So, if their trade engine screws up and incorrectly matches orders, causing you to lose money and someone else to gain money..... they won't compensate you if the other person withdrew the funds?

That's scary. I don't usually bother reading T&Cs on these small altcoin exchanges, so thanks for pointing this out.


I was looking into which altcoin exchanges to use.... I'll definitely be staying away from Nova. Any other exchanges you can recommend for non-KYC altcoin exchanges?

I don't think it's a game changer at all. Back in 2014, everyone thought merchant acceptance was a big deal. I've learned over time that consumer payments aren't the key to adoption, particularly because merchants generally just use Bitpay or Coinbase to process their transactions into dollars. That's likely what Uber would do as well (although maybe they would keep a small amount in BTC, like Overstock did).

Right. Dogecoin is going to the be the world's reserve currency. The largest accounts in the world will all be settled with a memecoin. That'll be the day!


Right now, a few semi-wealthy people can push the price around easily. It's possible for BTC to be a reserve currency far into the future when it might actually have stable value. But that's far enough off (decades probably) that I won't think on it too much.

The risks outlined in the OP are real. I'm very surprised more people aren't talking about. Especially given the general attitude towards, and awareness of, civil asset forfeiture in the Bitcoin community.

They were a very big exchange, meaning that a large supply of coins could be flooding back to the market. If it's anything like Bitfinex last year, we can expect a big exodus from the exchange as soon as withdrawals are available.

I was reading some of the replies to their last Twitter announcement. I saw some people talking about how they plan to withdraw coins directly back into their Coinbase accounts. Unbelievable!

I searched for a similar thread but couldn't find anything recent. I'm hoping you guys can provide some suggestions. I'm looking for exchanges where I can trade BTC, LTC and ETH, as well as other coins.

I'd like to be able to deposit/withdraw without hassle, and I don't trust these altcoin exchanges with my personal documents and information. I'm aware of Nova Exchange and Yobit -- I believe these don't require any sort of verification, correct? Does anyone use these exchanges...are they reputable?

Any other suggestions are greatly appreciated!

This theory has already been debunked. Try logging in with an incorrect password: you will not gain access. Log in with the correct credentials and you can gain access. In other words, if this is a honeypot or a phishing attack, whoever is operating it already has all of our credentials.

It's on the old .nz domain which was always used by Russian customers of the exchange. I think the only way that this is not the real admins bringing up the site is if it's a honeypot run by the US authorities.

That leads us to ask, how would they have obtained a complete, up-to-date decrypted database for their customers?

I actually thought the Foundation was defunct, so indeed it's surprising to hear anything from them. The bit about investigating the FBI is an adorable joke; of course they won't be investigated.

Does anyone know of this bill is making progress, or if it's likely to die? I researched a bit but can't gauge whether it will happen or not.

Interestingly, they specifically target tumblers...and altcoin-only exchanges need full AML compliance.

If they relaunch, it will create an extremely interesting situation. Yes, this means that the US government is highly motivated to take them down. However, I think it will take quite some time. If the exchange relaunches, the US government will be humiliated on multiple fronts: in that case, not only did they not announce seizure of funds, but they couldn't actually take down the exchange.

It took them 7+ months just to unseal the indictment; they probably investigated them for 1-2 years prior. If they spent this amount of time and money on a complete blunder, I think they'll spend considerably more time doing it right the second time around. And I think that playing cat-and-mouse with domains like torrent sites would only make the US government look powerless.

What's your definition of "fine?"

Since the November fork is a hard fork, it will cause a split from the original network. If the entire ecosystem migrates to Segwit2x, there will be no split, but that seems unlikely. If the fork happens and there is significant support for both chains, I think this could have a very negative effect on price. It's impossible to predict, though.

With Bitfinex last year, I made the mistake of dumping my tokens early on so I could exit the exchange. I don't think it was necessarily a bad decision in hindsight, because nobody knew how viable the exchange was. At that time, I preferred to take my chances profiting from trading on other exchanges, rather than gambling on Bitfinex's survival.

This time around, I think I would withdraw the crypto that I could, and keep the tokens to trade them on the token markets. Maybe they'd be redeemed in the future, and maybe I'll grind out some profits in the meantime.

The US was unable to seize much outright; that much is clear. But that is not to say that vast sums of fiat money are not frozen.

Mayzus is no stranger to this game. As I suspected from the start, the vast majority of fiat funds were held outside of the reach of US law enforcement. Seizing their Mongolian bank accounts? LOL, good luck! The only way the US could have frozen most of the funds preemptively would have been if Mayzus were working with the feds to take down BTC-e.

You don't "exit scam" by having the DOJ unseal an indictment against you, and by having a dozen federal agencies publish a press release about "taking down your criminal enterprise." The US couldn't arrest or extradite Mayzus if they wanted to, and that's partly why this situation exists.

I actually believe there is a possibility that much of the frozen funds may eventually be recovered, because a) the US may lack jurisdiction where funds are held and b) they may not have sufficient leverage over Mayzus. Sergey Mayzus is walking a tightrope: trying to maintain legitimacy by distancing himself from BTC-e (while never risking stepping foot where he can be extradited), while also maintaining control of the funds in question.

I definitely believe the Bitfinex/Poloniex rally (where they developed a massive premium over the other exchanges, which were hesitant to follow) catalyzed the May rally. That's not to say it wouldn't have happened otherwise, but they were the driving force.

The Tether supply expansion can be explained if you account for an exodus from Bitfinex to Poloniex, Kraken, Bittrex, BTC-e and other exchanges that accept(ed) USDT deposits. Does that make me comfortable, though? No. It just means that if something very bad happens to Bitfinex (and I think the chances of that are high, given their precarious legal decisions and incompetence regarding security), the fallout from USDT plummeting in value will spread to many other exchanges. This wouldn't be like Gox; customers will be devastated on many exchanges if Bitfinex goes down.


Is that a fact? There's literally no banking and hasn't been for 6 months. Institutional investors? LOL. They wouldn't touch Bitfinex with a barge pole.

We don't know for sure whether the government was behind the attack or even if it originated in North Korea. And from their perspective, why restrict attacks to government entities, if economic warfare can weaken the state?

They have no need to convert the BTC if this was government-sponsored. The object would be either a) economic warfare, b) accumulate BTC, or c) both.

While hash rate did drop, block times are still under 11 minutes. It's more about the spam/congestion than the hash rate. People just need to chill out. It will take time for the ecosystem to upgrade. In the meantime, use a wallet with a good dynamic fee algorithm, like Electrum. If you are in a hurry, "within 2 blocks" always works for me. When I'm not in a hurry, I toggle to "within 50 blocks" and go afk. Works like a charm.

Yes, the user's account would have been credited the ETH. For all we know, it was immediately withdrawn from the exchange, too. I think some users in this situation might use BTC-e to launder hacked funds, since accounts were anonymous and withdrawals instant.

It won't make any sense to write BTC-e support. Not only do they have bigger problems, but to them, you cannot prove that the funds in question belonged to you. Even if you can prove control of the private key, any number of scenarios could explain that: you could have sold them, or multiple people could have rightful access to that key. It's possible that you even sent the ETH to BTC-e and exchanged for another currency and withdrew. 

I think that for the foreseeable future, the Lightning Network will be enough with Segwit's 4MB block weight limit. That assumes that routing is sufficient (not totally clear yet from testing).

But if we're talking about a 300-fold increase, I don't think anyone can give you a clear answer. It largely depends on what the topography and usage of the Lightning Network looks like, and if the vast majority of transactions can be taken off-chain in an efficient, trustless way. We need to wait and see.

Your 28 ETH from MyEtherWallet, was your wallet hacked or something? It seems that whoever was in control of your funds sent them to BTC-e as a customer deposit.

BTC-e appears to be in control of their ETH wallets (despite the FBI seizure), and they are supposedly re-launching in 4 days. But unfortunately, I don't think that will help your situation. The hacker probably just has an anonymous account on BTC-e.

It still looks like a bull flag. Volatility on BCH/BTC has gotten extremely low. I'm not sure which way it will break in the short term. I will buy if we break and hold above the 4H trading range (0.1535 on Bitfinex).

I have major doubts that there would be any "governmental level" adoption of BCH. But given that Bitmain is backing it (and that Antpool is implementing auto-switching between BTC and BCH based on profitability), I think this coin will be around for a while. Indeed, things are just starting.

I wasn't paying attention to the hashrate distribution between BTC and BCH, but I did notice that the BTC hashrate dropped in half from its recent peak. That's a pretty massive drop; larger than anything I can find in the recent charts. So it's clear that BCH had some effect on miners. Long term, it's tough to say what will happen. We really can't predict future demand for BCH. I agree, there are powerful forces behind it, so in my mind, it's worth holding for a while to see where this goes.

I think that's a bit dramatic. They are setting this up so they can try to deny that they serve US customers. If you were a verified US customer, then your documents have conveniently been "destroyed" and you are back to a basic account with withdrawal restrictions:



Large accounts (US or not) need to verify if they hope to get considerable funds out quickly. So large US account owners might need to make arrangements to prove that they live in Canada or Mexico (not a big deal if 5-6 figures is on the line).