfinex must to make something like Binance launchpad to have more popularity in future. For today’s moment, Binance is the best.

I traded with Bitfinex for a short while. Experienced and reported an issue to CS on minimum withdrawal required for a certain altcoin. I was not able to withdraw at the minimum amount they required. I was only able to withdraw about 50x the minimum amount stated. Though CS responded but technical support and I guess whole management just ignored the issue even if it was just a really simple one so I thought the issue could have even been intentional or their own doing that's maybe why no fix was introduced to address the problem. I suspected this was partly due to their vested interest on the altcoin I held and traded with them.

And I do find the Tether issue also kind of a shady deal on their part so I finally decided to look for a better exchange site.

Hi!
It's up to you to trust or not.
This is one of the top exchanges actually.
Every market will have problems someday) :-X