I think it's high time we all realize that we should be hoarding our coins (and if we are spending them, batch payments and don't make unnecessary transactions). Saving some satoshis here and there on transaction fees cannot begin to justify the risk of holding coins on an exchange. Even if we are talking about regulated exchanges (even those who could be bailed out by their investors in a major hack of customer funds), customer money could be tied up for years, if most/all can be recovered at all, if the exchange gets hacked.

Seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. The US government creates the law and is largely free to enforce it as they please across the world. So in that sense, yes: any exchange that serves US customers without holding MSB licenses and complying with AML law can cause customer funds to be lost. The morality of this is a whole different issue.


There are two opposing camps that are diverging further and further apart. The cypherpunks who want to create a decentralized world have no interest in complying with government thugs. Others, like our friend above, are bootlickers, and enjoy seeing law enforcement rob people of their hard-earned money.

Most people in the world can't dream of investing $10k into something, let alone one risky new asset class (non-diversified). That was true back in 2010 and it's true today. First world problems, I guess.

Damn. You know, I live in the first world, and $10k investing funds seems like it would take me years to save up.

Ideally, though, people could more readily find work payable in bitcoin. These days, it is still fairly limited (although I hear that Bitwage is growing). Since I don't have much money to invest at this point, I'm just doing whatever work I can that pays in bitcoin--signature campaigns, small tasks, etc.

Don't feel too bad. I heard about it in 2010 as well. I even tried to mine some, but couldn't set it up properly. Even if I ended up mining a few blocks, I probably would have forgotten about them and lost the coins--that computer is long gone.

C'est la via. Live and learn. In the game since 2013 and never looking back!

That's what I find most upsetting about all the people who say, "that's what you get for keeping coins/money on exchanges." The same people often turn around and quote prices from the major exchanges (who are all at risk of going down from a hack, for example).

I get it, spread the risk around and take coins off exchanges when you can. I just wish people didn't seem to enjoy rubbing others' nose in it so much.

Everything seems stable at this point. The BIP148/BIP91 splits never materialized, and Bitcoin Cash is stable (if slow) and exchanges seem to have a good handle on supporting it now.

Still, it's good not to have your coins on exchanges...

They could have quadrupled their support staff (or more), hired lots of competent engineers, etc. in this time. They have been making incredible amounts of money, so it's worrisome that they haven't fixed these issues months later.

I hope they don't have bigger legal concerns occupying their time and money.... they did just update their terms, but I can't understand what they changed exactly.

It frustrates me to no end that it still gets the respect and usage that it does. The whole token scheme still leaves them with a target on their back from the SEC, and they still can't explain how they got hacked last year. And still, many months later, they can't even process fiat withdrawals. How does anyone even know they are solvent at this point?

Withdrawn

Keep pushing for Kraken to help you. I made this mistake years ago on another exchange and they dumped the private key for me. That's your only hope. I bet they created a boilerplate response to avoid having this issue drain their support resources. I'm sure you won't be the only one....

Definitely (at least pending any refund from BTC-e). I imagine the same goes for many legitimate brokers like FXOpen, AvaTrade, Plus500 and others who were using the exchange for liquidity. The ties between BTC-e and xBTCe go deeper, though, and this is more about distancing themselves...

How do you see that playing out? Say, 50% of the fiat got seized. Assuming they could somehow figure out ways to process that fiat to some people, how would the rest of the losses be spread around? For those that had only USD in their accounts, would they have bitcoin and random altcoins instead upon relaunch?

It seems that most of the crypto wallets have been moved/consolidated at this point. It's not entirely clear whether the feds, or BTC-e, moved them. BUT they did post a message last night which said they recovered their database and have access to their wallets. No details on how much crypto may have been seized. They also confirmed that Mayzus froze their accounts. No word on how much $ that represented.

This would be pretty boss, and I give the "Russian big balls, FU America" outcome a 2% chance of happening. That's because trying to run an exchange with a million users while the FBI is chasing you is a losing prospect.

But there's a 2% chance that they're badass enough to do it anyway. Cuz Russians.

Seems like majority miners don't care enough to attack the fork chain. So much for that plan. Difficulty has adjusted quite a bit (although I'm not sure whether it's actually profitable to mine yet).

In any case, the bigger threat seems to be the Segwit2x fork. That's got a lot more backing from miners, companies, etc....

It's not that simple. That's the same logic that says Ripple's market cap is meaningful. When the vast majority of supply cannot be moved/liquidated, the market cap is meaningless. Let's wait until the chain is stable and markets are opened on the bigger exchanges. Then we might begin to see more realistic pricing.

Well, if they do, no one can really complain. The exchanges were very upfront about their plans going into the fork. I think a lot of people didn't pay attention, or figured BCC would be worthless and/or dead right out the gate. Now people are feeling like they missed out.

I think Bitmain is just testing the waters. With the right branding/marketing and backing from miners, a hard fork could be much more successful than the BU/XT variety we saw in the past. It's less about features or decentralization, and more about control.

Maybe so, but that's what happened to ETC too. The cat's outta the bag. I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoiners try to dump this BCC coin to hell, but then it just goes through a typical shitcoin accumulation and then moons. Wouldn't that be hilarious?