I love waking up everyday to new all-time highs, but this euphoria is getting pretty tangible. I'm seeing lots of these threads. The last couple posted today predicted a 50 trillion dollar market cap within a year, and prices of up to $60,000. And you are saying that buying anything under $18,000 will make us look like geniuses, so that means you expect much, much higher prices than that.

Maybe the time for a nice, fat correction is coming soon.

Nobody knows how much was seized by the US government, nor how much BTC-e might be pocketing here. The US government didn't say, and the latter can't be verified.

There also may be money frozen by Mayzus Financial (supposedly voluntarily) that may become unfrozen in the future if it is not sufficiently tied to the exchange. The volatility of bitcoin right now could definitely also affect the payouts customers receive if they come back, because the losses are being socialized.

Do you have some evidence for this? Past the "one-time withdrawals" through their lawyer's trust account, I haven't heard of any such capabilities in several months. Apparently, you could get money in or out if you have access to Taiwanese bank accounts at some point, but that's not clear anymore, since they said they moved their money out of Taiwan due to the banking compliance situation there.

I certainly wouldn't dump my retirement accounts into bitcoin, per se, but I would love to diversify 10-20% into it. Unfortunately, I don't have that option where my accounts are currently held (through my employer). Just regular mutual funds, bonds, commodity funds, etc. I guess when I leave this job, I'll roll my retirement accounts into something that has access to GBTC. Or maybe we'll have an ETF by then.

Definitely agree. The major coins generally will recover if you have patience. And certainly, we can expect bitcoin to (as we've seen time and time again). It was the low market cap altcoins I was talking about, which can see a lot of hype early on, but die and never recover. Once it's on the chopping block for de-listing, you better hope for an exit pump and get out either way.

I like to say, "he who panics first panics best." I have no problem insta-dumping if my system tells me to. I know the OP is talking more about emotional panic, though.

But in all seriousness, you really can't always just "have patience." Sometimes a trade is dead, and some assets never recover. In those cases, you can baghold forever, or dump to preserve what capital you have left and live to trade another day.

I don't get it. Aren't you just ignoring the BTC-e case? Sure, the crypto should be encrypted. But due to fiat bank accounts being frozen, BTC-e is saying 45% of the money is gone. (I think they are probably pocketing a lot more than that if they do come back, given this talk of KYC)

Money laundering charges are a lot more serious than listing torrent trackers or even offering US-facing online gambling. Would you take the risks to run such an exchange? You can't step foot in most of the world for risk of extradition. And the bigger question is, why would anyone trade there? Given that they are under indictment from the US? Seems like a no-brainer to just go somewhere else.

You might be able to store them on a local wallet (probably available at Tether's website), but like any other "fiat storage" it is subject to third party risk. In this case the owner of Tether. If, say, the USA didn't like what Tether is doing, and seized their bank accounts, how much is that USDT going to be worth? It'll dump hard.

Or maybe they are just doing it because they can. Exchanges like BTC-e and Bitfinex became so big, they are low-hanging fruit, and there was a lot of money in seizing BTC-e (at least fiat money), I'm sure.

I think the USD can likely be maintained against all odds for quite some time, but regarding cryptocurrencies, I suspect the genie is indeed out of the bottle. They picked off BTC-e like they did Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars a few years ago. This time, no happy ending I guess...

I suspect more of the exchange's customers are US citizens than the exchange would like to admit. When they came back online last year, they made users indicate whether they resided in the US or not. I'm sure many clicked no. Apparently there were no repercussions based on IP address or anything like that. Based on the BTC-e indictment, the fact that they admit having US customers at all (without proper MSB licensing) may be a problem...

Escrows from this forum handle 5-10 BTC in the normal course of business, and often much more. I suppose people could look into fake IDs, but no one knows yet what the verification requirements are. Personally, I wouldn't know where to begin trying to get fake docs.

Also, losses are being socialized, so both crypto and fiat holders should have crypto in their accounts upon relaunch, based on their announcement.

It's very simple. You contribute pre-tax, and withdraw post-tax (in retirement). That means you can trade assets like GBTC (which have massive potential beyond most stocks) without paying taxes on the gains of each trade. You'll just pay on the net gains once you're in retirement. It's one way to take advantage of BTC growth and volatility without paying so much taxes on the capital gains.

There's no way to definitively know. There are some things they can do to demonstrate they are, in fact, the same people, but proof is elusive. For example, they have known BTC and ETH addresses. They could sign messages from such addresses, indicating whether a relaunched domain were legit or not.

That wouldn't solve the honeypot question (if Vinnik really was an owner and gave the FBI the keys, for instance). But it would make it unlikely that some random scammers were running the ICO, particularly if it coincided with the relaunch of a re-branded site that made partial repayments.

Indeed, I cannot find any record of this transaction's existence on the network, after checking multiple block explorers. Has this situation been resolved yet, or is Bitfinex still silent?


This is worrisome. Please post the transaction ID that the exchange provided to you (in your withdrawal history). Again, IMO, this is what both of you should do:


I'm not aware of any representatives on this forum. Reddit is your best bet. Please report back!

No. Mayzus Financial and Okpay made an announcement that they voluntarily froze funds with ties to BTC-e. The exchange confirmed this statement.

While it's clear that law enforcement seized the domain and servers including purses, and (based on historical seizures) attempted to seize fiat money, they oddly did not announce a concrete amount of funds seized. So, users are in the dark from all angles, and all we have to go on is what BTC-e tells us.

Indeed. In time, we will see a push towards enterprise mining, just as we did in China. It is far cheaper and more scalable to strategically build mining farms in regions with excess power run-off. In China, such mines are often built right off of hydroelectric dams. The fact that this "plan" includes mining from individual Russian households suggests that it wasn't well-thought out.

We're probably years away from this happening. But the fact that the article made it into Bloomberg at all is pretty exciting.

The intention could be to frighten people away from crypto, but it seems more so directed at commerce and value transfer that the US government cannot control. I don't see this sort of seizure happening to Coinbase, Gemini or Itbit. Those companies have poured incredible amounts of resources into legal compliance and obtaining the proper licenses. At most, they'd probably get small fines from regulatory agencies if anything was out of order.


Done and done. That guy is a broken record at this point.

There is nothing Core can or should do. The reality is this: any group (developers, users, services, miners) can defect from the consensus and create a hard fork at any time. Changing the parameters of difficulty readjustment is their prerogative.

Miners are unlikely to switch to Bitcoin Cash en masse even if it is more profitable to mine, because it is pretty well understood by now that encouraging such a major network split will destroy the value of both networks. Miners are rational; some may defect, but most will remain.

They usually provide a TX ID in your withdrawal history. Did they? If not, what does your history say? If you have a TX ID, and feel comfortable posting it, please post it here.

If the withdrawal really is stuck: Make a post on Reddit at r/bitcoinmarkets. Cross-post it to r/bitcoin. Tag one of their reps in the post: https://www.reddit.com/user/bfx_brandon

I would also link to the post in a tweet sent to @bitfinex on Twitter, with hashtags #bitfinex and #bitcoin. The exchanges tend to be more responsive when complaints start being circulated on social media. Sad but true.

In the Star Wars analogy, I agree. If only it were so simple! The fact of the matter is, by targeting the owners with criminal charges, the US authorities have made it much more likely that the owners will disappear with no attempt at relaunching or refunding customers. Any effort they make to repay customers puts them at greater risk. That makes our odds pretty bad.