Bitcoin Forum

I added some btc to Bitfinex but then I heard that it was hacked recently.

Is this exchange still trusted? What are your thoughts?

I, for one, no longer trust it. They "lost" a staggering amount of over 119,756 BTC

So, even if it was indeed a "hack", as they claim, I wouldn't place my money somewhere that managed to lose about $100,000,000 of their customer's funds.

I know that hacks happen and that this is not the first, nor the last, but whether or not they are to blame, it's still a fact that those funds are now gone. As for the "Shared loss" and those BFX tokens?  :-\ :-X

They still have some volume though, so that might suggest there are still some who trust them.  Can't speak for others,

all I know is I don't trust them and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Well if you are doubt on bitfinex because of hacking issue, more better don't use their service and personality i am believe on them because they have fixed the bugs on their service.

The same comment as neochiny. Do not trust them and do not ever store your Bitcoins in that exchange. Or in any exchange for that matter. Sooner or later some of them will get hacked or worse, might run away with your Bitcoins. That is common knowledge among Bitcoiners. Anyone who rebuts that statement is either a shill or a person who is lying.

After an hack and you get be a victim or have one around you, I bet you won't trust them. Some do not believe it was a hack but inside job. Now people don't even trust any exchange with their bitcoin, they will rather spread it into exchanges to reduce loss in case of hack at any exchange

It is not a matter of Bitfinex now, don't trust any third party with your BTC, if you are looking to keep your fund on exchanges make sure you move it to not less than 3 exchanges so you know when one is hacked you won't lose all your money

thanks for the suggestions.

in which exchanges do you guys trade if not for bitfinex? bitstamp? btc-e?

so better way is to trade then transfer that amount quickly to a personal wallet instead?

Nope. I dont trust this one and so as the other exchange. Exchange are really prone of hacking attacks which cause massive losses of their customers funds. Theres no safe exchange these days. Thats a fact. So try to pull out your fund as soon as you can. Dont store funds there for a long time. Keep in mind that any exchange are possible target of hackers.

i think you can trying to compare between bitfinex, bitstamp and kraken, and make decision to do trading. but for me, i feel comfort to do trading with kraken, i enjoy my time to watching and doing trading in that site. also, kraken have good reputation, but its only my opinion.

thanks. does kraken require verification to trade btc?

Yes.

They have, by far the highest volume of any of the western exchanges they have the most licquidity of any exchange, they offer 3.3x leverage and have competitive trading fees. They are also working on repaying the money stolen from them (of which had to be imposed on their customers otherwise they would not have been able to honor withdrawal requests).

I personally trust them with very significant amounts of money.

Yes, it was. at the middle of 2016, if you mean about early 2017 it's just rumor aiming coinbase.


Read this,
http://www.coindesk.com/bitfinex-bitcoin-hack-know-dont-know/

Well, I do not believe anymore with bitfinex. maybe a lot of people are going back believed when bitfinex would pay reparations to its users. it may be better to not go back there, because there are many places is more reliable than that. bitfinex has lost confidence in its members

well, you cannot blame other's  if their feed back about in bitfinex is not not good, it is because for what happen in the past. And that's the consequence of their failure by the that time. Even me there is something doubtful I have in bitfinex.

Getting hacked is totally different from scamming members. I read after that hack they slowly paid all the withdraw requests. So, they did not get affected due to that hack. So, bitfinex is still a trusted services imho.
But the best practice would be just withdrawing your capital immediately after completing your trades with them. Do not use them as your online wallet. You will be safer.

I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole! Hacked is an excuse nowadays ? Time to steal coins ? Cool,we have been hacked! -->> That's how the inside jobs works and the team eats pizzas for lunch every day with the stolen coins.
If you are in your right senses,withdraw your money right away.

Have you tried to withdraw any of it?

it is still one of the best trading platforms. However, every trading platform always contains risk about being hacked and being stolen all the money so beware before letting any third party holding Bitcoin for you. I only keep about 0.01 to 0.05 Bitcoin on yobit in order to avoid losing money

bitfines is as trusted as any other exchange is trusted and the fact that they got hacked, or even they got hacked and came back doesn't give them any more or less trust than others.

as long as the exchanges are centralized, without license and have no way of guaranteeing you your money they are all unsafe and can run away at any moment.

You know it is funny that the exchange that is perceived to be the most likely to run away with your money turned out to the most honest one so far. That exchange is BTCe. The owners/operators are anonymous, they are Russian according to most of the people around the forum and I do not think they have been hacked ever. If they were please post the link to the news.

somehow i am agree with densuj said and there is many good exchangers you can trade with like kraken, bitstamp, btc-e or else, but i think kraken is a good option for you. as long as you don't use all of your bitcoin in one exchanger then you are fine to go with trading, so you can trade with many exchanges.

btc-e is one of the oldest exchanges and is trusted but it is not better than others such as kraken. the only thing good about btc-e (in my opinion) is the fact that they are not asking for verification and also they have many different methods of fiat deposit/withdrawal that can be helpful to people in many different countries that can not or do not want to let their bank know they used a bitcoin exchange.

No doubt, Bitfinex is the best and one of the oldest exchange but it was hacked last year and this made me lose my interest in this exchange. Ofcourse the people who lose their BTC there, will never ever store their btc again there.

If you don't like just don't hold your btc with them just withdraw the money and find out the best exchange which is more secure for your money, in my case i won't keep my btc in exchange when i want buy some altcoin i will transfer little amount of money to exchange.

Make your own judgements. If you have to use an exchange then you take some risk with anyone.  I am still using finex fwiw, i like how the platform works and they are paying back debts over time.  Mostly just hold your coins offline if you can.

 I can not be sure that bitfinex still trustworthy but from what I heard bitfinex have hacked it's right. So may be some part of people (traders) was loss their trust from bitfinex. They are worried about losing money. So to avoid bad results may be move another exchanger for a while until nice conditions comes back.

I cannot say if bitfinex still trusted, for what happened before as we all know by that time when bitfinex had an issue the price value of bitcoin is obviously get affected by it, but in the long the community still support the bitcoin. In fact the bitcoin community became more aggressive into it.

Move only the amount you want to sell, don't store any funds at online services at all withdraw as quickly as possible because online services are way more vulnerable to hacks than an offline service or a wallet.

The fact is bitfinex still the 2nd largest exchanger around the world it mean that the hacking is not make the traders lost trust against the exchanger but the opposite, the traders still put their trust to the site and still trading there as usual, it's because the exchangers keeping promise to give back the money which was lost,prove it, and the customers have more trust to the exchangers

There were issue with bitfines last year from then, I have not tried anymore in that exchange. Until now I am using poloniex and I am happy with that exchance. I've been using it for more than a year and not having any problem. Until now I don't hear any bitfinex that it is now trusted so I never waste my time.

Do you know they had been hacked in early August 2016 and lost almost 120k bitcoins?

Regarding trust, you should not trust any exchange by default. So if you have to keep your funds there, keep only as much as you actually need for trading. Regarding Bitfinex specifically, I don't think they will ever regain their trust (what's lost is lost), this is a tough business and competitors are not sleeping. Look at what happened to Bter which had once been one of the largest altcoin exchange out there. Now it is a half-man half-exchange with fictitious volume and frozen order-books

bitfinex is not good
after hack is very low trust, because capital money client can't back

if comparation bitstamp and btc-e
about regulation bitstamp is good and above btc-e
if about easy use site and can take profit btc-e is good and many altcoin support in there

about withdraw use fiat money bitstamp is above btc-e

I disagree with your statement. BTCe is in some ways better than Kraken. It is run and operated in the way of how Bitcoin services should be. It operates outside of any legal boundaries and anyone using the exchange is assured that no government department will come sniffing for their users information.

So you think Bitcoin exchanges are more protected because they are more legitimate just because they adhere to some laws? Then look at what happened to Bitfinex and Bitstamp. They were hacked for a combined amount of more than $10M stolen. Did the government help get back the stolen coins?

actually it doesn't operate outside of any kind of legal boundaries, it is based in Russia and it will abide by Russian law and if they need to they will come sniffing for their users information and nothing can stop them.

and no following the law doesn't mean government is insuring anything about the exchanges. it only means they are following the law :D

and when i say kraken is better than btc-e, it is just my opinion and i am not comparing then based on security or insurance, but mostly based on the type of service they are offering and how they handle their site.

poloniex was also hacked long time ago, but it's still very operative, and many trust it inf act it is considered one of the best exchange now

so being hacked in the past doesn't make your exchange in backlist, it depend how the owner reedemed itself, if bitfinex refunded everything or a good portion it can be considered relatively trustable again

I second that


I don't know the story behind Bitstamp (it seems to have happened long long ago) and how much got stolen there, but at Bitfinex the thieves stole around 72M dollars at the exchange rates that were effective back then. So it seems to be far more than 10M dollars. I remember I even created a thread here about whether 72M dollars would be enough to finance the development of a distributed decentralized exchange that would work over the Bitcoin blockchain and allow to completely get rid of the third party risks arising in such cases...

Most agreed that the amount would certainly suffice, but nothing has been done ever since then in this regard

If you check the value of BFX coin its a good barometer of how traders are judging the value of finex right now.  People can get .60 on the dollar its pretty decent considering it would take a few years to pay out in full.

Regarding on the hacking incident for sure lots of users have lost its trust to bitfinex for sure but there are still some user who still believe on them.If you asked me I wont use them since there are already past issues regarding on the security which means it might possible to happen anytime and I don't want to lost my bitcoin but the full decision would be yours since its your bitcoins btw.

I second that too

If I'm not mistaken, Bter had been hacked twice. At first, some NXT coins had been stolen in 2014, then around 7K bitcoins in 2015, and now what? Regarding the Bitfinex BFX token and its rate, it didn't change much since they first introduced it. So this barometer doesn't show anything good for this exchange in the future. I guess they might easily manipulate its value and keep it artificially low. If it went to 1, many folks would happily kiss goodbye to this exchange selling their tokens and withdrawing their funds


Strictly speaking, that was not a hack, that was a lame hole through which users could withdraw the same amount many times

Are you sure about that timeframe? Payments on BFX tokens to date have been during times of very low volatility (and in turn trading volume). If volatility were to return to more normal levels, then I would anticipate much larger redemptions. 

for me bitfinex is still trusted because after hacking problem they provide more security for it and i hope no one can be hack it again and there is a lot of people using bitfinex.  

Do they? Who are the Russian authorities and regulators going to catch? The owners are anonymous. Where is the business permit of BTCe? Where are their servers located? It is run in the spirit of Bitcoin and no, Kraken is not better and will never be better than BTCe. Period.

Who told you that btc-e is based in Russia?

As far as I know its servers are physically located in Bulgaria (and maybe, the Netherlands). It is often thought of as a Russian exchange and most likely its roots are Russian in fact, but we don't know that for sure since its owners are basically unknown to the wide public. And I agree that operating exchange in such a way is quite along the Bitcoin way. As history shows, exchanges that seemingly chose to cooperate with the government get eventually hacked or outright scammed (Cryptsy, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, to name a few)

they are shamelessly admitting that they will release information of their users to any authority that asks: "if and when it is requested by government agencies that . BTC-e disclose information relating to user activity and/or contact information we will comply."


LOL, if it was that easy to find out where they are really located it wouldn't have been based on their servers, instead based on their registered company which is in London. they have another managing company in Cyprus! and they have banks in Russia, and many other places.

How do you know that *they* have accounts in Russian banks?

I mean how do you know that these accounts are actually registered for the legal entity behind btc-e? I just quickly went through the exchange site itself, and I didn't find any mention of this entity at all! But maybe, I missed it. Anyway, since there are many options for withdrawing rubles which obviously involve bank transfers (e.g. withdrawals to Russian banks such as Alfa Bank, Tinkoff Bank, Russian Standard Bank), they do have accounts opened in these banks but who is behind these accounts remains largely unknown. Maybe, Putin is behind btc-e

At least Bitfinex continues on refunding BFX

to me i think yes bitfiex recover its position and not it is trading in a very very good mode.

Many here look like they underestimate the way BTCe is run. The people who run it have already figured everything out. From how to evade the laws and what loop holes to use to avoid imprisonment. They are also protected by the most important item of all, their anonymity. Maybe Satoshi is behind BTCe.

one of their accounts are in Cбepбaнкa Poccии which is an state owned bank in Moscow. and when you have such an account you no longer are unknown entity.
but anyways, i am not here to defend btc-e or bash it. i have been using it and it has the same risks as any other exchange out there.


what the hell are you talking about? imprisonment? since when running a bitcoin exchange has been illegal?

It is the same with any bank out there, not just with Sberbank

You obviously miss my point completely. I don't mean to say that the banks don't know the identity of people or the companies that opened these accounts, I say that they may appear to not be affiliated with btc-e. You may use a lot of fly-by-night companies as intermediaries between you and your clients if you want to retain anonymity. Sberbank's chairman, Herman Greff (an ethnic German, by the way) has (or had) some bitcoins himself, so I wouldn't be surprised if Sberbank turned out to be behind btc-e at the end of the day


Just in case, the btce-e.com domain is not accessible from Russia (Russian users should use another address)

But since when is running a Bitcoin exchange legal too? Everything is in the grey area and there is nothing that will stop the government from slamming your door down and arrest you. Remember Charlie Shrem? I bet you do. He was imprisoned for running and "illegal" payment processor. What stops the people from using Bitcoin exchanges to launder their money? That is another angle law enforcement can look into. With BTCe the owners are safe from any indictment because they are hiding under the shroud of anonymity.

After the events surrounding Bitfinex, I started to rely less on exchanges, since Bitfinex itself was considered one of the best. Shortly thereafter, there were problems related to Coinbase, not technical problems, but legal problems. But it seems like things are under control at the moment. Anyway, I would not leave money standing for too long in an exchange.

i just tried it with a Russian IP address and i successfully accessed btc-e.com and there was no problem with the access and/or log in. 8)
https://i.imgur.com/aW2fdJV.jpg

Are you sure that you are using exactly this address (https://btc-e.com) for accessing btc-e?

Please check this address again and that you don't use a proxy, vpn, anonymizer or something to that tune. Some add-ons for Firefox allow you to use anonymizers only for specific sites (you might be using one). You can see for yourself here (https://reestr.rublacklist.net/search/?q=btc-e) that the access to the exchange is blocked for Russian users according to a court ruling. Obviously, that was a moronic decision by any means (as the whole idea of limiting access to sites in Internet), but it is there

Ok so you found the IP address of their site. Can you take it down? How sure are you that they do not have backup servers? Also how can you stop them? They are anonymous and can start another exchange with a different name. Unlike Bitfinex we know who the founders are and where to find them.

Once an exchange already got some problems in the past, please considered that for future use and for reference purposes about standards in choosing bitcoin exchange.

They are operating now but in the future Im expecting some big fraud activity with them. Im really dissapointed in their last problem and convert all my funds into tokens. I leaved that exchanges already and transfer to another one.

It is not the exchange IP's

The IP you see in the shapshot (i.e 83.239.58.162) is the poster's IP, his Internet provider is Rostelecom, the largest Internet provider in Russia (actually, the company belongs to the Russian government). The btc-e.com IP is 104.23.131.83, and access to this IP was restricted by the St.Petersburg court ruling, so you can't access the exchange by that address from Russia (at least through official Internet providers). The poster probably uses an anonymiser or proxy server (maybe, a vpn) to reach the exchange (or he is downright accessing btc-e through one of their alternative addresses, i.e. not .com address)

People are claiming that since the hack security have been improved, bugs fixed, and the service is running smoothly. On the other and it´s still a bit cloudy if it was indeed a hack or an inside job.

Keep the coins in your own wallet and only put the coins in exchanges if you are really planning on trading. Don´t use it as a wallet just to old the coins.

Once bitten twice shy

I would still not trust them. I read here about some guy who had been using his Bitfinex account as a web wallet (don't ask me why he was doing that) even after the exchange had got hacked. Not surprisingly that he ended up with his funds being locked by the exchange. He was desperately trying to withdraw his funds but he didn't write whether they returned the funds or not. The lesson to take home is that after something fishy happens stay away from it as far as possible

To answer the original poster's question:

1. Clearly as a matter of fact, yes:

a. Bitfinex currently commands between 30% and 50% (varying from day to day) of the entire USD/BTC exchange market. A large number  of traders clearly trust the exchange. The exchange is highly profitable and its USD/BTC book is the deepest there is.

b. Customers (includiing me) who were hacked have since exchanged tokens for US$ 50 million equity in the company. Again this suggests a high degree of confidence.

2. As regards their current levels of security, the hack was achieved by exploiting a vulnerability in Bitgo which (not surprisingly) Bitfinex no longer use.

3. More broadly, you can take two views. One is that if an exchange has been hacked then that shows its security is poor and so it should never be trusted again. The other view is that a hacked exchange is likely to take every possible step to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.  I take the second view, but both views are legitimate.

4. Given the scale of the hack, losses to customers were minimal. The original haircut was 37% but BFX tokens are now trading at almost 85 cents in the dollar so the net loss at current figures is 0.15 x 37% = ~ 5% which seems likely to fall to zero before the end of the year.

5. Personal/contact details and information are available for all key personnel. I find that reassuring and quite unusual in this industry.

Just my thoughts.

deposit and withdraw in bitfinex normal or not
how long proces withdraw in there

I would like to address this point of yours specifically

Theoretically, we can talk about these two approaches, though on a pure theoretical basis the first approach (i.e. never trusting a hacked exchange again) is certainly a preferable mode of action unless (and this is a crucial point here) you have additional info which could change your stance. In practice, the choice obviously depends on whether a hacked exchange did really improve their security policies, but without relevant knowledge staying away should be preferred. For example, Bter had been hacked twice within a year (or even within half a year), so trading there is likely an exercise in a sort of masochism

Absolutely no! You can compare price per point rates with other exchanges and see difference.Huge spreads,comissions etc

Follow the hacked coins: https://blockchain.info/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r

That is actually the current cold storage address for bitfinex. It is not the stolen/hacked coins.

edit: I just checked, and the last time any of the stolen coins moved out of the addresses they were sent to in the August hack was in March of this year.