Bitcoin Forum

Why?

1. If they just escape, there will be serious legal consequences. And the whole media world (CNBC, CNN, etc.) is watching at them.

2. They cannot refund USD. The purchasing price of stolen bitcoins are different: someone purchase at $1000, some at $0.25. If they refund by purchasing prices, many will be unhappy. Also, the market price is changing seconds by seconds. If they refund by the market price, many may be unhappy either because bulls may argue my coin has appreciation potential and I don't want the worthless fiat at all. Finally, if they refund by moving average price, people will argue why use 30 days MA instead of 50 days MA, etc. So refunding USD is near impossible for bitstamp.

For that reasons, I believe bitstamp will quietly buy back the bitcoin from the open market.

They claim they already have more than enough Bitcoin in their cold reserves to cover the losses. There is no reason to buy it back. IIRC they were operating way over full reserve when they were last publicly audited.

At this moment, bitstamp may have the incentive to bluff a little bit to stabilize the situation. We cannot know for sure if they have enough reserve to cover their ass.

Anyway, maybe you are right. But both of us are just speculating.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitstamp-passes-audit-overseen-bitcoin-developer-mike-hearn/

They had slightly over full reserve on 24th May 2014. On top of that they "confiscated" unclaimed unverified accounts back in October, which would've increased their reserves quite a bit:

http://www.forexnews.com/blog/2014/10/17/bitcoin-exchange-bitstamp-confiscate-unverified-accounts/

Quoted from the coindesk article: "As of 13:00 CEST 24/05/2014, Bitstamp held 183,497.40310794 BTC in their cold wallet. Combined with the money that was in their hot wallet this totalled to about 45 BTC more than the total customer deposits and Ripple IOUs recorded in their database."

Is this 45 BTC reserve enough to cover the 18K stolen coins?

1) Bitstamp has enough to cover in their reserve.

OR

2) They buy the 18K coins through second market or another route. They are NOT going to go to finex and place a market order for 18K coins if that's what some people are thinking. Stamp buying 18K coins will have no affect on the price.

Secondary market is the exchange. Primary market means miners. If you believe they buy from miners, it is understandable to me.

But still, when miners supply the exchanges less coins than before (coz they sold most outputs to bitstamp), will the price go up or not?

Let's assume that, miners usually dump 3600 coins to the open market every week. In the next ten weeks, they will sell half outputs, which is 1800 coins, to bitstamp. Now the supply on the exchange is the remaining 1800 coins. Will this move the price up or down?

i don't understand...who care in which way they will refund us? why it's important to you?

Yes, coz 18K buy order will affect the price a lot.

I am not sure if they actually lost anything . Didn't they say on twitter that all user funds are secure?

No, they made a statement on their website

https://www.bitstamp.net/

On January 4th, some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC

Ah thanks. I haven't been following it much .Just saw this today .
Would be really nice of them to cover the compromised bitcoins.

You have to remember how many BTC belong to abandoned accounts. Werent there a couple 100 THOUSAND idle coins on Gox at its demise? That makes the 200k they found more like 33% than 25% if 200k were idle and abandoned.

So, if 20k coins were abandoned, that means they dont really have any need to buy, even if there reserves were only 100%

Stamp can also play leverage game on finex/okcoin/huobi to drop market price significantly so scope up coins.

As long as they don't do the same bs as gox and reopen with bitstamp coins that everyone knows are not real bitcoin!
I expect they will buy them back, some on the exchanges and some off the exchanges.

No one knows what kind of Bitcoin reserves Bitstamp has, perhaps they can compensate the coins that they lost with their own coins.

Bitstamp is a more than decent exchange, it will sort everything out after investigation.

they are expecting everyone to withdraw as soon as they open. they better repurchase 18k coins before they re-open or no one will trust them when they cant process the withdrawals.

They need $5 million to reopen.  Do they have it? Can they raise it? That's the big question.

Bitstamp raised $10M from Pantera Capital in December 2013: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bitstamp

And the business already generates considerable revenue. I'd bet they have >$5M net assets.

Even if they use cold storage reserves to pay for this they will slowly want to build back whats been lost i should imagine, bullish either way.

Agreed, also they need to fix whatever problem they had/have and ensure it stays fixed.  Either or both of these could take some time.

of course they must buy at once, take advantage of price is still relatively low

if wait the price raise to $400?  ::)

No, that's not a valid excuse. They could start withdrawals even if they can't handle trades yet.

Some Bitstamp creditor in the UK needs to make a statutory demand for payment, to start the 21-day "pay or else" clock under British law.

I wasn't trying to make excuses.  There isn't one.  I'm not sure if they can partially open the site?  Myself had a pending BTC withdrawal when they closed down.  So in theory they could be processing those already as well.  I'm not sure what the pratical and security implications are of opening a half done site?
I agree that the formal demand needs to be made to make the legal wheel start turning in case it is as bad as Gox, but I'm hoping not.

That's the problem with these jackass VC/entrepreneur guys and opening exchanges; they are not solvent ever. In an unregulated, volatile market, no exchange can stay solvent. It's just not possible. For every fiat dollar in, they should have BTC reserves of 100+ fold value in order to cover the swings in price (this is not possible, but the swings can be so extreme this may be necessary). All they do is keep writing BTC I.O.U.s and taking the fiat. When shit hits the fan or goes sky rocket, speculators come knocking for their cash and suddenly exchanges go dark or claim theft...

Edit: I fear this is no coincidence.

You're making the big assumption that they will be back. I highly doubt that. Just look at the other hacked exchanges, even where hotwallets were stolen, they all promised to come back very shortly, then postponed, then vanished into thin air. The same will likely happen this time. Add to that the big incoming dumps... very bright future... lolll

Justcoin eventually closed after being hacked, but they asked everyone to withdraw all their funds before they closed. That's one hacked exchange that did not do things the way you described. In fact they were hacked, resumed trading, then closed because their countries banks were ordered to stop doing business with exchanges.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kkmj2/justcoin_is_shutting_down_withdraw_your_funds/

Dear Justcoin user,
Deposits are closed. Trading will close tomorrow, October 29th. We urge all users to withdraw their funds as soon as possible. Final deadline for withdrawals is November 11th. You may find useful information on wallets at https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet.
Please allow up to 24 hours for your withdrawals to process. We will manually batch withdrawals of all currencies. Cancelling a requested withdrawal will put you in the back of the line.

Maybe the "delay" = Bitstamp buying back bitcoins that were stolen to make sure they have enough to have withdrawals when they reopen.

Assuming they have enough FIAT to buy back 18,000 BTC.  ::)

Bitstamp could easily claim they lost everything and shut down. Karpeles isn't in jail, why would these guys be?

Poloniex and BitNZ were both hacked, lost coins, and still came back fine. It depends upon the amount of coins stolen, and 19k is probably manageable for Bitstamp. They have VC capital to cover it, and the main shareholders are multi-millionaires.

VC capitalists are in this to make money
not refund massive fuckups like this
i would be surprised if the pantera group used their own 5.2 million to reinburse customers
they will evaluate staying open against bankrupty and do whatever is cheaper for them
customers will be an afterthought.........

Yes. But it is a credit line available for Stamp to use while they restock from operating profits.

Owners supposedly both have 23 million eur (each).

+5 million VC.

If they don't reimburse, Bitstamp is probably dead. VC lose 5 million anyway.
Reputation is worth a lot (who wants to be next Mark Karpeles?)

If 5-6 million is all they lost, it's probably managable.

Perhaps they could issue company shares to those who lost BTC.

we'll see.

The Bitstamp owners are likely to have heard about Karpeles fears for his safety. When Gox went bankrupt people here speculated he would be dead within the year. From the Bitstamp owners point of view it might be worth paying $5 million out of their own pockets even if Bitstamp eventually closes. They would still be rich and not have the fears for their safety that Karpeles has to live with. I'd be afraid to be in Karpeles shoes.

All the links I googled said Bitstamp lost "less than 19,000 BTC" (about $5.1m). I believe this is a managable amount to pay back. They can dump what they have on hand and buy them back cheap. I believe VC will be willing to help if they see Bitstamp can still have a future after this crisis.

its hardly even comparable to put stamp in the same category as gox ,

under karpeles  gox "lost" 550,000 btc as well as millions and millions of dollars in cash accounts

and the fat fuck still hasnt seen any punishment that i know of but even if he did

it would probably be a slap on the wrist token sentence for not having tight enough security ........

for that amount of money i would also accept a slap on the wrist and move the coins to some secret wallet
as i suspect he has done .....hel get probably 3-6 months if even .......maybe less

If you suspect he has hidden 550,000 btc in a secret wallet then others are likely to suspect it too. Would you feel safe if you were famous and people suspected you had 550,000 btc in a secret wallet? I don't envy him.

i think he can afford the best security money can buy and anyway ,nobody knows for sure if he has those coins or not ,we just think he does

im sure he wont be making his whereabouts public knowledge so anyone looking for him would have to pick a country first
then a city etc and track him down somehow

and with a chunk of fudge that size ,he can move around ,stay in hotels ,live in luxury etc

theres no reason to think hes going to be assinated anytime soon although it would be nice lol

Yes, but every employee in any hotel he stays in will immediately recognize him because of his distinctively fat appearance. He will immediately get recognized anywhere else he goes in public for the same reason.

by bet is people will take their btc away in fear of getting database USD and some goes to USD holders they will take USD out in fear they will end up having database USD

That is what should happen, but we all know people don't act before it's too late.

but he can afford to stay in exotic far off  locations ,well out of harms way
its not like the internet warriors who threatened him have their own private jets to investigate every sighting at a moments notice
also many asian hotels may not even know what a bitcoin is ,never mind who karpeles is and what he is accused off....
and thats assuming he still uses the same name ,which he probably doesnt while renting accomodation etc

There are always people seeing profit there where's risk. Just like when MtGox went down people just couldn't resist sending money in to try and profit from the panic there. It will depend on how Stamp handles the situation when they reopen, if people can freely withdraw their coins and fiat I think it won't be as bad as people think. Sure lots of people will want to move out, while others will stay or send money in in the hopes to profit from panicking people. Overall I do expect the trading volume there to go down though.

When? If?
I think you are probably right, they will probably reopen, but not definitely.
The thing is, Stamp has to say it will reopen shortly, whatever the situation. If they have actually lost far more and will go bust, they still need to say they will reopen. If they are actually squirrelling money off to Brazil, they still need to say they will reopen. If everything is fine and they are about to reopen, they still need to say they will reopen. There is no situation where they would say otherwise.

He's been working on a new look to help with that  ;D

https://i.imgur.com/cfkJkXQ.jpg

Good point, but at this point we don't have any reason to believe more than the 18.8k coins that were stolen got compromised. And I don't buy all the conspiracy theories and crap that is said about Bitstamp, theories like these will always pop up whenever something happens anywhere. It always gets blown out of proportion by some people with paranoid fantasies. When MtGox had problems I stated months before its final collapse that it was a sinking ship and there were good reasons to believe so. I do not feel the same way about Stamp, at least not yet.

^^
Agree

it should move the price up

Rational choice is pay back the stolen coin out from their own pocket. They can make back the lost coins in a relatively short time frame?

Has anyone figured out or do some calculations whether the big buys on Bitfinex could've been Bitstamp stacking up on coins? If they really had enough coins in their reserves they wouldn't even need to buy back the coins they lost! But it could be a good idea because the price is low!

I suspect this is why the price has been rising since the bistamp closure.

This is I never, never invested fiat and just tried to get Bitcoin through mining alts, trading on pump and dumps of other altcoins and whatnot. I never wanted my data being archived somewhere in a database that says I bought Bitcoin, it defeats the point...

This is also why I trust in MaidSafe as being a true revolution with the p2p decentralized exchanges and in general decentralized internet.

Could be Stamp employees trading their own accounts.

But why would they buy that kind of BTC right now? Do you mean in anticipation of the potential buy-rush occurring on Stamp after they re-open their order books again? Why would they rush to buy now?

The most logical explanation is that, yes, they expect higher prices.

Phew... alright. This really has to be the consensus as of now. Everyone seems to believe that. I proclaim a self-fulfilling prophecy as soon as Stamp opens up its gates again. I really hope they clear their order books before starting trading again.

I hear that, coincidentally, there happens to also be someone sitting on 18k this week looking to sell it off-exchange.

Right.

The same reasoning applies after they reopened. We don't know if they have enough capital of their own to cover the $5M loss.

without any proof nobody knows any  details of this hack
how many coins were stolen ?
how many are left in storage etc  ?
were they bailed out by VC partner or was there enough in stamps bank to cover it ?
how can we trust a new system after a couple of days of testing that it wont be exploited like the old system was?
i can understand them not wanting to reveal how exactly how  the hack worked although it would be nice to know to make sure
they have fixed it properly etc and if it was something like a weak password or whatever thats kinda inexcusible for an exchange holding hundreds of millions
of usd

Buy back 19,000 BTCs. It sounds like someone is dreaming that they will buy and push the prices up.

I very much doubt they will have enough money to buy it back, but the low prices will certainly help.

it took 30K Coins to bring the price from 300 to 255. what do you think what impact a 19K buy can have.