Bitcoin Forum

What happens to your money if you leave it on the exchange and forget about it? Will they write off the money for inactivity?

At the end of 2017, he used an account, but after dump in 2018 decided to go on hold and take a break. Came back a couple of years later and found an empty balance. Got every penny back on exmo.com

Were you originally aware that you would be charged for inactivity?

Depends from exchange to exchange
I remember how people were surprised and angry at Latoken announcing (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5251428.msg54516170#msg54516170) they will charge a 5$ per month for inactive accounts but so few of them knew a lot more exchanges do so, like bitfinex or cryptocom.

So read the terms and services of your exchange before you start using it if you're concerned about it.
Or far better, don't leave any funds on an exchange at all.


Hold by keeping your funds on an exchange, that's the worse thing one can do, when the price finally goes up you might find out the exchange is no longer there!

Yeah, I knew that. But I forgot, as usual)

It somewhat depends on the exchange. I remember that back in 2017 there were Bitcoin card providers with inactivity fee.
On an exchange it should be written in the ToS or the fees schedule, but, since the ToS usually allows them change anything they want, you can easily end up later with the funds taken even if at start such thing was not possible/written.
Also an exchange can get hacked; or can have bugs; or a software or database change may cause their software "forget" about your money. The money will not be lost, it remains in exchange's wallets. But for you it's lost/taken.
As you should know: not your keys, not your coins. Money is not supposed to be held at exchanges. Especially if you plan to get inactive, withdraw your coins into your own wallet.

I'm still surprised about such a decision by exchanges. Why these inactivity fee is even collected? You "do not need to feed" cryptocurrency and charge fees for that. I dont believe that much maintenance must be made for crypto that simply is held on the account, or you need to hire a specialist for that. In general I see it like "bytes of data about every user and his balance". 1 hdd or ssd would be enough to keep all that data.

Or they compare themselves to bank, that charges monthly account fee? If the answer is yes, then they should give same quality service, support and funds protection (in case they got hacked, they must repay holders all the funds lost, like banks after being bankrupt repay users funds, after regulator sells banks assets).

Actually you are wrong. A proper exchange will have multiple mirrors and backups of their data and will probably use cloud services for their operations. And since the data stays "live" 24/7, the price is bigger than for simple data storage. (Of course, this doesn't excuse them for being greedy.)

That's how you see it, exchanges see it as a line in the table that is not producing a dime, unlike the animals that need feed, this is more like a shelf in a store that stays empty. Besides, when you're running a business you will see a lot of things differently from clients, they have found a source of income that they can charge to somebody who is using them as cold storage, looking from this angle is morally right, isn't it, they still provide a service?  ;D


Hihi, yeah, let's get real, the moment they will start providing "quality" services is the moment they will charge you two times more even for active accounts.
Exchanges are a money-grabbing machine, they don't care for anything else, they know their business model is threatened from all sides they just want to make as much as they can as soon as possible and their customers seem to get along with it.


Unlike Binance (https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1359691526511595520)  ;D

AFAIK, there's no dormancy policy for most exchanges but just to be sure. You should check it. But there's no assurance that their policy would stay for dormant accounts.

But if it's a very long time of inactivity they might give you a notice and if you have no response, it's on them what will be action taken. Are you planning to leave your funds in exchange? you should keep it easy on a dedicated wallet.

Touché. I didn't expect them handle this in such and amateurish way.
On the other hand, having your own cloud/data center is an expensive endeavor.
But proper RAID, maybe replication too, should be something absolutely normal, else 2 simultaneous bad hardware events may make user data no longer "safu".
As others replied to that tweet, CZ should hire a specialist. It would not cost that much...


This is a good point. At least PP is spamming the users in case of inactivity and funds still there. The corresponding e-mail should be still used/read to avoid surprises.
Still, best is to withdraw and be your own bank.

• The exchange can get hacked and you lose your funds,
• The exchange can do an exit scam and you lose your funds,
• The currency you are holding could get delisted and go to zero,
• The exchange could close down your account and you lose your funds,
• You could lose access to your log in details and lose your funds.

Best to store your funds in a non custodian wallet, which does not operate on terms and conditions.

This irks me the most. Why not communicate the change via email or site notification rather than sneakily changing the Terms of Service since most can't read through the whole term and any change is nigh impossible to be tracked, unless there's one guy that has lots of time to actually do so.

Lose your fund in account if exchange is hacked, shut down.

Your account can be closed, terminated, frozen and funds will be given to governmental entity.

I don't agree with people who open account and store crypto on exchanges and turn to be inactively for months or years.

Bittrex

Poloniex

This is the best approach. You only risk your own money since the moment of the deposit. since that moment forward, they are not your money anymore -- they are exchange's money. In theory, they are still yours, but just in theory, as without having the private keys, the deposit is a move similar to giving your wallet to a stranger and kindly ask him to take care of it. Unfortunately, very few users actually understand that. And from those understanding all the risks (also detailed by me here: 12 years later and people still don't know to use Bitcoin nor what it's good for (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5310500.0)), for some reasons, a part of them choose to ignore all the risks and still go to an exchange...

In many cases, they start crying afterwards, when the exchange is hacked / performs exit scam / freezes abusively their accounts / reports the users to IRS or local authorities / etc. etc. etc. But the cry is in vain. The damage is already done. For all those which still don;t want to open their eyes, just remember what happened with Mt. Gox.

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Looooooool seriously? Oh well, maybe if CZ would join to ChipMixer campaign, maybe he'd afford a back-up HDD. Life is hard, you know? :) Maybe all the Binance users (at least from the forum) could collect together 100-200$ to help him buy a HDD.

I had some money left on some exchanges, and as of now, I received no fee just for my inactive trading there. But it may really vary between different exchanges. So better read the terms before sending funds.

Is it considered as inactive if I have a current pending booked order? It was already a year ago tho. Just random coin.

So that's true how the conditions of the exchange when we save and then are no longer active for a long time and even disappear once I do, so I think any safe exchange will keep your funds intact.

But I haven't experienced the things that the OP talked about because when I'm going out of the market for a long time then I will pull all of it to maintain security later because one day problems often occur when we don't know the information.

I guess they are doing it because such inactive users isn't beneficial for them. They don't trade, so it's not possible for exange to earn from trading fees. So, it's just a way to monetize every user, even inactive one.
Same like I got message from one online bank few days ago. They don't have monthly fees, but I haven't used them for few years, so they send me message that they will charge €2 every month, until I will login to my account. At least they don't charge if account ballance is empty.

Some do charge but if they are any decent they would notify via email beforehand, do remember tho it's always a bad idea to put funds on exchanges unless you are actively trading.

I guess the cryptocurrency blockchain has not started charging maintenance fees which  are the ways some financial institutions drain up your untouched balance.  Even if exchange touched your balance you can easily see the address where you found is sent to an be able to get the back.

i am so certain that nothing will happen to your funds and also nothing will happen to your account. your account will go down if the exchange have decided to shut down business. i think you have the right to sew any exchange that intentionally closed your account without any notice. you have the right to demand for your funds from that exchange.

My personal opinion is that the commission’s for inactivity is perfectly normal. You just have to know and remember the exchange rules.

Some exchanges will arbitrarily drop a coin/token from their roster - users are given a certain period of time to withdraw their funds before the wallet is removed (some wallets will be put in cold storage, others, the wallet is just simply wiped.  If an exchange has done it's job properly, they will have sent out an email warning of the impending removal.  (Better ones more than one email).

Some wallets go "off line" due to no addnodes for an extended period - exchanges might just pull the plug and count their losses without warning.

These days with the number of hacks, thefts, exit scams and the like you really need to evaluate just how many coins you want to leave on an exchange (especially bitcoin hoping to buy a coin/token if/when the price crashes).

It’s gonna be stupid for an exchange to impose inactivity fees like the case of LAToken. Some of my coins and tokens from Binance since 2018 are still there and not charged even a single centavo.

This is why I prefer to store my money into crypto than in banks. No disrespect, I usually store crypto in DEXs and CEXs.

There is no such kind of fees collected in any exchanges I traded until now, you can still access the funds after years with no worries and no debit but I heard that some local exchanges have such fee like wallet maintenance fee which is similar to we pay year credit debit card fees to banks but I never met such exchanges yet.

That's the most appropriate thing anybody should do but let's consider the below scenario

Assuming I left some BTC on the exchange when it was worth $50 and I don't feel like trading anymore.
So I take a break and come back after 2 years to find out bitcoin spiked up to 15x times.
Considering BTC spiked from $3000 to $58000 in last 12 months it is quite a possible scenario.
So now my $50 turned into $750 but when I login into my account it's not there or may be the exchange charged a hefty fees for inactivity.

$50 would not have been a big amount back then which is why I would not have considered to transfer it to a non-custodial wallet.

What should be best thing to do in such a scenario ? @stompix

Everyone should go with tier 1 exchanges.This exchanges are safe and secure than any others.But always keep your eyes on their terms and conditions.safest way is to take a note of users feedbacks about them.most feedbacks are genuine so we can trust.

How do you define a tier 1 exchange? If it's determined by volume, then you'll already have some really bad exchanges sitting in the top.

I'm also quite skeptical about user feedbacks. Many of them are either paid promotions or exchange sockpuppets. Large business =/= user safety.

This might be a bit off-topic, but it would be great if bitcointalk would charge inactivity fee for being inactive on the forum. Like every 10 days you lose 1 activity. Part of sleeping accounts, that are made for sale or scam bounty promotion will disappear.

As to inactivity fee - I dont support that. Even though exchanges are not banks and dont have to keep your funds safe, but charging inactivity fees is wrong. How ever, it is better not to keep funds on exchange for a long time at all. It is safe to keep funds, that you use for trading and later withdraw them to personal wallet.

Yeah you are absolutely right.In my opinion use hardware wallets to store funds they are safest.Only deposit that funds which you need to trade. All other assets should be in hardware wallet.

Maybe it depends on the exchange site you placed your money in, but so far out of the exchange sites I’ve used and there have been some already inactive; I didn’t get any inactivity fee although there are some who froze my account but you can just unfroze it whenever there is a meed for you to check back that exchange site. Just make sure the exchange site doesn’t close.

It depends on the rules of the exchange.
In general, it's not a good idea to keep your crypto in an exchange for a lot of time, crypto word is pretty and many things can happen in a short time (exchange can disappear or fail, or introduce suprise-KYC etc...). Exchange are good for...exhange assets, not to store them.
Also, on a "big scale" it's not good for the crypto-world to store money on exchanges, you can find a deeper analysis here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=945881.0

Considering social engineering - feedback can be paid, so everything is known only through personal experience. In author case - EXMO have different feedback, but I trying this exchange and was satisfied.

Sorry for the late reply, I wasn't active that much the last two weeks

I can tell you from the start, assume every penny left on any exchnge as lost when you do that for long periods of time.
If you think that 50$ is just change now,  then you shouldn't look back when it grows to 1000$, what you have done by leaving that there is just like looking at a Batm 5 years ago and saying, it's just 10 dollars I would rather have a beer.
If the fee for withdrawing is too big and it eats all the sum change to LTC or another coin and withdraw that.

I have never left anything more than dust which I couldn't withdraw anyhow on any exchange gambling site or whatever, not because I'm counting every penny but because they've fleeced me already with fees, why should I be giving them tips?


Are you sure about it?
As I was saying before, a lot of people were surprised when they found out even bitfinex or crypto.com are charging such fees and many others.

If that truly exist, then that's purely a centralised bank acting to be decentralized, keeping funds in a wallet untouched is the purpose of the decentralized system. This incidence will cause a very deep loss of customers from using Latoken,
The only way reduction of coins value occured is when delisting token from an exchange shortening portfolio especially when you weren't aware of the update of delisting the coin in possession.

In my 2 years of trading career, I never paid fees for being inactive but as I said heard that local exchanges are having such fee structure which I came across exchanges section (I guess) but can't be able to find the thread now, probably they were moved to their local board.

Currently there is no such policy in majority of the exchanges but if they got this idea, they will surely implement it. The exchanges don't let go any money making opportunity.

By the way, are there still people around us who would like to keep money on the exchanges ? It's been taught everywhere not to keep any extra money on exchanges on which you are not trading.

It’s not about you wanting to keep money on the stock market, it’s about letting it go and not using the stock market for a while.

Before I used an exchange I read their terms and conditions and a lot of rules requires understanding and base on my experience most of the exchange I've ever used they don't give an inactive fee so it's good to me but again.

It's not recommended to store most of your funds to exchange because anything can happen and they have the right to close their application or service but for sure they will release a notice to their users before they do this.

Not that it’s a typical branded Exchange, but eToro does apply an inactivity fee of 10$/month for accounts that have been inactive for over a year (see https://brokerchooser.com/broker-reviews/etoro-review/etoro-fees).

Their "advanced" crypto Exchange, eToroX, plays around with two notions of time for considering an account inactive, depending of your deposits:
https://etorox.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/etoro-x-limited-exchange-terms-of-use-31.12.18.pdf

Not a trend to follow, but just wait for a more mature and stable market and things may spread.

That’s right - an exchange provides information to its user, but not everyone reads these long texts - that’s the essence of people.